Allied Ground Push in 20 Days Foreseen : Strategy: Officials say offensive can begin after air strikes destroy half of Iraq’s combat vehicles, equipment.

U.S. military officials have concluded that the allied ground offensive against Iraqi troops can begin when half of the enemy’s combat vehicles and equipment have been destroyed, a job that could be completed in as few as 10 days, Pentagon sources said Saturday.

The U.S.-led air campaign, which has just turned to the systematic bombardment of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq in the last five days, has had a “dramatic effect” on Iraq’s 545,000 troops and their ground weapons, a senior official said.

The highly placed Pentagon official, who asked not to be named, said that unless the weather or some other factor disrupts the U.S. air war schedule, the Iraqi forces would be sufficiently softened up for an allied ground assault in 10 to 20 days.

His observations are the most precise assessment to date of the level of destruction that U.S. military planners want to inflict in Iraqi forces before commencing ground combat, and of the timetable they have laid out for achieving it.

The comments also project the Pentagon’s increasing confidence that the air campaign is proceeding on schedule and meeting its key objectives, despite difficulties in determining the extent of damage and the need to divert hundreds of aircraft to the search for Scud missiles.

The task of disabling Saddam Hussein’s ground forces has been made easier in recent days by the Iraqis, who have moved a large number of vehicles from protective shelters out into the open, where they have been subjected to relentless air attack.

Some U.S. military officials have speculated that the Iraqi movements, combined with recent border attacks, may be an attempt to draw allied units into a ground war prematurely. But the officials say the allies will not commit to massive ground combat until the air campaign has met its goals.

The senior official cautioned that war planners will not be able to determine exactly when the 50% target is reached and that the ground battle will be “a slugging match” with substantial U.S. casualties, no matter how much aerial punishment is delivered in advance.

The official said the U.S. military plan is not to kill masses of Iraqi infantry soldiers--whom he characterized as “just a bunch of country boys, lettuce growers”--but to “demobilize” Iraq’s armored and mechanized forces by destroying their vehicles and mobile guns.

U.S. intelligence agencies estimate that Iraq has 4,200 tanks, 2,800 armored personnel carriers and 3,100 artillery pieces in Kuwait and southern Iraq, an area referred to as the Kuwaiti theater of operations.

The 150,000 troops of the elite Republican Guard are bearing the brunt of the bombardment because they are the most mobile of Hussein’s forces and have the best combat vehicles, including top-of-the-line Soviet tanks, personnel carriers and self-propelled artillery.

While largely successful, the allied air campaign against Iraq has suffered some predictable but serious problems, including missed targets, wrong targets hit and civilians killed, the official said.

In one case, a U.S. warplane sent to destroy the Iraqi Ministry of Interior building in downtown Baghdad aimed its bomb at a similar building directly across the street, the official said. “I’ll be damned if the air crew didn’t lock that building up and put one right through the roof,” he said ruefully.

Attack planes returned the next day and hit the right building, he said.

The official said he had “no idea” what kind of facility was wrongly destroyed. “It could have been a grocery store for all I know,” he said.

Military officials wanted to release the videotapes of both attacks, to illustrate both the accuracy of the weapons and the fact that sometimes in wartime the wrong targets are hit. But senior civilians at the Pentagon overruled them and suppressed both tapes, a knowledgeable official said.

The official also explained why it took allied forces 790 air sorties to hit 36 bridges used by troop-supply convoys in the Kuwaiti theater. The job of blowing up the bridges originally was assigned to Navy attack planes because the spans were in the Basra area near the northern Persian Gulf, within range of the three U.S. aircraft carriers.

But after scores of misses by the unguided, “dumb” gravity bombs dropped by the Navy jets, the bridge-busting mission was reassigned to Air Force F-117 and F-111 fighter-bombers equipped with television-guided, “smart” bombs.

Last week, theater commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf showed several gee-whiz videotapes of guided bombs scoring direct hits on Iraqi bridges; none of the tapes of bombs exploding harmlessly in the water were released, an official noted.

Despite the occasional misfires, the official said he is “reasonably confident” that civilian casualties have been kept low. “We planned to try to avoid Muslim holy places, cultural sites, hospitals, that sort of thing. We’ve conducted most of our urban attacks at night when, hopefully, most of the civilian population was home in bed and off the street,” he said.

“Having said that, we knew from the beginning that we would injure and kill people we weren’t all that angry with, and that’s just an unfortunate part of the operation,” the official added.

While the air war appears to be progressing ahead of schedule in some respects, no one in the Bush Administration is pressing for early commencement of ground combat, allied officials said Saturday.

Indeed, there remains some faint hope that air power alone will dislodge the large and deeply entrenched Iraqi force from Kuwait, but the expectation is that a large-scale ground attack will be necessary to finish the job.

Lt. Gen. Peter de la Billiere, senior commander of British forces in Saudi Arabia, said Saturday he believes that ground operations will be needed to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. Even so, he said, the ground assaults “are not going to start until we are satisfied, until Gen. Schwarzkopf is satisfied, that the air operations have prepared the battlefield to a state we want it to be in before we deploy ground troops.”

The British general said it is unlikely that the Iraqis will surrender under air attack alone. And he added that Iraq’s ground forces have not been tested yet, except for “this rather foolish, militarily foolish escapade up at Khafji.”

Referring to the goal of destroying 50% of Iraqi vehicles before initiating ground combat, a senior U.S. military official said: “In my judgment, when we achieve those levels of destruction of his mechanized forces, then you have pretty well disorganized the ground defense. . . . Others might have other goals.

“But in any case, I don’t think the President is uncomfortable at all with waiting as long as necessary,” he continued. “And if we achieve the 50% level of destruction, he might tell us to start over and get another 50%. . . . I fully expect the President to wait until he senses it can be done with absolute minimum casualties on our side when he decides to go ahead and clean it up.”

The biggest concern of U.S. military commanders and political leaders alike is American casualties, the senior Pentagon aide said. “Those 11 or 12 Marines, the 14 guys we had on the (AC-130) gunship, were taken hard by the President. So he will probably have a higher level (of destruction of Iraqi forces) than ours before he authorizes action on the ground. In any case, I sense no impatience,” the official added.

The military timetable could be set back by bad weather or by other unexpected factors, officials noted. Bad weather could slow the bombing sortie rate and make it difficult to assess its effect. While it is possible to count carcasses of individual tanks, trucks and armored vehicles from aerial reconnaissance, those pictures cannot be taken through clouds, a military officer said.

One pleasant surprise of the war has been the effectiveness of the F-117 Stealth fighter, which has been used against a variety of targets that required the precision delivery of bombs. While there are only about 40 of the radar-evading planes in an allied air armada of more than 2,000 aircraft, the F-117 has played an “extraordinary, disproportionately large” role in attacking critical targets such as hardened bunkers, Scud missile launchers and chemical and nuclear weapons plants, the official said.

He declined to say how many sorties the F-117 has flown, but the number is thought to exceed 1,000 out of an allied mission total of more than 35,000. He said that Iraqi air defenses have not “scratched” a single Stealth fighter. The only damage suffered by an F-117 during the war came when one ran off the runway at its base at an unspecified location in Saudi Arabia, officials indicated.

“I just wish we had more Stealth aircraft,” a Pentagon officer said. “It’s been a very very good lesson for everybody. Essentially you can say that the Stealth aircraft technology has made every other air force in the world obsolete overnight.”