Opening with A Bang

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The war would begin with a regime-shattering thunderclap. "It's hard to imagine that Saddam could have any idea of what he's in store for," Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told TIME last week. "There's no way he can survive," says Levin, who recently visited U.S. forces in the region. "It's too massive."

The Iraqi military would stand largely defenseless before this onslaught. U.S. tanks could destroy Iraqi tanks before the Iraqi tanks could even detect the American armor. B-2 bombers fly beyond the reach of Iraqi guns, and invading U.S. troops should be able to drive around flaming, oil-filled ditches or other defensive measures; U.S. troops call them speed bumps. If the Iraqis elect to stand and fight, the Pentagon fears, they would unleash hidden stores of chemical and biological weapons on advancing U.S. troops.

The most recent wars in which the U.S. fought--the Gulf War, the Balkans, Vietnam--were stop-and-go affairs with lots of pauses. They were designed to compel action--get out of Kuwait, out of Kosovo, out of South Vietnam--not to decapitate a government. That would be the principal goal of a second Gulf War. Actually, Gulf War II would look less like the first Gulf War than 1989's U.S. invasion of Panama, a country the size of South Carolina (and one-fifth the size of Iraq). In that operation, some 24,000 U.S. troops pounced on 27 different objectives across the country within the first 24 hours. Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega eluded capture for 14 days, but the war was essentially over in a day. Enlarging the Panamanian operation to cover a nation the size of Iraq would not have been possible before recent advances in smart bombs, sensors, stealth technology and remotely operated drones.

U.S. troops would, in Pentagonspeak, vertically envelop Iraq--drop behind enemy lines via parachute and chopper--to seize key targets "as rapidly as possible," a senior Central Command officer says. That's why the war plan features overlapping ground and air campaigns, nothing like 1991's deliberate 39-day air-only battle followed by a 100-hour ground war.

HIT FIRST--AND HARDER The Pentagon expects the "shock and awe" of thousands of JDAMS being dropped from B-2 bombers (neither of which existed at the time of the first Gulf War), combined with the ground deployments, to lead to mass Iraqi surrenders. If Saddam's troops needed further persuasion, the U.S. Air Force might push satellite-guided massive ordnance air-burst bombs (MOABs) out of the rear of its C130 cargo planes. These huge, 21,000-lb. bombs pack the power of a small nuclear weapon, complete with mushroom cloud, and trump the 15,000-lb. "daisy cutters" used in Vietnam and Afghanistan. (Air Force types prefer to call MOABs the mother of all bombs.) "We want to create a feeling of absolute hopelessness in the Iraqi military," says Harlan Ullman, a proponent of the shock-and-awe strategy and a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.