Pentagon assessment of Desert Fox: 'Job extremely well done'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- After an air bombardment that lasted 70 hours over four nights, Iraq's military capabilities have been significantly "degraded" and "diminished," according to a preliminary Pentagon assessment of Operation Desert Fox.

"We gave our forces a very difficult job to do ... and they did it with great skill," Defense Secretary William Cohen said at a briefing shortly after President Bill Clinton announced an end to the air campaign.

"We are satisfied the mission has been successfully accomplished," he said.

"A job extremely well done," said Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Cohen said there were no U.S. or British casualties during the operation. However, four people died in a pre-strike training accident on board the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise.

Although a more detailed assessment won't be made public until Monday, Cohen and Shelton outlined some results of the bombing campaign:

• About 100 targets were hit, including seven or eight of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's "presidential sites" and the Baghdad headquarters of his Baath party.

• 650 strike and strike-support sorties were carried out by U.S. and British aircraft.

• About 415 Tomahawk and cruise missiles were fired.

• Four divisions of Iraq's elite Republican Guard were targeted, and significant damage was done to their barracks and other facilities.

• A plant believed to have been used by Iraq to manufacture missiles was destroyed, and Cohen said Iraq's capacity to deliver weapons of mass destruction was compromised.

Cohen insisted the strikes were planned to minimize civilian casualties, although he conceded that there was possibly collateral damage harming civilians.

"Our goal was to weaken Iraq's military power, not to hurt the Iraqi people," Cohen said. He said Iraq will not be able to repair its military structure quickly because of international sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.

Shelton said the United States "will maintain a significant capability" in the Persian Gulf region to contain the Hussein regime. And, Cohen said, "We are prepared" to carry out additional airstrikes if the Iraqis try to re-establish a capacity to build weapons of mass destruction.

At an earlier briefing Saturday, Pentagon officials spent much of their time explaining how damage assessors discern between light, moderate and severe damage, and when they declare a facility destroyed.

"When the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed," Cohen said by way of illustration, "the initial photographs ... described that damage as being moderate."

Assessments, both Cohen and Shelton said, are initially made conservatively, and changed as better information becomes available.

"We will have refinements of the photographs in the next few days," Cohen said. "We do not want to have misconceptions" about the damage inflicted on Iraqi facilities.

The last plane returned from mission to USS Enterprise Saturday

Among the targets attacked by American and British airstrikes were 32 air defense system targets, 20 command and control facilities, 18 security facilities, 11 industry facilities, nine Republican Guard facilities, six airfields, and one economic facility, according to the Pentagon.

The attacks destroyed seven command and control facilities, one air defense system and two security facilities, the Pentagon said.

The aim, said Rear Adm. Thomas Wilson, a senior official on the Pentagon's Joint Staff, was to render the facilities unusable.

"We don't aim at every building in a facility," he said. "We aim for key parts that we think are most important."

Cohen said the military attacks didn't focus on the "dual purpose" facilities -- those that could serve a civilian as well as a military purpose.

"We did not target those facilities which are dual-use capable because of the concern for damage to innocent civilians," he said. "We are not going to engage in acts which could result in the deaths of many, many innocent people."

For that reason, Cohen conceded the possibility that some of Iraq's facilities for making weapons of mass destruction -- hidden in hospitals or other facilities -- could have survived the strikes. But he said the strikes crippled Iraq's ability to use those weapons on neighboring countries.