Beach landings, commando raids deep into enemy territory and plans for mass paratrooper assaults behind the lines. The opening days of the latest war in the Gulf are reminiscent of another, more daring era in military tactics, World War II.
After two decades of post-Vietnam caution, during which US forces have only gone to war on their own, overwhelming terms, this amounts to a transformation. In the last Gulf war, 12 years ago, the US-led force pulverized the Iraqi military with five weeks of air bombardment before advancing across a broad front in massed armored columns and half a million troops.
That war was the ultimate realization of the Powell doctrine, named after Colin Powell, former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and current secretary of state. He is not having a good week.
Just as his diplomatic efforts ran into a dead end, his greatest legacy at the Pentagon was swept aside on the beaches of the Faw peninsula.
"Shock and awe" is still clearly on the agenda, with B-52s in the air friday night and officials talking about a "big blast" ahead, but in this war it has not been the strategy of first choice.
That strategy has been to hit the core of the regime with "decapitation strikes" while prodding its perimeter to test its will to fight, with the outside expectation that the whole structure might implode.
While the opening blows of the 1991 Gulf War were aimed at killing as many Iraqi soldiers as possible, obliterating them in their camps as they stood waiting in the sand, the first moves of this conflict have been designed to give them a chance to live.
They have been given repeated offers to surrender, with millions of air-dropped leaflets, radio broadcasts on hijacked frequencies and even secret contacts through the friends and families of individual officers. The discreet e-mail to the enemy general has become a new weapon of war.
Even as US and British troops were rolling across the Iraq-Kuwait border, the US defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was still insisting that there was "no need for a broader conflict."
British sources say this is the main reason why the promised "shock and awe" air strikes did not materialize at the start of the campaign. The aim of keeping as much of Iraq's infrastructure in place -- as well as the need to avoid civilian casualties -- was the main reason why ground troops were sent in so quickly, the British sources say.
However, military planning has been hampered by events beyond the US' control.
Turkey's refusal to host US troops meant a whole division, the 4th Infantry Division, stayed at its bases in the US, while its equipment bobbed in the Mediterranean on board three dozen transport ships.
"The US military has had transformation thrust upon it in the last few weeks," Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, said, pointing out that "it is unprecedented for the US military to begin a campaign with so many of the required forces still in transit."
The failure to obtain UN backing for the war meant the deployment of equipment was seriously delayed and US military planners had to be even more nervous than usual about the prospect of causing civilian casualties, or even killing significant numbers of Iraqi soldiers.
"The last thing we want is industrial warfare," said one senior British officer, referring to prolonged airstrikes, tank fire, and artillery barrages.
He added: "We want a stable Iraq and as much as possible of their armed forces in one piece. We do not want to destroy every large tank of the Republican Guard."
British military officials say they will rely on the help of existing Iraqi forces to maintain law and order in a post-Saddam Iraq.
Military sources paint a picture of "British brigadiers alongside Iraqi brigadiers", after the "implosion of the regime," as one put it.
The last, perhaps the most important, part of that transformation came when the CIA became convinced on Wednesday that it had tracked down Saddam Hussein to a building in southern Baghdad. The decision to launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and stealth bombers turned the military plans on their head.
The Iraqis responded by burning oilfields near Basra and lobbing missiles at the coalition forces in Kuwait. The decision was made to send the British and US Marines into battle 24 hours earlier than scheduled, in an offensive on Basra and the oilfields. Consequently, the ground war got off to a staggered, almost gradual, beginning. It was a long way from the Powell doctrine.
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