Press Briefing 27 FEB 91

File: doc53_07.txt
Page: 07
Total Pages: 17

-~ nci:cdiblc actr of br~vt:~ y 9c~3 rig 0f ~`:.r-r~cc,n wt:t 0.! 6 :-`~~i 6 ioi ) o~ J'hot donn
~e had contact with him, he 1ad a broken leg on the ground. Two hClicopters fro.~ the
101st, they didn't have to do it, but they went in to try ap.d pull that Pilot out.
One of them was shot down, and we're still in the procers of working throug~ that.
But that's the kind of thing that's going On out on that battlefield ri9ht now
is not a Nintendo game -- it is a tough battlefield where people are risking their
lives at all times. There are great heroes out there, and we ought to all be very,
very proud of theni.

That's the campaign to date. Tha~'s tte strd-tc(jy to date. I'd now be very
happy to take any <~estions anyone mi9ht have.

0: ~ want to go back to the air war. The chart you showed there with the
attrition rates of the various forces was almost the exact reverse of what most Of us
thought was happening. It showed the front line troops attritted to ~5 percent or
more, and the Republican Guard, which a lot of public focus was on when we were
covering the air war, attritted less than 75. Why is that? How did it come to pass?
A: Let me tell you bow we did this. We started off, of Course, against the
strategic targets. I briefed you on that before. At the same time, we were hitting
the Republican Guard. But the Republican Cuard, you must remember, is a mechanized
armor force for the ~ost~part, that is very, very well dug in, and very, Very Well
spread out. So the initial sLages of the game, we were hittjng the Republican Guard
heavily, but we were hitting them with strategic~type b6mbers rather than pinpoint
precision bombers.

For lack of a better word, what happened is the air campaign shifted from the
strategic phase in~o the theater. ~e knew all along that this was the important
area. ~he nightmare scenario for all of us would have been to go through, get hung
up in this breach right here, and then have the enemy artillery rain chemical Weapons
down on troops that were ~n a gaggle in the breach right there. That was the
nightmare scenario. So one of the things that we felt we must have established is an
absolute, as ~jch destruction as we could possibly get, of the artillery, the direct
support artillery1 that would be firing on that wire, That's why we shifteU it in
the very latter days, we absolutely punished this area very heavily because that was
the first challenge. Once we got through this and were moving, then it's a different
war. Then we're fi9htin9 our kind of war. Before we get through that, we're
fighting their kind of war, and that's what we didn't want to have to do.

At tbe same time, we continued to attrit the Republjcan Guard and that's why I
would tell you that, again, the figures we're giving you are conservative, they
always have been conservative. But we promised you at the outset we weren't going to
give you anything inflated, we were going to give you the best we had.

0: He seems to have about 500-600 tanks left out of more than 4,000, as )ust
an example. I wonder if in an overview, despite these enormously illustrative
pictures, you could say what's left of the Iraqi Army in terms of ho. long could it
be bfore he could ever be a regional threat, or a threat to t~e region again?
A: There's not enough left at all for him to be a regional t~reat to the
region, an offensive regional threat. As you know, he has a very large army, but
most of Lhe army that is left north of the Tigris/Euphrates Vallev is an infantry
army, it's not an armored army, it's not an arnored hea~y army, which means it really
an offensive army. So it do~sn't have enough left, un~ess someone chooses to
rearm them in the future.