First strikes were limited in scope: US defense officials

Agence France-Presse | 3/20/03

[kattracks]

The US war against Iraq commenced with a series of limited air attacks, not the bang of a full scale air war that the military and a coterie of experts had led the world to expect.

The operations unfolding in Iraq were kept under a cloak of secrecy but US defense officials said they were the start of a campaign that has been designed to topple the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"We're at a critical juncture, and obviously there are things that are going to start to happen in preparation of the battlefield," said a senior US defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Tomahawk Land Attack Cruise Missiles were fired from six US surface warships and submarines in the opening strikes, a Navy spokeswoman said. The Pentagon released video of Tomahawks streaking toward Iraq from the deck of the USS Donald Cook, a guided missile cruiser in the Red Sea.

Officials would not confirm television reports that B-2, B-1, B-52 bombers and F-117 stealth fighters took part in the opening attacks on Iraq or that the aim of the first wave of strikes was to "decapitate" the Iraqi leadership.

"It is a limited thing. It ain't A-Day," said one Pentagon official, referring to the slogan for the start of the air war.

In another surprise, the strikes began just before dawn broke in Baghdad, rather than early in the evening as most experts had supposed.

The US military prefers to use night as cover for its stealth fighters and bombers and because it enjoys a huge technological advantage in nightfighting over the Iraqi military.

The limited scope of the strikes and the riskier near dawn raids prompted speculation that the US military was responding to unexpected, time-sensitive intelligence, possibly on the movements of whereabouts of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

But Pentagon officials dismissed those reports as exaggerated.

"That's a little overstated. In fact that's a lot overstated," said the senior defense official.

Pentagon officials have long maintained that the campaign, crafted by Army General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, would defy expectations, achieving tactical surprise even if Baghdad was fully prepared for the war itself.

It was unclear what the first strikes had achieved or how soon they would be followed with heavier attacks.

If the initial strikes were limited, it was not for lack of capability.

More than 600 US combat aircraft are within striking distance of Iraq, operating from five aircraft carriers and land bases across the Gulf region, Pentagon officials said.

Nearly 180,000 US and British troops, meanwhile, have been straining at the leash in northern Kuwait, awaiting the word to lunge into southern Iraq in tanks, armored fighting vehicles and assault helicopters.

B-2 bombers alone can strike up to 16 targets in a single pass with 2,000 pound satellite guided bombs. The B-1 bombers can hit 24 separate targets. And the B-52 can fire air-launched cruise missiles or unload a dozen 2,000 pound satellite guided bombs along with cluster munitions.

For the first time in combat, US forces expect to use a Sensor Fuze weapon, a particularly frightening weapon that dispense bomblets over a battlefield that independently seek out widely scattered enemy armor, officials said.

"I do not think our potential adversary has any idea what's coming," Air Force Colonel Gary Crowder, chief strategist at the Air Combat Command, told reporters earlier.

Thousands of precision bombs and missiles will be used in the first day of a US air campaign, 10 times the number dropped in the opening the 1991 Gulf War, he said.

"The effect that we are trying to create is to make it so apparent and so overwhelming at the very outset of potential military operations that the adversary quickly realizes that there is no real alternative here than to fight and die or to give up," he said.