"It is not helpful to have those kind of comments come out when we've got troops in combat, because, first of all, they're false," said Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"They're absolutely wrong, they bear no resemblance to the truth, and it's just harmful to our troops that are out there fighting very bravely, very courageously," he said as Rumsfeld looked on at a Pentagon news conference.

The controversy over the war plans came as US warplanes and ground forces south of Baghdad pounded Republican Guard divisions, which Myers said have been reinforced with a Republican Guard division from the north.

Myers said at least two of the five Republican Guard divisions defending the city have been "degraded" by more than 50 percent. He said they have dispersed in defensive positions but have not retreated.

"I think there's bigger pushes that will be under way as soon as we're ready," he said.

Unnamed army officials, as well as retired generals, have been quoted in a series of US newspaper reports as saying that the US force sent into Iraq was insufficient because of Rumsfeld's insistence on a smaller ground force and his meddling with the sequence of deployments.

"He wanted to fight this war on the cheap," an unnamed colonel in Iraq was quoted by the New York Times as saying in the latest such report Tuesday. "He got what he wanted."

A leading critic of the decision to go to war with just a single armored division in the field has been retired army general Barry McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Gulf War.

"The 'rolling start' concept of the attack dictated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has put us in a temporarily risky position," he wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal under the headline "A Time To Fight."

"We face a war of maneuver in the coming days to destroy five Iraqi armor divisions with only one U.S. armored unit (the Third Mechanized Infantry) supported by the modest armor forces of the First Marine Division and the Apache attack helicopters of the 101st Airborne," he wrote.

"We will succeed in this battle because of the bravery and skill of our soldiers and Marines combined with the ferocious lethality of the air power we will bring to bear on the enemy force," he said.

Rumsfeld and Myers said Army General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces, devised the war plan and structured the flow of forces to support both a campaign of diplomatic pressure on Iraq and to preserve tactical surprise.

"We wanted to deploy a sufficient force, but not the kind of force that would make it look like diplomacy didn't have a chance to work," Myers said.

By launching the ground war before the air war, Franks gained the surprise he needed to seize the oilfields in the south, suppress feared Scud attacks in the west, and send forces more than 200 miles inside Iraq in 36 hours, Myers said.

Rumsfeld said the commanders of the army, navy, air force and marine forces beneath Franks signed off on the plan, as had all six members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The defense secretary said the plan was hammered out over six months but that he had demanded only that the orginal plan be revamped.

"It was pulled off the shelf, it was old and stale," he said. "Everyone who looked at it ... said 'no way. That's not going to work. Let's do one."

"There haven't been delays in any major thing," said Rumsfeld. Myers said any delay in the deployment of forces was because of transportation problems, not because Rumsfeld was not signing off on the orders.

Elements of the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment based in Fort Polk, Louisiana was deployed over the weekend to Iraq on an accelerated schedule after US forces encountered persistent attacks on its supply lines, officials said.

The regiment, which uses armored Humvees and Kiowa reconnaissance helicopters, specializes in scouting missions and supply line protection.

"Are we going to adjust? You bet. Are we light on our feet? Can we adjust? Yes. Can they (the Iraqis) adjust? They try, but it's futile. OK?" said Myers.

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