Next Step : Hussein May Be Banking on Ground War to Turn Tide : Many nagging questions remain for the allies as the clash of armies draws closer.

The preliminary skirmishes of a gulf ground war already have begun: There were artillery exchanges last week between Iraqi troops near the Saudi-Kuwaiti border and U.S. Marines. And the Americans have been openly “rehearsing” amphibious landings off the Persian Gulf.

Many analysts expect the ground forays to increase this week--possibly as probes to help test the Iraqi forces’ state of readiness. One or two Iraqi--or allied--units may come under heavy fire.

To be sure, U.S. tacticians have been hoping to accomplish as much as possible by using air power. Pentagon figures show that over the past two weeks allied warplanes have flown more than 20,000 sorties, knocking out strategic targets from radar sites to buildings.

There were even some hopes that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein might cave in after the first few air sorties, relieving the United States and its allies of the need to launch a ground war. Some had visions that Hussein might be killed in action or assassinated by his men.

For now, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney appears to have put a temporary hold on the ground war, saying in a television interview on Sunday that despite the heavy U.S. air attacks, fresh assessments show the damage to the Iraqi war machine has been less extensive than believed previously.

Although his remarks could be designed to throw the Iraqis off guard, Cheney said the allies will not launch a ground attack until they are “absolutely certain that we have gained everything we can” from the air campaign. “We haven’t felt any deadline on us in this regard,” he added. “The air campaign is going very well, and we want to let it work just as long as possible.”

Whatever the timing, there is a growing consensus among military strategists that once the bombers have finished, the U.S.-led multinational force still will have to mount a ground action in order to defeat the 540,000 Iraqi troops now in Kuwait and southern Iraq, and bring the war to a close.

“It is hard to convince me that you own a piece of property until you can stand on it,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. Bruce Jacobs, now an official with the National Guard Assn. of the United States.

“You might fly over it, spit on it, napalm it or make it an uninhabitable moonscape, but there are people who would dispute whether you own it. To control the town, you have to be able to sit in city hall.”

Just when the real ground war will come, however, still is a matter of military security--and, possibly, fate.

Although outlines of the land war plan have been laid out for several weeks, nagging questions remain. And the answers will ultimately dictate how expensive this war will be both for the soldiers fighting it and for the politicians back home who sent them to the front in the first place. Among the unknowns:

* How effective have allied air sorties been in softening up Iraqi defenses, and particularly in weakening Hussein’s elite Republican Guard? It’s difficult to tell from the Pentagon’s briefings, and bad weather has frequently impeded U.S. bombing.

* Are U.S. and other allied troops fully prepared for a land war? A few U.S. divisions arrived in the gulf only 10 days ago and still are not acclimated to the desert routine. As of last weekend, key fighting equipment for both the U.S. 1st Armored and 3rd Infantry divisions was reported still arriving into Saudi ports some 200 miles from the troops who must use it. Some commanders want the preliminary bombing to continue for at least two more weeks.

* If, as has been speculated, Hussein has been keeping his air force under cover to save it for use against a ground attack, how effective is it likely to be? The few Iraqi planes that have confronted allied fighters so far have been summarily shot down. A related question involves the disposition of dozens of Iraqi fighters that have mysteriously flown to Iran in recent days.

* How effectively will Iraq be able to use its chemical--and possibly biological--weapons, such as nerve gas? Although Baghdad so far has kept these in reserve, Iraqi radio hinted strongly over the weekend that its actions in the future might not be “conventional.”

* What about other factors, such as morale, supplies and the availability of fuel? Although the morale among U.S. forces appears to be high at the moment, most American troops aren’t battle-tested. How effective they will be remains to be seen.

* How much of a threat is Iraq’s formidable artillery complement, which includes modern weapons purchased from the Soviet Union, Argentina and South Africa? Some analysts believe it is at least a match for that of the allies.

Almost everyone concedes that, inevitable or not, a move into a major ground war would be a major step politically for the Bush Administration. Until now, U.S. casualties have been remarkably light--a few U.S. pilots taken prisoner, a handful of deaths.

But the White House and many lawmakers alike worry that a move into a full-fledged land war would be almost certain to produce far higher casualties, eroding popular support for the war at home and undermining the Administration’s ability to prosecute it to the hilt.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence analysts say that may well be Hussein’s strategy in hiding his aircraft and forcing the United States into a ground war. The Iraqi leader has said repeatedly he believes that, as in the Vietnam War, the U.S. public would not be able to accept high casualties.

Josh Epstein, an analyst at The Brookings Institute, theorizes that the Iraqi air force has been kept out of action, not to engage the Americans on the ground, but to attempt a suicide strike against Israel as a last desperate bid to widen the war.

There also remains a very real threat of Iraqi chemical warfare. “Despite all this gas-mask business in Israel and Saudi Arabia, none of us is really certain whether Saddam is capable of loading a chemical warhead onto a missile and actually launching it anymore,” noted a military analyst who has lived in Iraq.

“The one thing we know with absolute certainty, though, is that the Iraqis are infinitely capable of using gas in the ground war. More than 80% of his chemical capability is in artillery. . . . I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone studying this war expects Saddam to bombard the allied troops with this gas soon after the ground war begins. The chances of that, I would say, are more than 90%.”

But this analyst also predicts that the impact will be just the opposite of what Hussein intends. “The chemical suits now being used by the allies are more than capable of counteracting the effects of this gas, and I think it’ll just intensify the allies’ determination to destroy Saddam,” he said.

Perhaps the most crucial decision of all is choosing the right moment to strike.

Besides the question of minimizing casualties, U.S. planners must ask when the air campaign reaches a point of diminishing returns. How many casualties is President Bush prepared to accept? How long is the Administration willing to let a ground campaign continue? What are the objectives once the allies have defeated Iraqi forces in Kuwait?

On all those questions, the still-sketchy intelligence is mixed.

Retired Col. David Hackworth, who is in Saudi Arabia as a special correspondent for Newsweek magazine, reports that “the Iraqi army in Kuwait is crumbling like a doughnut that’s been soaked in too much coffee,” and that continued air attacks can do the job.

“They are dug in--they can’t maneuver,” he said. “They don’t have communications. They are not getting resupplied. I’m told they have three days’ rations, that their bellies are growling. They don’t have medical support.

“What they are going to do is what the Germans did at Stalingrad--that is, dig in and fight behind their tanks. Sure, you can go around the Iraqi lines and fight them from the rear, but you don’t have to do that. With our air power, you can just blow these guys apart.”

But Greg Grant, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believes a ground offensive still is necessary to cut the Iraqi army off from its supplies and to force its troops out of their holes where they would be exposed to air attacks.

Although the Iraqi forces are in the open desert and more vulnerable to air attack than were the communist guerrillas in the Vietnam War, officers who saw B-52 raids on targets in Vietnam are among skeptics of the “carpet bombing” strategy.

“I have been close to B-52 raids in Vietnam where you would swear to God that no living creature could survive,” said Jacobs of the National Guard Assn., “and shortly see people coming out of tunnels.”

The preparation for a ground war is already well under way. U.S. ground units have edged closer to the Kuwaiti border, and the air campaign has begun to focus on battering the Republican Guards who are dug in far behind the tanks on the front line near the Saudi border.

The U.S. strategy for besting the Iraqi forces has been clear for weeks--the same one that the allies have used in NATO exercises: Breach a vulnerable point in the Iraqi line, break through and use allied mobility to cut off reinforcements and encircle the dug-in units.

U.S. officials say American-led ground forces will seek to achieve tactical surprise with a land offensive much as they did with the first air strikes, taking advantage of Iraq’s substandard electronics intelligence-gathering capability.

“I guarantee you that we will maintain tactical surprise in any operation we mount,” said Marine Maj. Gen. Martin Brandtner, operations officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For Iraq, the battle plans are expected to call for operations that are virtually identical to those it used during its eight-year war with Iran.

Hussein already has arrayed his massive armor, artillery and ground troops along his southern front in configurations much the same as those he employed on his eastern front against Iran.

Indeed, journalists who visited Iraq’s western front during the war with Iran were awed by the way Hussein had transformed his desert into an ocean of men and metal.

From horizon to horizon, the desert was punctuated with 20-foot-high sand bunkers, each housing a long-range artillery piece or a state-of-the-art Soviet-built T-72 tank, many equipped with highly accurate wire-guided missiles.

Although some analysts have likened the array to the trench-warfare used in World War I, many believe that the sophistication of Iraq’s weaponry and the broad expanse of the desert battlefield will make Iraq’s ground force far more lethal than any that fought in World War I.

In broad aspects, analysts expect the land engagement to be similar to the air war. The U.S.-led coalition will enjoy a major edge in technology, but it will be hampered in spots by a numerical disadvantage.

“Saddam Hussein is going to be as surprised by the technical capability of the Army and the Marines as he has been surprised by the air power of the Air Force and the Navy,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford.

But even with the advantage of breath-taking mobility and firepower, the land offensive will present vast uncertainties.

Technological superiority on the ground, says retired Gen. Jack N. Merritt, a former commandant of the U.S. Army War College, will translate into less combat advantage than does a technical edge in the air.

“On the ground, we are really superior,” Merritt said, “but even with that, it is going to be pretty untidy.”

In the final analysis, most experts believe that once the ground war finally begins, the outcome will hinge largely on the morale of the troops who are doing the fighting.

“The outcome of the ground war really depends on the morale of the Iraqi soldiers,” said a European military analyst in the gulf. “They’ve already been softened by allied attacks, and even the senior Iraqi commanders know that general officers don’t get very old there--they’re usually executed the moment they say or do something wrong.

“If the Iraqi troop morale is low, you might well see mass surrenders when the allied troops penetrate their first lines of defense. But if the morale stays high, it will be a very difficult battle. It’s a well dug-in force and, eventually, you do have to go in there and get them out.”

Most analysts agree that logistically it would be best to wait as long as possible to launch a ground attack, hoping that relentless bombing runs will shatter morale and destroy at least some of the huge enemy ground force.

What Brookings’ Epstein sees for now is a test of patience, with Iraq continuing to hunker down, willing to accept huge losses in an attempt to prolong the conflict, draw Israel into it and precipitate a breakup of the alliance against Hussein.

But virtually all strategists also caution that the rule book doesn’t count once the fighting begins.

“If you’re in a war, normally you do the unexpected,” one European defense expert said, “and the unexpected would be to move very soon. . . . The alliance doesn’t have that much time left to wait. . . . It’s already beginning to get hot in the desert during the day.

“So I would say some window opens at the end of this month, and it goes through the middle of February. Sometime in there, you’ll see the ground troops move in and then, well, let’s just wait and see.”

Abramson reported from Washington and Fineman from Amman. Times staff writer David Lamb in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.