Heat Won’t Preclude Iraq War

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is prepared to invade Iraq even if political negotiations and Saddam Hussein’s maneuvers drag on into winter and rule out action during the coolest months, defense officials and military analysts say.

For months, military analysts have spoken of a winter war as essentially the only option and suggested that it would be impossible for U.S. troops to fight in the searing Iraqi summer.

With an eye on the calendar, President Bush rushed to secure a tough resolution on Iraq from Congress and is pushing for a second one in the United Nations. Administration officials have grown increasingly impatient as the U.N. negotiations have dragged on for weeks. Bush has warned that once a resolution is adopted, he will tolerate no delay in inspections for chemical, nuclear and biological weapons after U.N. teams return to Iraq.

Yet even as diplomacy forges ahead on the presumption that the “weather window” for an attack will close in March, the Pentagon is ready to fight a war in the spring, one that could even spill over into summer, when temperatures in Iraq can hit 120.

Advances in weapons technology and military tactics over the last decade have dramatically altered the calculations for waging a second Persian Gulf war, making weather far less a determining factor than it was during the first conflict, in winter 1991.

Improved surveillance, new satellite-guided bombs that can plunge to their targets through thick cloud cover and less restrictive chemical-protection suits have made U.S. troops and their equipment more weatherproof than ever.

“We would prefer to get it done by May for lots of reasons, strategic as well as weather, but there’s less constraint” than during the ’91 war, said Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret and CIA operations officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington. “Even if Saddam manages to delay this until, say, May, it doesn’t necessarily preclude conflict until next November. We might be willing to launch the campaign in the summer.”

Gulf dwellers tend to scoff at the notion that the weather should affect U.S. plans.

“I think if you come from Texas or Arizona, the weather is not that different,” said Bader Omar Dafa, Qatar’s ambassador to Washington. A potential command center for U.S. air power is now rising in the Qatari desert.

Certainly, Pentagon planners say, U.S. forces would have to alter their strategy for a later attack. But in the end, a strike decision would be largely a matter of how as opposed to when.

“There are times when weather can be a detractor and when there’s an optimum window. But we are capable of being an all-weather force,” a senior defense official said. “Would we hate it? Sure. But putting a window on it isn’t right.”

As part of their contingency planning, military strategists say, officials at U.S. Central Command are already mapping weather patterns in Iraq, using technology to explore the nuances of their effects on warfare. A testing facility at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base, for example, can simulate any weather, from conditions in Antarctica to those in the tropics.

Under one option, U.S. and allied forces could rely mostly on air power during the hot months and employ special operations soldiers on land only in key operations, military analysts and defense officials say. Under the worst-case scenario, American and allied forces would simply prepare for high numbers of heat casualties in brief fighting that most analysts predict would last less than a month.

“You can work around it when you employ air power with the amount of effectiveness the U.S. Air Force and the Navy are capable of,” said Col. William F. Burnette, vice commander of the Air Force Weather Agency at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. “We don’t want thousands of guys crapping out in chem suits on the ground.”

The Pentagon has more than a million new chemical protection suits and masks -- more than enough for the 250,000 or so U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen most analysts believe would be required to topple Hussein’s regime. That’s an improvement from 1991, when soldiers complained that supplies were inadequate and the suits suffocating, although Gulf veterans say problems remain.

Iraqi military defectors and senior U.S. defense analysts say there is a significant chance that Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons if attacked, because unlike the ’91 war, which aimed only to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait, an invasion now would be aimed at toppling Hussein. Although the Iraqi leader denies having chemical or biological arms, the U.S. suspects that he does and notes that he has used chemical arms on Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds in the past.

In the Gulf War, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf relied heavily on weather reports, which he considered so sensitive that his press briefers often declined to describe the weather in Iraq to reporters. On Oct. 29, 1990, nearly three months before the war was launched, Schwarzkopf asked for a detailed study of how the weather would affect military operations.

He wanted meticulous information on rain, sandstorms, wind and temperatures through April. He wanted precise daylight hours because the short light of winter gives U.S. planes and ground troops with night-vision equipment the power to “own the night,” in the words of one pilot.

The analysis came back nine days later: “The bottom line was that mid-February is an extremely advantageous time for U.S. forces to attack,” Schwarzkopf wrote in his autobiography. Opting to launch an air war with the goal of saving the optimum time for a ground invasion, U.S. forces went in on Jan. 17.

There was ample reason for avoiding summer fighting. The Tomahawk missiles and heat-seeking devices that were celebrated for their effectiveness in the Gulf War sometimes fail in extreme heat. The bulky Gulf-era protective anti-chemical suits and masks would have made it punishing, if not impossible, to rappel down a rope from a helicopter or even to turn a wrench under the sweltering Iraqi summer sun.

Yet fighting in the Iraqi winter also has its disadvantages. In the Gulf War, inclement weather often limited AC-130 gunships’ ability to offer close support to ground troops. The laser-guided bombs that made their debut in 1991 were ineffective when there was heavy cloud cover.

In the last decade, technological advances have solved many such problems. AC-130s have been equipped with thermal imaging cameras that can see through the haze common in the Iraqi winter. U.S. soldiers have patches taped on their helmets that identify them to aircraft even in low light.

Surveillance planes, such as U2s, now use airborne sensors that can penetrate clouds with radar. And when weather defeats laser-guided bombs, warplanes can now use the satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions used in Afghanistan, which can find their targets through heavy cloud cover.

Despite advances in defending against the heat, the problems posed by temperatures that can top what amounts to 140 degrees for soldiers in heavy gear and armored vehicles are myriad. The vision-distorting flush that radiates off the white sand grows so intense that even T. E. Lawrence, the British adventurer better known as Lawrence of Arabia, conceded, “After a while I could not endure it.”

Beyond the summer heat and winter clouds, there is the ubiquitous, choking sand. In 1991, American equipment operators strapped pantyhose over vehicle air intakes until small-bore grates were delivered. The problem is worst in the sweeping thunderstorms from February to April and the sandstorms that rake the desert from April through summer’s end.

It was just such swirling sand that Delta commandos encountered in Iran in 1979 on their way to try to rescue hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Eight commandos and pilots died when a plane and helicopter collided in a sandstorm before ever leaving the ground. The debacle put an end to further rescue attempts. Now, using commercial satellites, Air Force weathermen can pull down data on dust storms as well.

U.S. soldiers might be able to fight in any weather, but their performance will inevitably suffer in summer, and the number of heat casualties would rise, according to soldiers who know the region. During the winter fighting of 1991, heat illness accounted for less than 1% of sick-call visits to Navy clinics, which treated all U.S. service members, but summer illnesses could range from painful heat contractions to delirium and even death.

Nevertheless, the armed forces have made some advances that blunt the heat. The Gulf War-era chemical gear -- a bulky mask and a charcoal suit with a strap-on hood -- has been replaced by an improved mask and a sleeker, one-piece suit designed to seal out chemicals but cool the wearer by allowing heat to pass through the fabric. New Humvee-mounted biological agent detection labs, as well as the Fox chemical detection vehicles, are air-conditioned -- to protect the equipment, not the soldiers, Army officials say.

There are advantages to fighting in the summer: Clear weather expands the options for warplanes. And there are also regions in Iraq where the cold grows lethal. Schwarzkopf acknowledged in his autobiography that he had underestimated the severity of the weather in Iraq’s mountainous northwest, where two members of a U.S. “Scud-busting” mission to take out Iraqi missiles on the ground died of exposure in freezing temperatures in the war’s early days.

Schwarzkopf relied on combat weathermen like Air Force Master Sgt. Jeffrey Johnson to keep him informed. Johnson had no computer and needed five or more colleagues to help lug 800 pounds of TV monitors and antennas to intercept satellite reports. None of the instruments could detect a sandstorm.

Johnson, of the Air Force’s 10th Combat Weather Squadron, remembers looking at the printout of a satellite picture in the desert and seeing a thunderstorm. Minutes later, the rains kicked up a dust storm that blotted out the sun.

“In the middle of the day, it was like it was 2 in the morning. It was just pitch black. It was unreal,” Johnson, 39, recalled in an interview from Ft. Bragg, N.C. “That was probably the scariest day of my life. You wanted to tap your shoes and say, ‘There’s no place like home.’ ”