Opening with A Bang

The first Gulf War was as relentless and predictable as the tides--waves of warplanes, followed by thousands of U.S. troops, destroyed much of the Iraqi military. The second Gulf War, if it comes, would be more like the Big Bang--hundreds of towering explosions all across Iraq all at the same time. The Pentagon buzz word for this is simultaneity. The plan would have unprecedented numbers of smart, satellite-guided bombs attack a multitude of targets over a great sweep of territory, swiftly followed by U.S. troops seizing key objectives.

Call it the doctrine of inevitability. The U.S. military wants to capture 75% of Iraq, a country the size of California, in the war's first week and convince the Iraqi military that resistance is futile. The Pentagon is betting that most of Iraq's 400,000 troops would not fight. The diehards--led by the 20,000 members of the Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, which would be suspected of hiding banned weapons--would be expected to hole up in greater Baghdad, which includes Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles north of the capital. The Pentagon believes that the Iraqi dictator's 24-year reign would come to an end, one way or another, somewhere in that vicinity.

"Our troops in the field are trained; they're ready; they are capable," Army General Tommy Franks said last week after briefing President Bush on the war plan. Pentagon planners suggest that more targets in Baghdad would be hit in the first 24 hours of Gulf War II than were hit in all 43 days of the first war. The U.S. military's goal would be to deliver "such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on that the end is inevitable," Air Force General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told TIME last week.

Unlike the first Gulf War, in which fewer than 10% of the bombs were smart, this time close to 80% would be. And unlike the laser-guided bombs of 12 years ago, these satellite-guided weapons, known as joint direct-attack munitions (JDAMS), should be able to find their targets automatically, unimpeded by smoke or bad weather. The top targets of those JDAMS would be the military sites--command posts and critical garrisons belonging to the Republican Guard--that keep Saddam in power and the symbolic sites, like his presidential palaces, that reflect that power. "It will be highly kinetic," an Air Force planner says with grim understatement.

NOVEL STRATEGY last fall General John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer, previewed this new kind of war for other senior officers. The old way of war, he said, "was to seize terrain, overmatch adversaries and control populations." The dearth of intelligence on the enemy's whereabouts required such a measured approach. That's no longer the case. "We have unparalleled situational awareness to understand what an enemy is doing," Keane said. "In a sense, we have an unblinking eye over the enemy formation." That near omniscience plus smart weapons, U.S. officers say, would enable the U.S. to take out lots of enemy positions across vast distances. "We want to go to these objectives as near simultaneous as we can," he said. Keane's views are watched closely inside the Pentagon. He is a favorite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and is slated to become the Army's top officer in four months.