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Posted on 10/16/2001 6:29:22 PM PDT by Jean S

PARIS The Pentagon's decision to begin using low-flying AC-130 gunships in Afghanistan this week signals the start of a bloody offensive against Taliban ground forces that will involve an arsenal of new helicopter-borne firepower and special forces, defense officials and other experts said Tuesday.

The AC-130 is one of the most lethal American warplanes in terms of its ability to chew up ground forces. The goal of the new offensive is to destroy the Taliban militia as a fighting force and to isolate Osama bin Laden's terrorist group from the Afghan people, according to the defense sources.

The slow-flying AC-130 is known as "Spooky II," because of its fearsome firepower. It circles a target and saturates it with automatic fire from three computer-controlled guns, including cannon and heavy machine guns capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute. The plane's guns can cover an area the size of eight football fields with a round in each square yard.

An adaptation of the Hercules aircraft that has been a U.S. war horse, the AC-130 has banks of electronic sensors on board capable of detecting ground targets normally elusive from the air - notably small units moving at night or through cloud cover or fog.

"There's no body count yet, but clearly the attack has shifted to killing Taliban fighters, getting them to move so that they can be spotted and then shot or bombed," according to John Pike, a strategic analyst in Washington.

The new phase of the war also involves covert operations by U.S. special forces, the defense sources said. "If it's safe enough for the AC-130s, then you can bet that black helicopters are going in at night," according to one U.S. official who spoke anonymously.

Night-fighting Apache attack helicopters and more traditional helicopter gunships could provide extra firepower, the source said, as U.S. fighter bombers start trying to pick off Taliban artillery and vehicles trying to move under the cover of darkness.

The next step, the sources said, will involve "capture and kill" raids in which U.S. special operations forces raid Taliban hideouts and try to bring out some fighters alive for interrogation. To strike with surprise and then escape safely, U.S. commandos will ride fast Blackhawk helicopters that have been modernized with satellite guidance so that pilots can navigate through the Afghan weather at night, even in fog.

"This is the secret war that the Pentagon has said was coming in which there would be successes and defeats that are publicly never talked about," according to a French defense official.

The Bush administration apparently hopes to end the war in Afghanistan quickly by moving to this new phase in the offensive. Destruction of the Taliban would open the way to an advance by the Northern Alliance and other rebel groups that are poised to seize power in Kabul.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday referred openly for the first time to cooperation between U.S. airpower and Northern Alliance ground power. U.S. defense planners liken that combination to the teamwork that developed between Albanian guerrillas and U.S. bombers during the 1999 war in Kosovo. The Albanian guerrillas forced the Serbian Army to regroup in self-defense, offering a target that was decimated by U.S. bombers.

Mr. Rumsfeld, without specifically referring to new U.S. tactics, seemed to have that in mind when he referred to the front where the Northern Alliance has been poised for days. "I suspect that in the period ahead, that might not be a safe place to be," he said.

So far, Bush administration officials have avoided any public discussion of heavy losses that are likely to be inflicted on the Taliban, mainly because Washington wants to play down bloodshed against Muslims - even a declared enemy such as the Taliban militia. The administration apparently fears that reports of heavy casualties will spark more anti-American demonstrations.

The overall casualty rate among the Taliban remains unknown at this stage, probably even to their own commanders, due to the collapse of national communications in Afghanistan. Damage estimates measured in Taliban troop losses are generated by the Pentagon, but "advances in the military track seem to be inhibited right now by the uncertainties about the political track with Muslim countries," according to Francois Heisbourg, a French strategic specialist.

Now, a Bush aide said, "This war can go on for a long time without arousing public fever across the Muslim world if we get to a phase centered on small battles that don't make headlines."

In other words, this sort of counterinsurgency campaign can only succeed if it stays largely secret, according to U.S. officials. Many of them draw an analogy with the U.S. failure in Vietnam in the 1970s: now, they say, the Pentagon wants to avoid adverse publicity - and also wants to prevent the Taliban from following U.S. military moves too easily through the global media.

With U.S. armed forces starting to hunt for Taliban battlefield forces, the campaign will see a tapering-off of the thunderous missile strikes that can easily fuel anti-American demonstrations organized by Islamic extremists in Pakistan and other Muslim members of the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism.

Though the operations by U.S. special forces risk possible American casualties, the raids are seen as an essential source of information about the Taliban's military deployment and for possible leads about the whereabouts of Mr. Bin Laden, the suspected terrorist leader, and his top aides in Afghanistan.

So far, the Pentagon "has to work with a fuzzy picture of the Taliban's organization and therefore how to go about rolling it up," according to Mr. Pike, who heads Globalsecurity.com, a U.S. strategic consulting firm.

The Taliban have an elite force, the 55th Brigade, that apparently works closely with the bin Laden organization and includes many of the Taliban's best-trained fighters, including combat veterans from Arab countries and from Pakistan. Even this force, said to number one or two thousand men, apparently has been broken into smaller units stationed in different parts of Afghanistan.

"To fight any war, you need a picture of the enemy's order of battle that tells you who you're fighting and where and we still haven't got that," a British official said. That picture has to be pulled together bit by bit, the British official said, especially now that the Taliban have lost the ability to organize and communicate through nationwide command-and-control systems.

Even with fewer electronic intercepts, the United States has several sets of round-the-clock eyes on Afghanistan, including a special spy satellite launched last week, an array of electronic warfare planes and the small unmanned drones - some of which are now being equipped with air-to-ground missiles that can be fired remotely.

All of this technical data, however, needs to be fleshed out with human intelligence of the sort that can come from Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence force, which helped set up the Taliban, and from Russian intelligence agents, many of whom worked against the Taliban for years.

Say hello to my little friend....Mr. Howitzer!

See the thread "Pictures to Make You Feel Warm And Fuzzy - The AC-130"

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