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No plan B - so could the US ever learn to live with Iran in the nuclear club?
The Bush administration has yet to decide on a clear plan B for Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to persuade Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. But military planning is progressing to fill that policy vacuum and may create a momentum of its own, former administration officials and political observers said yesterday.
After the fall of Baghdad three years ago, US marines completed an analysis for an amphibious assault on a radical, fictitious Middle Eastern theocracy called Karona, a thinly disguised version of Iran, according to William Arkin, a former army intelligence officer who writes on military affairs for Washington Post online.
In parallel with the marines' plan, the Pentagon has ordered US central command to conduct an analysis of a fullscale war with Iran in the "near term".
In July 2004, US and British army planners met at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to play a war game codenamed Hotspur 2004, fictitiously set in 2015 in the Caspian Sea, in which a British medium-weight brigade operated as part of a US-led force.
Most of the plans being worked on focus on suspected underground facilities scattered around Iran where Tehran is believed to be building a covert nuclear weapons programme. Because those bunkers are thought to be built of thick concrete and buried deep below the surface, those plans also include nuclear options.
Mr Arkin wrote: "To think today that the gamers put nukes away is naive, and to think that nuclear weapons don't play a role in the Bush administration's strategy is wildly wrong."
The plans are being honed by US strategic command in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of Global Strike, a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with suspected weapons of mass destruction held by "rogue states" such as Iran and North Korea.
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1754378,00.html
In parallel with the marines' plan, the Pentagon has ordered US central command to conduct an analysis of a fullscale war with Iran in the "near term".
In July 2004, US and British army planners met at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to play a war game codenamed Hotspur 2004, fictitiously set in 2015 in the Caspian Sea, in which a British medium-weight brigade operated as part of a US-led force.
Most of the plans being worked on focus on suspected underground facilities scattered around Iran where Tehran is believed to be building a covert nuclear weapons programme. Because those bunkers are thought to be built of thick concrete and buried deep below the surface, those plans also include nuclear options.
Mr Arkin wrote: "To think today that the gamers put nukes away is naive, and to think that nuclear weapons don't play a role in the Bush administration's strategy is wildly wrong."
The plans are being honed by US strategic command in Omaha, Nebraska, as part of Global Strike, a pre-emptive strategy for dealing with suspected weapons of mass destruction held by "rogue states" such as Iran and North Korea.
More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1754378,00.html
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WASHINGTON -- Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney calls it the "Big George" scenario.
According to the man who helped plan the first air war against Saddam in 1991, U.S. aircraft, armed with conventional bunker-buster bombs, would be more than enough to wipe out Iran's nuclear and missile facilities, and cripple its ability to command and control its military forces.
McInerney believes that U.S. air power is so massive, precise, and stealthy, it can effectively disarm Iran with just limited assistance from covert operators on the ground whose task would be to light up enemy targets.
In his "Big George" scenario, the United States would attack 1,000 targets in Iran. Fifteen B2 stealth bombers based in the United States and another 45 F117s and F-22s based in the region would carry out the initial waves of the attack, crippling Iran's long-range radar and strategic air defenses.
Massive, additional waves of carrier-based F-18s, as well as F-15s and F-16s launching from ground bases in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, and Bahrain, would take out Iran's known nuclear and missile sites.
"Big George" would also target command and control facilities – Revolutionary Guards command centers, key clerics, and other regime-sensitive sites – in the hope of triggering a revolt against the clerical regime by opposition groups inside Iran.
The massive strike scenario could be carried out in just two days, McInerney told an audience of intelligence specialists recently in Washington. "We must destroy and damage Iran's nuclear capability for at least five years," McInerney said.
If the president decided to focus solely on Iran's nuclear and missile sites, McInerney proposed a Plan B version he called "Big Rummy."
"Big Rummy" would be executed in a single night, and would concentrate on 500 "aim points." It would require greater assistance from covert operators if the administration's goal was to provoke regime collapse, McInerney added. But in a report appearing in the New Yorker, left-wing columnist Seymour Hersh claims that President Bush is so filled with doubt over the Pentagon's conventional capabilities that he asked military planners to consider using nuclear weapons against Iran.
Hersh claimed that his sources in the defense and intelligence establishment suggested the military could use the B61-11 warhead. But Hersh's scenario, based on old technology, packs more political shock value than actual military punch.
The first B61 warhead, now designated B61-1, entered the U.S. strategic stockpile in 1968, according to the Department of Energy.
A reconfigured B61, designated B61-7, was the first U.S. strategic nuclear weapon to be equipped with a "hardened ground-penetrator nose." It was introduced into the stockpile in 1985 and had a selectable yield of 10 to about 340 kilotons, according to a report by the anti-nuclear Los Alamos Study Group. The report can be viewed at http://www.brookings.edu/fp/projects/nucwcost/lasg.htm.