ASHINGTON, Sept. 20 — The Pentagon has completed and delivered to President Bush a highly detailed set of military options for attacking Iraq, Pentagon and White House officials said today.
The commander of forces in the Persian Gulf region, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, presented the war-planning document to Mr. Bush in early September, just days before the president spoke to the United Nations on Sept. 12 and demanded that it authorize military action against Saddam Hussein. In his speech, Mr. Bush made clear that the United States was prepared to act unilaterally.
The highly classified plans, which were presented to the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the president was briefed, are the most specific plans the military has presented to Mr. Bush so far.
"The president has options now, and he has not made any decisions," Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, said in an interview today. He noted that Mr. Bush had asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in August to send him options that were more concrete than earlier concepts.
Senior administration officials declined to comment on the details of the war document, which will continue to be polished while Mr. Bush decides whether to order an offensive. In a brief interview this week, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would not discuss the war-planning process. Senior Pentagon officials said he had demanded more creative options from his field commanders.
Officials said, however, that any attack would begin with a lengthy air campaign led by B-2 bombers armed with 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs to knock out Iraqi command and control headquarters and air defenses. They said a principal goal of the aerial bombardment would be to sever most communications from Baghdad and isolate Saddam Hussein from his commanders in the rest of the country.
At the same time, according to officials knowledgeable about the planning, tens of thousands of marines and soldiers would stage out of Kuwait and possibly other countries in the region, officials said.
Officials familiar with the war-planning document say its contents include the number of ground troops, combat aircraft and aircraft carrier battle groups that would be needed. It also contains detailed sequencing for the use of air, land, naval and Special Operations forces to attack thousands of Iraqi targets, from air-defense sites to command-and-control headquarters to fielded forces.
"We're very comfortable with the state of planning right now," a senior Pentagon official said.
Until recently, the White House said Mr. Bush had "no war plan on his desk." But today, Mr. Fleischer said, "I am not saying there is no plan on his desk."
Asked about how to suppress Iraq's capability to use chemical or biological weapons on American troops or Israel, Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that "one of the things you'd think about doing would be attacking his delivery means or his weapons of mass destruction."
It is an issue, General Myers said with some understatement, "that General Franks would pay a lot of attention to."
The Pentagon regards January or February as the most suitable for any ground attack because the short winter days play to the American edge in night-fighting and the cooler temperatures ease discomfort for troops dressed in chemical warfare gear. Because of that, Mr. Bush's top national security advisers decided this summer that their diplomatic and military strategies must be worked out simultaneously.
So since July, General Myers or his deputy, Gen. Peter Pace, have attended a series of classified meetings at the White House with Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.
The themes of Mr. Bush's speech to the United Nations were first conceived in those sessions, and military options were also discussed.
The meetings have been considered so sensitive that the word Iraq never appeared on the private schedules of those attending. Instead, the sessions have been listed under the phrase "Regional Strategies Meeting." They have usually been run by Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser and one of the principal architects of the doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against nations with weapons of mass destruction.
A participant in the meetings said the goal was to "explore all the elements — regime change, what military options there might be, how the diplomatic process fits in."
The principals did not examine individual military strategies. "We would look at the question of how might you have regime change thought of as liberation rather than occupation?" the participant said. "That was a question put before the principals, and then there would be a paper done on it."
But by August, from his ranch, Mr. Bush asked for specific military options. Those were settled on at the White House in early September, shortly after he had returned to Washington.
Much planning remains both at the Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and at other military commands. That includes the Special Operations Command, whose highly specialized counterterrorism and counterproliferation troops, including the Army unit known as Delta Force, would have responsibility for hunting down storage and production sites for Iraq's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
Special military assessment teams throughout the armed services have been assigned to study specific problems, ranging from tracking and destroying Iraq's mobile Scud missiles to assessing how to separate Iraq's security forces from the regular Iraqi army. The army may be more willing than the security forces to turn against the Iraqi leader after several days of punishing American airstrikes.
But as the administration presses the United Nations and Congress for resolutions supporting the use of force against Iraq, Mr. Bush now has a highly refined set of options to topple Mr. Hussein and eliminate Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction, officials said.
The plans represent weeks of discussions among Mr. Rumsfeld, General Myers, General Franks and other top military and national security officials. Mr. Rumsfeld and General Franks usually speak at least twice a day by telephone or secure videoconference.
Mr. Bush had received at least three briefings from General Franks on the broad outlines, or "concept of operations," for a possible attack against Iraq. The most recent of these briefings was on Aug. 5, according to the White House.
In these meetings, General Franks reviewed options including one in which a military operation using about 250,000 troops, with an initial invasion force of fewer than 100,000 troops and a larger force in reserve.
In early July, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers sent General Franks a classified written directive about five pages long, spelling out in detail what the war plan should contain: the role of allies, how to address Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, how to stabilize the country after a war; all issues underlying the primary goal: deposing Mr. Hussein.
Pentagon officials said the written planning order helped crystalize the work of planners at Central Command, and other commands that were working on elements of the war effort. But the document also raised new questions and issues, and officials said General Franks asked for an extension until early September to work through the detailed underpinnings of the detailed options, Pentagon officials said.
"Up to then, Franks was going on verbal guidance," said one senior officer who reviewed the planning order. "This was a well-written directive that would drive detailed planning."
