>But you still have had a country
>overrun and its capital city besieged in less than a week-- the casualties
>from city fighting will no doubt be gruesome and the political costs of
>victory astronomical, but I wouldn't overdo it.
Financial Times - March 25, 2003
WAR IN IRAQ MILITARY: Generals deny advance is too fast, too far By Peter Spiegel in Washington
Towards the end of 1942, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was rushing towards Cairo, pushing his Afrika Corps over hundreds of miles of desert with what was, for the time, astounding speed. But as he approached the small coastal town of El Alamein, his supply lines ran for more than 1,000 miles and were hopelessly exposed, forcing him to conserve fuel and ammunition.
Out-gunned and out-planned by the new commander of the British 8th Army, General Bernard Montgomery - and with his supplies constantly attacked on their way across the Mediterranean - Rommel was pushed back and eventually forced out of North Africa, never to return.
As the US army's 3rd Infantry Division rushes across a similarly barren desert towards another historic Arab capital 60 years later, the concerns that even the most optimistic military analysts have raised about the Iraqi war plan are coming to the surface, with strange echoes of North Africa, 1942: Is the advance too fast? Are the supply lines too exposed? Have the invaders gone in with sufficient ground power?
Clearly the parallels stop there. The battered and rusting Iraqi forces cannot compare to Monty's 8th army, and unlike the battle of El Alamein, the eventual result of Operation Iraqi Freedom is in little doubt.
But as the 3rd Infantry reaches the outskirts of Baghdad and prepares for its first engagement with the Medina Division of Iraq's elite Republican Guard, the war plan put together by General Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command, and his boss, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will come under its most intense test.
For months, the debate inside the Pentagon and among the influential corps of retired officers has been whether the invasion should look like the 1991 Gulf war, with four or five heavy divisions marching their way deliberately out of Kuwait, or more like last year's Afghan campaign, replete with swift-moving, lightly armoured infantry, heavy air support, and special operations forces operating throughout the country.
Under the prodding of Mr Rumsfeld, the plan has looked much more like the latter, with only one heavy US division currently on the ground. The result has been a lightning advance on Baghdad, but also a rear that is somewhat exposed, leaving US marines - who are armed with far fewer tanks - to secure the main population points of Basra and Nasiriya. Without the overwhelming force of a full army division to help them, the marines have found themselves with some unexpectedly tough fighting and mounting casualties. Places such as Umm Qasr and Nasiriya, once thought to be secured, suddenly were not.
The stiff resistance has also called into question the decision to launch the ground invasion before the full brunt of the "shock and awe" air campaign had begun.
Centcom officers have identified 50,000 targets inside Iraq, an extremely difficult number to hit even if warplanes were given two or three days to "prepare the battlefield" before the ground attack, as originally envisaged.
Indeed, the first air strikes of the campaign concentrated on so-called "leadership targets", and only in recent days has it shifted to "softening" Republican Guard units. Without more heavy guns on the ground, the US has had to rely on air strikes to batter enemy positions before they engage.
US commanders have deny moving too fast or with a force too light. "We certainly have sufficient force," said General John Abaziad, deputy Cencom commander. "There's probably not been a more powerful military force ever put together on the planet Earth than this one."