The plan, approved in recent weeks by Mr. Bush well before the Security Council's unanimous vote on Friday to disarm Iraq, calls for massing 200,000 to 250,000 troops for attack by air, land and sea. The offensive would probably begin with a "rolling start" of substantially fewer forces, Pentagon and military officials say.
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The military plan calls for the quick capture of land within Iraq, which would be used as bases to funnel American forces deeper into the country. That approach is intended to relieve some of the diplomatic pressure created by massing troops and initiating attacks from neighboring nations, including Saudi Arabia.
Under the plan, United States and coalition forces could operate out of such forward bases in northern, western and southern Iraq, building on lessons learned in Afghanistan, where the military seized a similar outpost south of Kandahar.
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The Army is loading tugboats, forklifts and other cargo-handling equipment onto the Tern, a giant cargo ship in Hampton Roads, Va., that is bound for the gulf to prepare ports for the arrival of tanks and other armored equipment.
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Heavy equipment recently deployed to the gulf region will remain while inspections get underway, officials said. But troops and ships sent for exercises or regular duty might rotate with fresh forces if it appeared that the inspections were moving ahead without obstruction.
The plan still has some moving parts, senior administration officials said, but it calls for 200,000 to 250,000 troops - several Army and Marine divisions, aircraft carriers and Air Force wings. The only ally expected to contribute significant ground forces is Britain, with several thousand troops expected to participate.
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The entire troop total may not necessarily be in the region when the offensive begins. The bulk of the force would probably stand ready in case of battlefield setbacks and be poised to occupy parts of Iraq as soon as resistance ends.
Under the plan, the air campaign would be less than the 43 days of the first gulf war, and probably under a month, military officials said.
In the opening hours of the air campaign, Navy and Air Force jets, including B-2 bombers carrying 16 one-ton satellite-guided bombs and B-1 bombers carrying 24 of the same weapons, would attack a range of targets from military headquarters to air defenses. Only 9 percent of the weapons dropped in the gulf war were precision-guided; this time, the figure would be well in excess of 60 percent, allowing more effective bombing with fewer total aircraft, officials say.
The campaign would quickly seek to cut off the country's leadership in Baghdad and a few other important command centers in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government, officials said.
As in Afghanistan, Special Operations forces would infiltrate Iraq early in the campaign to designate targets, to destroy sites holding weapons of mass destruction, and to seize other objectives to prevent Mr. Hussein from slowing the American assault by flooding the marshes in southern Iraq or igniting the country's vast oil fields, officials said.
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"While we would not want to kill many Iraqi soldiers, if they stupidly fight, we will," a senior military official said.
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