U.S. Jets Now Aiming at Dug-In Iraq Soldiers : Strategy: After battering the command network, air attacks are to focus on troop concentrations.

By RUDY ABRAMSON and MELISSA HEALY

Jan. 20, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON — It has already become a routine.

Early every morning, the office of Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, the U.S. Air Force commander in Saudi Arabia, issues a computerized document half the size of the Orange County phone book. It is by all odds the most compelling reading in the kingdom.

With unerring government instinct for the prosaic, it is entitled the daily ATO, the Air Tasking Order. It’s really a hit list, a catalogue, a shoppers guide to Iraqi assets marked for destruction in the following 24 hours.

On the fourth day of the air campaign against Saddam Hussein, Horner’s select readers could discern a shift in the ATO plot. More targets now belong to planes such as the A-10 Warthog, a low-flying tank killer with an armored cockpit to protect its pilot from ground fire.

After an opening assault bestowing credibility on the long-maligned term “surgical strike,” air raids are about to be turned more heavily on Iraqi troop concentrations, according to military sources. With Saddam Hussein’s command and control network evidently in shambles, the killing is about to begin.

The unexpected is to be expected in war, and it can force changes in the best of plans. Thus far, however, in spite of the Scud missile attacks on Israel, the elusiveness of their mobile launchers and the hiding of the Iraqi air force, the war in the desert has been strikingly methodical.

And it has been shaped by one central principle: keeping American casualties to an absolute minimum. The goal of limiting casualties, not a timetable, will now determine how the coming weeks will unfold, sources said Saturday.

“Their air defense system is no longer effective,” Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff Organization, told reporters at the Pentagon on Saturday. “We have the ability to gain and maintain air superiority in any sector of Iraq in which we plan to operate.”

Military analysts now expect the United States’ 2,000-sortie-a-day rampage to continue for a week, and perhaps substantially longer, before a decision is made to extend it or commit ground forces to action against Iraqi tanks dug in across the border.

“We have a plan, and it’s predicated on the basis of creating battlefield conditions favorable to U.S. ground forces, as well as destroying his (the enemy’s) strategic and offensive capabilities,” said a senior Pentagon official. “We’re sort of on automatic pilot in a sense. We’re following our plan, preparing our logistics system and moving our ground people into place to go into Kuwait and Iraq if they have to.

“But it’s boring, ugly-sister kind of work, and we wouldn’t want to go until we’re ready. There’s nobody chomping at the bit to start early.”

The point was reinforced in Saudi Arabia on Saturday by Maj. Gen. Robert Johnston, chief of staff of the U.S. Marine Corps Central Command.

“This is going to be a long campaign, if need be,” he told reporters. “It will be done with great caution and very professionally, and with the objective of minimizing our friendly casualties. I think it would be very speculative for me to say . . . when the (ground) campaign starts, and how far we would have to go.”

Although the focus will now be upon battering the elite 150,000-man Republican Guard, which makes up the backbone of the Iraqi army, substantial numbers of American planes are expected to continue disrupting Iraqi command and control networks by revisiting the targets of the first days, keep up the hunt for Scud missile launchers in the western Iraqi desert and keep Saddam Hussein’s air force pinned in its revetments.

“I don’t believe the Iraqi air force is to be regarded as any kind of a serious threat,” said military analyst Jeffrey Record.

Of the nearly 700 Iraqi planes surviving, less than 100 are believed to be modern MIGs or Mirage jets with capabilities comparable to the fighters and fighter bombers flown by the U.N. coalition. With cluster bombs designed to crater runways, Record said, it should take relatively few sorties to keep Iraqi runways unusable.

Although Scud missile attacks have sent tensions soaring and brought Israel face to face with a decision on retaliation, sources said it would take all-out Israeli intervention to impact the methodical strategy being pursued against Iraqi forces.

From a purely military perspective, Israeli raids might even be helpful in the search-and-destroy campaign against the mobile Scuds, but heading off Israeli retaliation of any sort has evidently been the most urgent task before President Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III since hostilities began.

According to informed sources, as many as 500 to 800 launchable missiles remain in the Iraqi inventory, and Gen. Kelly confessed Saturday that finding the hidden mobile launchers has proven to be exceedingly difficult.

Still, analysts say it is not unreasonable to expect Scud forces to be reduced from a threat to an irritant.

In Saudi Arabia, Gen. Johnston took it as evidence of allied progress that the Scud launches declined from eight Friday to three on Saturday.

Members of Congress were advised Saturday not to expect imminent action from U.S. ground forces, which are still conducting live-fire training exercises in northern Saudi Arabia in preparation for a move against entrenched Iraqi armor. The word, said California Rep. Norman Mineta (D-San Jose), is that the current bombing phase can be expected to continue for “some time.”

Indeed, assertions that allied planes can now roam Iraq at will have produced hope in some quarters that the air campaign might eventually succeed in driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait or produce massive defection by ordinary troops after the destruction of the Republican Guard.

“There is the possibility of a campaign cheap in casualties and as short as two weeks,” military analyst Edward Luttwak wrote Saturday, if planners can resist the temptation to involve all forces sent to the war zone and to avoid jumping at a diplomatic solution.

But while officials reassert their commitment to continue with their battle plan chapter and verse, they insist there would be no hesitation to bring the Army and Marine ground combat units home without firing a shot if that became possible.