Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2003
They're calling it "A-Day," A as in airstrikes so devastating they would
leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight.
If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air
Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets
in Iraq. As CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports, this is more than
number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War.
On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise
missiles.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one Pentagon official who
has been briefed on the plan.
"The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated
before," the official said.
The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the National Defense
University. It's called "Shock and Awe" and it focuses on the psychological
destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical
destruction of his military forces.
"We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one
of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept which relies on large numbers
of precision guided weapons.
"So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons
at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman.
In the first Gulf War, 10 percent of the weapons were precision guided. In
this war 80 percent will be precision guided.
The Air Force has stockpiled 6,000 of these guidance kits in the Persian
Gulf to convert ordinary dumb bombs into satellite-guided bombs, a weapon
that didn't exist in the first war.
"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of
your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city
down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days
they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted," Ullman
tells Martin.
Last time, an armored armada swept into Kuwait and destroyed Saddam's elite
republican guard divisions in the largest tank battle since the World War
II. This time, the target is not the Iraqi army but the Iraqi leadership,
and the battle plan is designed to bypass Iraqi divisions whenever
possible.
If Shock and Awe works, there won't be a ground war.
Not everybody in the Bush Administration thinks Shock and Awe will work.
One senior official called it a bunch of bull, but confirmed it is the
concept on which the war plan is based.
Last year, in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, the U.S. was badly
surprised by the willingness of al Qaeda to fight to the death. If the
Iraqis fight, the U.S. would have to throw in reinforcements and win the
old fashioned way by crushing the republican guards, and that would mean
more casualties on both sides.
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Statement from CBS News Anchor Dan Rather: "We assure you this report
contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the
Iraqi military
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