Opening salvo is classic stuff

The opening strike against Baghdad was a classic move out of the new American textbook of war. It was a pre-emptive surprise attack against targets selected and targeted by state-of-the art spy planes and satellites and smart bombs and missiles.

George Bush's administration has long advocated the doctrine of pre-emptive strike, first made public in the New Strategic Doctrine of a year ago. The President had warned Saddam Hussein that America might attack before the 48-hour deadline was up if Saddam showed no sign of complying with Washington's ultimatum.

The targets appear to have been key command centres and command bunkers where Saddam and his family are known to have been sheltering. The raids emphasise the main objective of operations against Iraq, to overthrow and destroy the regime and person of Saddam. When this purpose was spelled out by Tony Blair in the House of Commons yesterday, it was as if he was reading from a carefully worded mission statement.

The attacks will have been launched by stealth bombers and fighters and missile-firing submarines, destroyers and cruisers in the Red Sea and Arabian Sea. At least one of the firing vessels will have been a British S class or T-class nuclear powered submarine.

The targeting of the first objectives would be carried out by the new techniques known as "network-centric warfare". This is the web of surveillance vehicles, drones, spy planes, and satellites, continuously processing information. This is then passed rapidly to command centres and to "shooters" - ships and aircraft across the region.

Most of the battle will have been controlled from the joint allied command under General Tommy Franks in Qatar. The battle will be plotted on digital displays in the tented HQ.

The techniques of relaying data to firing platforms was pioneered during hostilities in Afghanistan and in the campaign against al Qaeda. Initially the results were not good. A Predator unmanned plane was used to defend the Afghan leader Abdul Haq when he was chased and caught by Taliban near Jalalabad. The Predator fired its two Hellfire missiles and missed. Abdul Haq was caught and hanged.

Today's targets were clearly the immediate entourage of Saddam. In military parlance they are the centre of gravity of the Iraq war machine: take them out and Iraq will not be able to fight on - at least, that is the theory.

The purpose of these first strikes will have been psychological as much as physical. The Americans wanted to show Saddam and his sons, and those around them, that they are the targets, and they can have no hiding place. The battle for Iraq is now in its second phase, with artillery strikes on carefully selected targets from British and American guns along the Kuwait border.

Again electronic surveillance and data transmission is the key. The blanket barrage of hundreds of guns, as at the start of el Alamein 60 years ago, is now a thing of the past. At dawn this morning, British and American drones - small pilotless planes - flew out over Iraqi lines between the al Qasar border station and Basra to spot Iraqi positions.

Guns then fired selectively on carefully registered positions, pinpointed by the video cameras in the drones. The drones have been recalled because they suffer badly in the heat, particularly the British Phoenix which looks like an outsize model plane.

The British troops of the 7th Armoured Brigade, the Desert Rats, 16 Air Assault paratroopers and 3 Commando Brigade Royal Marines are now moving to their start lines - but many could be held back for hours. They will not want to fight in the heat of the day, in temperatures of reaching into the high eighties. Heat is made worse by the need to wear protection suits and gas masks against biological and chemical attack, and the squalls of desert sandstorms.

This the worst time of year for sandstorms, the 40-day season of the Shemal. They can lacerate the body, and frequently kill nomads caught in the open desert, and are lethal to machines. Recently helicopters and armoured vehicles were going through an engine a day.

The main thrust by the British forces and American Marines to Basra, and the looping swing west to Baghdad by the US 3rd Infantry and 101 Airborne divisions, will wait until two things have been fully assessed - and they are the two factors which will determine how swift victory may come.

The most urgent issue is how, when, or whether Saddam's hardliners in the Republican Guard will use chemical weapons. The most practical and readily available are warheads in artillery shells and Scud missiles containing VX nerve gas, or phosgene and variants of mustard gas, the type he fired at the Kurds of Halabja 15 years ago. On past form in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 chemical shells were fired at Iranian troops massed for the assault, particularly when they had to make their way through narrow breaches in minefields.

The best opportunity to hit at concentrations of allied troops is when they make their first advance into Iraq - which can only be hours away. The next best chance is to wait for the final push into Baghdad. From the west this can only be done on a front less than six miles wide, because of the two lakes on the western side of the sprawling city. This would be a highrisk gamble, as it is extremely unlikely that Tommy Franks would order the capital to be taken by a conventional frontal attack. As one of his deputies, Lt General Scott Wallace of V Corps, put it: "We don't want to do house to fighting like Berlin in 1945."

The second major factor facing the British and Americans now on the start line in Kuwait is how much the Iraqi forces will want to fight, and how many of them will fight. Already there are unconfirmed reports that two divisions of the Iraqi Army, almost entirely conscripts, in the Basra region have indicated they are willing to give up.

However, this is not likely to be the case with about 80,000 Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard diehards who have laid elaborate defences round Baghdad and Saddam's tribal home town of Tikrit. They know they have nowhere to go, and could risk being destroyed by rebels inside Iraq as much as the onslaught of British and American forces.

Commanders have already been targeted for months in a huge cyber campaign. Emails have been intercepted and text messages sent back on mobile phones, telling the commander where and how he can surrender. The information campaign is the most novel development in this unprecedented war. It covers data processing of targets down to the way the media is managed and fed with data.

But the most important piece of data waiting to be processed to the world this morning is what precisely was hit by that precision strike on Baghdad in the early hours - the opening salvo of the first war of the information era.