WASHINGTON In the most ambitious effort of its kind, the American military is already at war with Iraq, but it is a conflict being fought with electrons and words in advance of any order by President George W. Bush to loose bullets and bombs. American cyber-warfare experts recently made an e-mail assault against Iraq's political, military and economic leadership, urging them to break with the regime. A second wave of messages has gone to private cell phone numbers of specially selected officials. More than eight million leaflets have been dropped over Iraq, including towns 100 kilometers south of Baghdad, warning Iraqi anti-aircraft missile operators that their bunkers will be destroyed if they track or fire at allied warplanes. A similar blunt notice has gone to Iraqi ground troops: Surrender, and live.
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Military planners at the United States Central Command are using the burgeoning field of information warfare - including electronic attacks on power grids, communications systems and computer networks, as well as deception and psychological operations - to try to break the Iraqi military's will to fight and sway Iraqi public opinion.

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American commanders say these opening psychological salvos have in part influenced Iraqi forces to move or curtail their anti-aircraft fire. "It pays to drop the leaflets," Lieutenant General Michael Moseley, commander of allied air forces in the Gulf, said by telephone from his headquarters in Saudi Arabia. "It sends a direct message to the operator on the gun. It sends a direct message to the chain of command." Deception and psychological operations have been a part of warfare for centuries, and American commanders launched limited information attacks during the 1991 Gulf War and 1999 air campaign over Kosovo. Commanders say the current effort is much broader and more tightly integrated into the main war plan than ever before. "What we're seeing now is the weaving of electronic warfare, psyops and other information warfare through every facet of the plan from our peacetime preparations through execution," said Major General Paul Lebras, head of the Joint Information Operations Center, a secretive military agency in Texas that has dispatched a team of experts to help the Central Command info-warfare team in polishing and then carrying out its battle plan for Iraq.

Just as modern combat relies increasingly on precision strikes at targets carried out from afar, the military is also increasingly aware that there are many ways to take out those targets. An adversary's anti-aircraft radar site, for example, can be destroyed by a bomb or missile launched by a warplane; it can be captured or blown up by ground forces - or the enemy soldiers running the radar can be persuaded to shut down the system and go home. "We are trying very hard to be empathetic with the Iraqi military," said a senior American information warfare official. "We understand their situation. The same for the Iraqi population. We wish them no harm. We will take great pains to make those people understand that they should stay away from military equipment."

» Cyber-warfare in Iraq already has broken out