Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said there were few good targets in Afghanistan and the Taliban's arms were primitive. U.S. aircraft mounted only about 100 strike missions daily in Afghanistan, one-sixth the number in Yugoslavia and one-fifteenth the number in Operation Desert Strom in 1991.

But Gen. Tommy Franks, the operation commander and initially a JDAM skeptic, found the weapon to be incredibly reliable and easy to employ. With a relatively low level of effort, U.S. forces wound up using an enormous number of guided weapons. That is because heavy bombers can drop large numbers in each strike mission. In Afghanistan, the B-1 and B-52 were the main users of JDAM; the stealthy B-2 only flew six missions, and those were in the first three days.

With the inventory dwindling, U.S. commanders started to look over the horizon at Iraq and ask themselves a crucial question: How many JDAMs would the military need in order to defeat Iraq? They know that U.S. planes would launch many more strikes than the 100 daily that were used in Afghanistan. A Desert Storm-like effort, with over a thousand-strike missions daily, could potentially consume the inventory in less than a month.

These are the questions that Pentagon war planners have been addressing for months. For instance, B-2 bomber advocates have been floating a proposal to use their stealth assets, some flying from Missouri, some from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, to deliver a single "mass precision" strike on Iraq in the opening hours of a war. "The theory is it might shock them into collapse," one B-2 industry expert says. Such an air mission would deliver 256 one-ton JDAMs on 256 separate targets almost simultaneously. They could be joined by hundreds of additional Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles and cruise missiles launched from B-52s-all of them virtually impervious to being shot down by Iraqi air defenses. After an initial blow with hundreds of precision weapons, there would be methodical follow-up strikes by more vulnerable B-1 and B-52 bombers and Air Force and Navy fighters, all in the same 24-hour period. Oh, and by the way, all of those planes are now capable of carrying JDAMs as well. Far more than a thousand JDAMs could be delivered in a single day. And, in theory, that number could be delivered day after day.

Were war to start tomorrow, many are already arguing that the JDAM inventory is a limitation on the United States. That is because though Iraq is a military paper tiger in my opinion, it also represents tens of thousands of potential targets and "aimpoints": air defense and communications sites, factories possibly used for weapons of mass destruction, depots, airbases, military barracks, bridges, etc. If war planners include individual tanks and armored vehicles, which were quite rare in Afghanistan but will be available by the thousands to Iraqi forces, the number of potential targets indeed is quite daunting.

Some bonehead planner could argue that the formula for victory in Iraq is delivering one guided bomb -- JDAM or laser-guided weapon -- onto each individual target vehicle, the traditional, time-consuming strategy of attrition.

In this scenario, the JDAMs would pave the way for U.S. ground forces to trundle into the streets of liberated Iraqi villages and cities. Arguably, it would be necessary to stockpile a huge number of JDAMs in order to make this approach work. Add to that the military's tendency to plan for the "worst case" and you might see why some shake their heads asking why it took the Pentagon until now to just put Boeing on a "wartime" production footing. But such complaints assume that there is some direct relationship between the number of aimpoints, the availability of the new hallowed JDAMs, and victory. Airpower analysts have been making the argument for years that precision targeting make the new weapons vastly more efficient than old "dumb" weapons. The Gulf War Air Power Survey conducted after Operations Desert Storm concluded that it took about 13 "dumb" bombs to destroy as much as one precision weapon. If the precision weapon had been launched from a stealth fighter, each one destroyed as much as 26 dumb bombs. In Afghanistan Northern Alliance commanders were in awe of the ability of JDAMs to hit Taliban targets. One spotter near Bagram is said to have killed 3,000 Taliban soldiers in a single day by calling in strikes. The airpower advocates now argue that overwhelming all-weather high-altitude precision bombing in Iraq could render a war of attrition unnecessary.

Gen. Franks, who will direct any attack on Iraq, is not known for having a nimble mind, and the dominant view in the Pentagon, particularly the Army, is that more U.S. ground forces in the mix ensure the desired outcome on the ground. The feeling is that the Al Qaeda and Taliban leaderships slipped away in Afghanistan because the back door wasn't closed by U.S. boys. Rumsfeld seems not to completely buy this argument. He keeps sending Iraq war plans produced by Franks and his staff back to the drawing boards for not being "imaginative" enough.

Meanwhile, the Air Force and Navy are building up their JDAM and smart weapons inventories in theater both because it is the best weapon currently available in abundance and because they have no idea what strategy Rumsfeld and President Bush will ultimately select. Boeing won't be able to start producing 2,800 JDAMs a month until August 2003. The perception that there may be a limit on the availability of these preferred smart weapons is already influencing planning for a possible attack on Iraq by favoring a traditional approach.