WASHINGTON - President Bush has settled on a war plan for Iraq that would begin with an air campaign shorter than the one for the Persian Gulf war, senior administration officials say. It would feature swift ground actions to seize footholds in the country and strikes to cut off the leadership in Baghdad.
The plan, approved in recent weeks by Bush well before the United Nations Security Council's unanimous vote Friday to disarm Iraq, calls for massing 200,000 to 250,000 troops for attack by air, land and sea. The offensive would probably begin with a "rolling start" of substantially fewer forces, Pentagon and military officials say.
Bush, speaking at a news conference Thursday, did not discuss the secret process for planning a possible war, but he said that if military action was required to compel Iraq to disarm, the United States and its allies would "move swiftly with force to do the job."
The plan calls for the quick capture of land within Iraq, which would be used as bases to funnel U.S. forces deeper into the country. That approach is intended to relieve some of the diplomatic pressure created by massing troops and initiating attacks from neighboring countries, including Saudi Arabia.
Under the plan, U.S. and coalition forces could operate out of such forward bases in northern, western and southern Iraq, building on lessons learned in Afghanistan, where the military seized a similar outpost south of Kandahar.
As the Pentagon puts the finishing touches on a plan of attack, White House and State Department officials are discussing what one senior official called a "seamless transition" from attack to a military occupation of parts of the country. It would include efforts to deliver food to Iraqis and to engage them quickly in planning for economic development and eventual democracy in areas that President Saddam Hussein has terrorized.
Iraqi scientists and local military officials would be encouraged to reveal the location of hidden stores of weapons of mass destruction, a process that Bush publicly encouraged from the Rose Garden on Friday when he told Iraqis that "by helping the process of disarmament, they help their country."
Bush, after several war-planning meetings with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the gulf, has decided that military action in Iraq would be carried out with the large troop levels that Franks has consistently advocated. Even so, Bush can still maintain the formal position that no decision has been reached because he has not yet ordered the nation to war.
Even as the U.N. weapons inspectors prepare to fly to Iraq, the U.S. military is moving into a new phase of positioning logistical forces that military officials say are significant indicators of a movement toward war.
The Army is loading tugboats, forklifts and other cargo-handling equipment onto the Tern, a giant cargo ship in Hampton Roads, Va., that is bound for the gulf to prepare ports for the arrival of tanks and other armored equipment.
But the orders to send those heavy ground forces have not been given.
The plan still has some moving parts, senior administration officials said, but it calls for 200,000 to 250,000 troops - several Army and Marine divisions, aircraft carriers and Air Force wings. The only ally expected to contribute significant ground forces is Britain, with several thousand troops expected to participate.
"There were options within the plan, but there has only been one plan," one military officer said. "They have settled on the bulk of it." But the officer said the war plan maintains flexibility over the final deployment of troops in order to cope with a range of Iraqi responses.
The entire troop total may not necessarily be in the region when the offensive begins. The bulk of the force would probably stand ready in case of battlefield setbacks and be poised to occupy parts of Iraq as soon as resistance ends.
Under the plan, the air campaign would be less than the 43 days of the first gulf war, and probably under a month, military officials said.
In the opening hours of the air campaign, Navy and Air Force jets, including B-2 bombers carrying 16 1-ton satellite-guided bombs and B-1 bombers carrying 24 of the same weapons, would attack a range of targets from military headquarters to air defenses. Only 9 percent of the weapons dropped in the gulf war were precision-guided; this time, the figure would be well in excess of 60 percent, allowing more effective bombing with fewer total aircraft, officials say.
The campaign would quickly seek to cut off the country's leadership in Baghdad and a few other important command centers in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government, officials said.
As in Afghanistan, Special Operations forces would infiltrate Iraq early in the campaign to designate targets, to destroy sites holding weapons of mass destruction, and to seize other objectives to prevent Hussein from slowing the U.S. assault by flooding the marshes in southern Iraq or igniting the country's vast oil fields, officials said.
Because the United States wants to help transform Iraq quickly into a liberated nation, the air campaign would be carried out to avoid the major destruction of the gulf war. The campaign would try to avoid destroying important city services and alienating the civilian population, and would also encourage Iraqi troops to defect.
"While we would not want to kill many Iraqi soldiers, if they stupidly fight, we will," a senior military official said.
The "inside-out" approach of attacking centers of power first aims to capitalize on the U.S. military's ability to strike at long distances and to maneuver forces rapidly to neutralize a large target. One important aim would be to disrupt Hussein's ability to order the use of weapons of mass destruction. Another would be to wrest control of Baghdad from Iraqi forces without getting bogged down in block-by-block urban warfare.
But Hussein has proved to be a vicious adversary, and senior administration officials have mounted a campaign to warn Iraq's military commanders that they will be charged with war crimes if they unleash weapons of mass destruction. Last week, Bush hinted at another concern, that the Iraqi government would purposefully sacrifice its population to stain a U.S. military victory with civilian blood.
"The generals in Iraq must understand clearly there will be consequences for their behavior," Bush said Thursday. "Should they choose, if force is necessary, to behave in a way that endangers the lives of their own citizens, as well as citizens in the neighborhood, there will be a consequence."
Bush did not say so specifically, but veteran analysts of the Iraqi government say Hussein is preparing thousands of civilian volunteers to fill "martyrs' brigades" and offer up their lives to bombs and advancing troops even though it is unclear how many would follow through.