U.S. Central Command has told reporters embed­ded with mil­i­tary units in Iraq to shut off their Thuraya satel­lite phones, Reuters says. The phones could be used to zero in on where troops are — they’re equipped with GPS, and have a location-​​finding sys­tem that’s accu­rate to 100 meters. Phones from Thuraya’s military-​​backed rival, Iridium, aren’t as pre­cise.
(via /​.)

The U.S. military’s bat­tle plan for Iraq began as “a what-​​if ses­sion over beers among a hand­ful of Army majors nearly 17 months ago,” the National Journal reports in a must-​​read article.

They were all stu­dents at the Army’s School for Advanced Military Studies, known col­lo­qui­ally as SAMS, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the Army’s most promis­ing plan­ners take a grad­u­ate course in strate­gic cam­paigns. The young majors brain­stormed about a march on Baghdad to dis­pose of Saddam Hussein. In its ear­li­est ver­sions, the plan envi­sioned a 125-​​day cam­paign by a U.S. force nearly twice the size of that now in Iraq.
Maj. Kevin Marcus, a SAMS grad­u­ate now attached to V Corps head­quar­ters, helped develop the plan from a back-​​of-​​an-​​envelope exer­cise into a PowerPoint pre­sen­ta­tion that within days of being fin­ished ended up on the desk of the pres­i­dent of the United States. Though any mil­i­tary cam­paign plan of the size of Iraqi Freedom has many mid­wivesand for this one, they include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld him­self, who prod­ded plan­ners to think out­side the box]Marcus saw it develop from infancy to fruition.
From the very begin­ning, he says, the need to syn­chro­nize a rapid, combined-​​arms cam­paign to seize the ini­tia­tive with “shock and awe“roughly the modern-​​day equiv­a­lent of armored blitzkrieg war­fare­oleapt out at plan­ners deter­mined to limit the oppor­tu­nity for Iraqi forces to employ chem­i­cal weapons, wreak envi­ron­men­tal havoc, or orga­nize a coor­di­nated defense. In bull­fighter par­lance, they wanted to go for a quick kill before the bull learned the trick of the cape…

Changes to Marcus’ plan may have under­mined its effec­tive­ness, how­ever.

Right up until the launch of the war, the plan kept chang­ing… Just days before the war began, U.S. com­man­ders had also seri­ously con­sid­ered chang­ing the bat­tle plan to allow for a strate­gic pause at the key south­ern cross­roads city of An Nasiriya. Such a pause would give U.S. forces time to accept the expected sur­ren­der of the 11th Division of the reg­u­lar Iraqi army that defends that city, and give Republican Guard forces near Baghdad an oppor­tu­nity to capit­u­late as well. The plan was dropped at the last minute…
By far the most dra­matic and dis­rup­tive change to the bat­tle plan, how­ever, was Rumsfeld’s deci­sion last November to slash Central Command’s request for forces. This sin­gle deci­sion essen­tially cut the size of the antic­i­pated assault force in half in the final stages of plan­ning, and it had a rip­ple effect on Central Command and Army plan­ning that con­tin­ues to color oper­a­tions to this day.
Notably, the Pentagon scrapped the Time Phased Force Deployment Data, or “TipFid,” by which regional com­man­ders would iden­tify forces needed for a spe­cific cam­paign, and the indi­vid­ual armed ser­vices would man­age their deploy­ments by order of pri­or­ity. The result has meant that even as Central Command chief Gen. Tommy Franks was launch­ing the war, forces iden­ti­fied for the fight con­tin­ued to pour off ships in Kuwait, and not nec­es­sar­ily in the order of first priority.

For the first time in Gulf War II, the U.S. Air Force has hit down­town Baghdad with “bunker bust­ing” bombs. A B-​​2 stealth bomber dropped two of the 4,700-pound, satellite-​​guided GBU-​​28 muni­tions on a major com­mu­ni­ca­tions tower on the east bank of Tigris River, accord­ing to Ha’Aretz.
The bunker-​​busters were parts of mas­sive coali­tion bomb­ing effort last night. Combat air­craft dropped bombs “just about as fast as we can load them,” Capt. Thomas Parker, aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in the Persian Gulf, told the paper.