“War planning for Iran is now the most pressing scenario,” the newspaper said.
It said the US armed forces are shuffling their planning approach “to adhere to President Obama’s strategic guidance that downplays preparing for conflicts such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and counts on allies to provide additional troops.”
The newspaper said the US Central Command, which plans and runs operations covering the Middle East and Central Asia, “believes it can destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s conventional [i.e., non-nuclear] forces in about three weeks by using air and sea strikes.”
That is a much, much shorter time than most analysts outside the Pentagon have used. Most have talked of months of pounding from the air if ground troops are not inserted into Iran.
Before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Persian Gulf—Iran and Iraq—and the Korean Peninsula had been the focal point of military planning for two decades. Iraq is now gone, and Iran and Korea return as the chief focal points.
The newspaper quoted unnamed defense sources as saying the United States would respond to an invasion of South Korea by North Korea primarily with massive air and sea power, leaving the ground fighting chiefly to the South Korean Army. That would presumably leave the Army and Marine Cops to focus on plans for ground actions in Iran.