Allies Control Air; Picture on Land Is Unclear

Although the most intensive air campaign in history has won the U.S.-led coalition unchallenged mastery of the skies over Iraq and Kuwait, it remains unclear how much the more than 15,000 bombing runs have hurt Iraq’s ground-fighting capability.

Enemy troops “certainly have a lot of fight left in them,” said Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf on Wednesday. Although his assessment of the progress of the battle to date was unqualifiedly upbeat, he could offer no concrete evidence that the massive expenditure of explosives has significantly weakened Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s 545,000 ground troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq.

The theater commander showed graphic high-tech footage of bunkers blasted, bridges crushed, missile launchers destroyed. But what no jet fighter gun camera can disclose is the readiness and war-fighting capability of a huge ground army.

Knowledgeable sources said the Pentagon knows that it will take almost two months of bombing equal to the levels Schwarzkopf described to cause the eight heavily fortified divisions of Hussein’s tough Republican Guard to crack.

“We haven’t killed very many of the Republican Guard’s tanks. In that sense, Schwarzkopf’s upbeat comments have to be looked at very carefully,” one senior military officer said after watching the general’s hourlong briefing Wednesday.

The officer said he believed that the allied air campaign had destroyed a “distressingly low” number of tanks of the Republican Guard--the backbone of Baghdad’s forces and the key to the regime’s survival.

Softening up troops is “a slow process, which is what they’ve been saying all along,” said one Air Force analyst. He added, however, that the continued bombing of troops eventually will exact a terrible toll.

“Having achieved air superiority, it’s a fairly low attrition prospect for us, and it can cause a lot of destruction among the ground troops,” he said. “At that kind of exchange ratio, I don’t know anyone can put up with it very long. It’s got to be demoralizing.”

At the same time, President Hussein demonstrated that he still has some cards to play during the daylong battle at Khafji, inside Saudi territory.

“This guy’s not dead yet,” a Pentagon planner said.

To be sure, the U.S. war plan is designed to unfold in stages, with the air campaign only now turning to concentrated bombardment of Iraqi troop positions, supply lines and ammunition and food stores that will sustain the Iraqi ground force in combat.

Military officials note that these are “soft” targets, and it is extremely difficult to prove or quantify damage to them. By contrast, it is obvious when a bomb hits a “hard” target, like a building, bridge or radio tower.

Schwarzkopf cited considerable progress in attacking and damaging hard targets, including command-and-control centers, airfields, aircraft shelters and supply bunkers. The continuous and progressive destruction of these targets will continue, U.S. officials said, as will efforts to interdict supplies and soften up the huge Iraqi field army.

But they note that commanders had never promised that the air assault alone would drive Iraqi troops from Kuwait. Bombardment of dug-in troops has had mixed results in past conflicts.

“What we found in World War II was that even after enormous devastation, people were able to make do,” said Bennie Davis, a retired general who was chief of the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command from 1981 to 1985.

“But making do and being effective are two entirely different things: The question is what’s the psychological impact, how battle worthy is that group after they’ve been through this tremendous concussion? You can’t measure psychology from photography, but you can measure physical damage.”

Schwarzkopf confidently asserted that “by every measure, our campaign plan is very much on schedule.” But he also noted that “there’s no way that I’m suggesting that the Iraqi army is close to capitulation and going to give up. I think their actions last night have proven that to all of us.”

The commander was referring to several cross-border incursions by Iraqi troops beginning Tuesday night, including the seizure of Khafji. The Marines lost 12 men in the clashes, the first allied deaths in ground combat since the war began.

Schwarzkopf added that he will redirect the air campaign in part to target the troops close to the border, rather than focusing solely on the more capable Republican Guards, who are deployed as a strategic reserve in northern Kuwait and southern Iraq.

A senior Army officer in Washington said planners were shifting the air attacks because “we misfocused on strong links while neglecting the weak links. It seems we would enjoy more benefits from pounding units where there would be desertions and forcing the kind of spasmodic fighting we saw last night.”

A senior Air Force analyst said that now that air supremacy has been established, the bombing of ground troops using such weapons as B-52s becomes a virtual “industrial operation” involving the delivery of massive quantities of bombs on troop concentrations with little or no losses of aircraft from ground fire.

Military commanders have said that Iraq still has thousands of antiaircraft artillery guns that can pepper low-flying aircraft with heavy fire. But surface-to-air missiles, which can reach aircraft flying at higher altitudes, have been largely silenced--a factor that has played a major role in leading commanders to declare air supremacy. The term is defined at the Pentagon as meaning that the opposing air force is “incapable of effective interference.”

Schwarzkopf claimed major successes in the allies’ operation to halt the supply of food, water and ammunition to the troops farther south by targeting storage depots, highways, bridges and railroad crossings. Those were among the targets that the allied air forces started bombing in the second phase of the air war, which opened just two days after the battle began.

“What they’ve got is what they’ve got. And after they use that up, they’re going to be hurting,” Schwarzkopf said. Accounts from prisoners of war and from refugees fleeing Kuwait, he added, suggest that Iraqi soldiers in the south already are so short of rations that they are begging and stealing food.

Schwarzkopf said that on one recent day, traffic along the major supply route between Basra, in Iraq, and Kuwait city was down to 10% of its level at the start of the war. Whereas it takes almost 20,000 tons of materiel daily to support the troops in Kuwait with food, water and ammunition, Schwarzkopf said, only about 2,000 tons moved in trucks on a recent day.

It is not clear whether the day Schwarzkopf cited was representative of most recent days. But although Pentagon officials continue to hold out the prospect that the troops encamped in Kuwait can be starved or “thirsted” out of their bunkers, there is little question that they have large ammunition stocks and have husbanded them carefully during months of preparation for war.

Furthermore, supply lines are not as tenuous for the Republican Guard, which is dug into a 4,000-square-mile area of southern Iraq around Basra, a major city. Those forces continue to be supplied by many routes from the north, officials said.

In detailing the allied air attacks on Iraqi targets, as well as the often surprisingly low levels of destruction, Schwarzkopf made clear that his own definition of success stops well short of destroying Iraq and every last one of its weapons.

In targeting everything from electrical generators to hardened aircraft shelters to Scud missile launchers, U.S. commanders have chosen not to destroy all of Iraq’s military capability, but to deny Hussein’s military machine the ability to function effectively and threaten Iraq’s neighbors.

“This campaign has many different phases to it,” Schwarzkopf said. “There are certain determinations that have to be swung, and I’m not going to telegraph any of our punches. But I will repeat once again what the President of the United States has said all along. That is, our argument is not with the Iraqi people. Our intention is not to conquer Iraq in any way or reduce Iraq to a non-country. It never has been.”

ASSESSING THE WAR SO FAR

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf , U.S. commander of the Desert Storm operation, offered these summary assessments of damage to Iraq after two weeks of warfare. His briefing Wednesday contained many more details about allied strikes than had previously been made available. Among the highlights:

IRAQI COMMAND

26 of what the general called leadership targets were struck, with 60% damaged or destroyed.

25% of electrical generators are inoperative; 50% are damaged.

75% of command, control and communication facilities were struck, with 33% destroyed or inoperative.

31 nuclear, chemical or biological warfare sites were struck in more than 535 sorties.

A major ammunition dump in northern Kuwait was destroyed.

IRAQI AIR POWER

Iraq has abandoned centralized control of its air defenses.

No Iraqi aircraft have successfully penetrated coalition airspace.

The Iraqi early warning system has completely failed.

Allies have attacked 38 Iraqi airfields, some at least four times. Nine are no longer operational.

29 Iraqi aircraft were destroyed on the ground; 89 have crossed into Iran.

70 underground aircraft shelters have been destroyed.

IRAQI GROUND TROOPS

Allied aircraft are flying 300 daily sorties against Iraq’s elite Republican Guards.

At least 24 Iraqi tanks were destroyed in four separate engagements near the Kuwait border overnight Wednesday.

Bombing of routes has reduced the rate of troop supply by about 90%: Of the 20,000 tons a day required, only about 2,000 are getting through.

IRAQI NAVAL TARGETS

46 Iraqi naval vessels have been sunk or disabled.

74 Iraqi naval personnel have been taken prisoner in two engagements.

Maritime interceptions of ships bound for Iraq continue, totaling more than 7,000 since August.

IRAQI MISSILE SITES

1,500 sorties have been flown against the Scuds.

All fixed missile sites have been destroyed.

All major missile production facilities have been eliminated.

There have been 53 Scud launches--27 against Saudi Arabia and 26 against Israel. Iraq launched 35 in the first week of the war and 18 in the second.

At least three mobile launchers, four Scud missiles on Scud-servicing vehicles, and three more Scud-servicing vehicles have been eliminated. Schwarzkopf said it was possible that as many as seven mobile launchers were knocked out.

Air attacks on a Scud missile base apparently prevented an attack on Israel on Tuesday night.

THE ALLIED EFFORT

Coalition forces have lost 19 aircraft in 30,000 sorties. One aircraft has been lost in the last five days to enemy groundfire.

Allied forces in the Gulf passed 500,000, the highest level yet.

170 coalition ships control the Gulf and the Red Sea.