The Battlefront: Calculus of Death

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"The number of Americans killed will exceed tens of thousands if a ground battle occurs with Iraqi forces . . . which are trained in defensive combat to an extent that no other force in the world has reached."

-- Baghdad Radio

Boastful propaganda? Of course, but with just enough potential truth to haunt George Bush for days to come. The President, his generals and allies emphasized last week that he alone will make the fateful decisions whether and when to start a ground offensive -- a campaign that Baghdad Radio says Iraq "is waiting impatiently" to fight. But if he gives the go signal -- and it is increasingly difficult to see how he can avoid doing so -- he enters into a grisly calculus of death.

The body bags that became a repellent cliche of pre-Jan. 16 antiwar oratory, and that have been so remarkably scarce through the first three weeks of actual war, might pile up quickly, though probably nowhere near as high as Saddam Hussein's propagandists suggest. But how many soldiers' deaths are likely if the attack begins next week, the week after, a month later, two months later? How many Iraqi civilians might die in the meantime from U.S. bombing? What number of casualties, and over how long a period, can the U.S. stand without a disastrous loss in public support for the war? Conversely, how many more Iraqi civilian deaths, real or alleged, can the Arab world witness without an almost equally devastating accelerated swing to support for Saddam? And can the allied coalition hold together, especially if Soviet support softens -- as Mikhail Gorbachev's weekend statement suggests?

Officially, Bush has not even decided when he will decide. But all indications are that the first Rubicon has been seven-eighths crossed. The President asserted he is "somewhat skeptical" that air power alone can drive Saddam's forces out of Kuwait, and others were far more categorical. Lieut. General Sir Peter de la Billiere, British commander in Saudi Arabia, called a ground campaign "inevitable." No matter how devastating the air war has been, said Sir Peter, it is "minor, compared to what they've got coming."

The rationale for the land campaign -- driving Iraqi forces out of Kuwait -- by definition means seizing and holding ground, and that is one thing air power cannot do; only tanks and infantry can. Saddam could be overthrown by a coup, or he could suddenly pull his troops out voluntarily, or those troops could be so worn down that they surrender en masse. But a commander who bases his plans on any of those things would be taking almost as much of a chance as the restaurant customer who counts on paying for his dinner with the pearl he hopes to find in an oyster.

< If a land offensive seems certain, however, its timing and intensity are not. Much guessing focuses on late February or early March. French President Francois Mitterrand said flatly last week that the ground attack would begin "in the next few days, if not later, in any case sometime this month." But some Congressmen attending a closed-door briefing by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell last week came away with a different impression. As Democratic Representative John Spratt of South Carolina put it, "I didn't get the sense anybody is pushing for a hurry-up ground war."

The generals talk less in terms of time than of conditions. The primary one is that a land offensive should be launched only when bombing has softened the Iraqi defenses to the maximum extent possible. There is agreement that, as one Congressman emerging from the Cheney-Powell briefing said, "we're still some distance from achieving the necessary kill level of tanks and artillery." But how soon might that point be reached? That, says General Norman Schwarzkopf, top allied commander in the gulf, involves a "compendium of actual results, measurable results, estimated results, anecdotal reports and gut feel."

To put all those considerations together, Bush dispatched Cheney and Powell to the gulf to talk with Schwarzkopf and other allied commanders. They were scheduled to return Sunday, and will give Bush their recommendations on whether the ground war should be launched and when.

TROLLING FOR TRUCKS

That does not necessarily mean that a hard-and-fast decision, let alone a deadline, will be fixed immediately. The initial determination could be to wait, say, two more weeks and then reassess. It may take at least that long just to judge how much damage the stepped-up allied air assault is doing to Iraqi troops, weapons and supply lines -- a question that is already dominating public discussion of the fighting.

With air raids averaging one sortie a minute, according to the allied command, the war can hardly be said to have hit a lull. But last week was the first that brought no new oil spills, Iraqi raids into Saudi Arabia or any other surprise developments, just more -- or less -- of the same. Less: the pace of Scud-missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia dwindled further; Israel went five whole days without being the target of even one. More: additional Iraqi planes fled to safety in Iran (the total is now said to be 147), though for the first time, American jets shot down six before they could cross the border. And there were more allied bombing and strafing runs than ever.

The big change is a perceptible shift in the type of bombing, toward the sort that would pave the way for a ground offensive. American and allied planes are still carrying out the kind of "deep penetration" strikes on factories, communications facilities, bridges and other fixed targets that began Jan. 16; Baghdad late last week had been hit 22 nights in a row -- every night since the war began. But by last week the majority of strikes consisted of what military men call battlefield interdiction -- direct attacks on Iraqi tanks, artillery, troops and supply lines. Often the targets are not even specified in advance; pilots simply fly around looking for whatever prey they can find, a practice they call trolling. Says Lieut. Colonel William Horne, commander of the Marine 224th Squadron at a base in the gulf area: "Before, I went after a bridge. Now I'm going after a category of targets, for instance, 'movers' ((like tanks and trucks)) down the road."

The Iraqis, however, have been adapting to such tactics. Horne's pilots, for example, report that Iraqi supply columns increasingly have been broken up into small groups of perhaps five trucks or cars to avoid presenting concentrated targets. Saddam's soldiers also have become ever more expert at decoy practices. They put aluminum sheets under camouflage netting to confuse U.S. radar, build small fires under metal plates that infrared sensors aboard a smart bomb might read as the engine heat from a tank, and set off smoke pots to tempt aviators into reporting bomb hits that never happened.

Determining how many bombs have struck such phantoms and how many have hit real targets is no mean trick. One American report quoted Pentagon sources as figuring that the fighting efficiency of the Republican Guard, Saddam's best troops, had hardly been dented, but General Michel Roquejoffre, French commander in the gulf, estimated that it had been lessened "between 20% and 30% on average." The Israelis reckon that as of last week the bombing had destroyed 600 of 4,000 Iraqi tanks believed to be deployed in Kuwait and 40,000 tons of ammunition out of an estimated 300,000 tons that Saddam's forces have stashed away. A U.S. briefing officer claimed the number was 750 tanks destroyed, along with 650 artillery pieces and 600 armored personnel carriers.

While that would certainly mark progress, it also indicates that the Iraqis still have more than enough weapons and ammunition left to put up a savage fight on the ground. True enough, the tactical bombing will be stepped up steadily from here. But almost everyone agrees that more bombing is needed before the time looks anything like ripe for a ground assault. Two more weeks would bring the date close to the end of February. By coincidence or not, that is also the long-standing target for the last American troops and weapons being sent to Saudi Arabia to be in place and trained and acclimated to desert conditions -- in other words, ready to fight.

WHAT'S THE RUSH?

A considerable body of U.S. political and military opinion, however, favors holding off not for weeks but for months, if not forever. The argument, in essence: Baghdad Radio was telling the truth when it said Iraq is waiting eagerly for an allied ground offensive. Saddam's strategy has always been to inflict unacceptably heavy casualties on allied forces, and mowing them down as they move through minefields and across ditches filled with burning oil offers his only chance to do so. But why play Saddam's game? Air power is the allies' overwhelming advantage; it should be used to the maximum extent possible.

En route to Saudi Arabia, Cheney identified as "the No. 1 priority" expelling Iraq from Kuwait "at the lowest possible cost in terms of loss of U.S. life." That is precisely why a land offensive should be put off, argues the bomb-for-months school; prolonged bombing holds the best hope of saving allied soldiers' lives. The more tanks, troop bunkers and supply trucks that can be destroyed from the air, the less bloody an eventual ground assault will be. For Iraqis too, in fact: the pounding they are taking hunkered down in foxholes and bunkers is minor compared with what they will face if they have to come out into the open to fight allied attackers.

This line is being voiced largely by people who prior to Jan. 16 favored giving economic sanctions a lengthy trial before any use of force at all. Some refer to bombing as "sanctions with teeth." But it also is coming from bipartisan hawks. Maine Republican William Cohen, an influential member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who voted for the resolution authorizing Bush to use force, publicly urged the President last week to pursue the air campaign exclusively "for the next several months." Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, similarly warned against "danger . . . that we will go to the ground war too soon." And one member of Bush's unofficial five-man war cabinet asserts that the Administration hopes bombing will so cripple Iraq's fighting ability that an eventual ground offensive "will be nothing more than a mopping-up operation."

THE CASE FOR SPEED

There are some military reasons for a relatively quick start to the ground war. The air campaign eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns, when all the obvious and easy targets have been blasted. Only hardened and elusive ones remain, and hitting them requires more and more bombing to produce less and less effect. Maintaining the fighting edge of allied troops becomes more difficult the longer they sit in the sand. And the longer they wait, the greater the chance that coalition troops would have to fight in searing heat. If Iraq uses poison gas and the allied troops had to don bulky protective clothing, they could quickly reach the limits of physical endurance.

The most important arguments for speed, however, are political. The more protracted the war, the greater the chance that proposals for a compromise settlement that would leave Saddam a menace for the future would gain support. Iran made some mysterious noises about such an idea last week but got no takers. That situation might change in a month or two, though -- particularly if the Soviet government softens its insistence that Saddam must get out of Kuwait. And Moscow seems to be falling under the increasing influence of military men who still feel nostalgia for the old alliance with Iraq and distress at the idea of a victorious American army perched virtually on the U.S.S.R.'s southern doorstep. In a statement Saturday, Gorbachev warned that the gulf war might begin to exceed the U.N. mandate and said he was sending an emissary to Baghdad.

The heaviest pressure is coming from the Arab world. With every day that Iraq holds out against the assaults of a coalition led by the world's sole surviving superpower, Saddam becomes more of a hero to masses of Arabs who have long felt humiliated by the West. And that is one problem that a prolonged bombing campaign will not ameliorate. Quite the contrary, it gives Iraq ever more opportunity to propagandize about civilian casualties.

Already the Saddam government is daily escorting foreign journalists to bombed-out homes, schools and the like, scenes that are running almost nightly on American TV. The allies insist they are going out of their way to avoid civilian targets, and the record bears them out. Baghdad's own figures on civilian casualties, while hopelessly confusing, are remarkably low, given the length and intensity of the bombing. But there is no way to entirely avoid the killing of civilians, and Saddam seems to be trying to provoke more by putting military installations among them -- placing antiaircraft guns on top of apartment houses, for example. Thus a dismal equation: more bombing equals more civilian deaths equals an ever greater chance for Saddam to portray the war as an assault by Western colonialists and Zionists against the entire Arab world.

Optimists insist that Arab governments that are members of the alliance -- predominantly Saudi Arabia and Syria -- can maintain control, despite the surge of pro-Saddam feeling. Congressman Aspin concedes the growing strength of that sentiment. But he asserts that "those who might fall out of the coalition, either because of the impact on their public of the damage being inflicted on Iraq by the air campaign or because they want to pursue a diplomatic solution that falls short of our war aims, are not vital to the military campaign." Maybe, but some of the staunchest U.S. allies do not want to take any chances. "We quite frankly underestimated the support for Saddam in the Arab street," says a Saudi minister. "If we don't move to cut that off as quickly as we can, the postwar peace will be harder to fashion than even the most pessimistic among us have thought."

British diplomats say Bush has written to Arab members of the coalition, pledging not to delay the ground war beyond this month. White House officials strongly deny that, but they readily admit that several Arab coalition partners are pressing the President to begin the land offensive within the next few weeks to bring the war to a relatively speedy end. Thus one central question in the decision could be bluntly phrased this way: How many American and allied soldiers' lives is it worth to cut off pro-Saddam sentiment among the Arab masses before it burgeons enough to threaten both the war effort and the eventual peace?

In an airborne briefing en route to Saudi Arabia, however, Powell cautioned against the idea that the "ground campaign, as the night follows the day, means huge casualties." Saddam may be planning a Verdun in the sand, but ! allied commanders insist they are not going to oblige him by relying primarily on frontal attacks on the impressive Iraqi fortifications. The campaign instead is likely to combine a flanking maneuver around the lines in Kuwait, with paratroop drops and amphibious landings behind those lines.

Most of all, as Cheney and Powell insisted to the point of monotony, a ground war would not be just a land battle but a combined land-air assault. They even talked of the ground campaign as a kind of supplement to a continued and intensified air war. The likely meaning: the aim of all the assaults would be to draw the Iraqis out from their fortifications and into a war of maneuver. Iraqis are not considered good at such fighting, and, more important, they would be doing it without vital air cover. Frontal attacks, where they occurred, would be preceded by heavy aerial bombardment and would be aimed at piercing holes in the lines, which the Iraqis would have to try to seal off by counterattack. That would require them to come out into the open and expose themselves to pitiless bombing and strafing.

Such tactics might indeed hold down allied casualties. But there is no getting around the fact that the toll of soldiers killed in a day of land fighting -- even the delayed, low-intensity mopping-up operation that some air-power advocates still foresee -- is likely to exceed by far the number of pilots lost in a month of the most ferocious bombing. Deciding whether and when to start a ground offensive inescapably turns into pondering a calculus of death.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: GULF CALENDAR

With reporting by William Dowell/Dhahran, William Mader/London and Bruce van Voorst with Cheney and Powell