Armchair generals (and who is not of that company?) have begun what promises to be an orgy of analysis of how the coalition won the war in Iraq that will go on for months.

There is no question that it was a most unusual and significant military campaign. From a military point of view, it was an affirmation that the "smart" war in which so much has been invested actually does work. The speed with which it succeeded and the low number of casualties it generated will guarantee that it will be studied in military schools as a shining example of good military planning and execution for years.

Many analysts are still suggesting that the war plan that won the day was the outcome of a contest between the Rumsfeld school, which favoured a speedy, "light" war, and the Powell school, which favoured a more ponderous, "heavy" war. This theory seems to be related to the speculation that suddenly swept the media, as troops neared Baghdad, to the effect that the military had had to halt their advance because their first plan had somehow been mistaken, and had to be re-written. In truth, there was no such crisis.

It may be true in a superficial way that before the campaign started, there was argument over the number of troops committed, in that Mr. Rumsfeld must have been interested in the least expensive war that would work. But the light/heavy contest theory does not take into account the fact that American fighting doctrine has been going through a period of radical revision over the last few years anyway.

Fighting doctrine is a general statement of how troops will fight and it forms a foundation for decisions about military strategy. The old doctrine, written in 1976, favoured warfare of attrition - a static line of defence against the enemy's strongest point, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. The new doctrine was first outlined by General Wass de Czege, founder of the School for Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. It favoured, agility, speed, manoeuvre and deep strikes behind enemy lines.

Many of General Czege's students were in high-level posts on the staff of General Norman Schwartzkopf's central command at the time of the first Gulf War. They called themselves, a little preciously perhaps, the Jedi Knights, and were responsible for the design of that war's strategy. The feinted assault up the middle, the sweep of armour up to the Iraqi Army's western flank, multiple thrusts from all sides, throwing the Iraqis into confusion and disarray, are all straight from the Czege war manual.

One of US war commander General Tommy Franks' favourite little aphorisms for his troops is "Speed can kill the enemy", so he is singing from the same hymn book. His plan of manoeuvre to close with Iraqi forces wasn't unlike that of Gen. Schwartzkopf's - a division of Marines and an Army division straight up the middle to Baghdad; an armoured division sneaking up the Jordanian/Iraqi border, then striking suddenly across the western desert at the Iraqi flank.

Speed allowed the coalition to move more quickly than the Iraqi command structure could absorb information, relay it back up the chain of command, make decisions and put them into effect. So although bridges had been rigged with explosives, for example, the quick arrival of American troops left local Iraqi commanders insufficient time to get approval for their destruction.

But was speed all there was to it? Far from it. There were a number of other factors that combined to allow the coalition to win in record time.

Pride of place has to be given to the long list of Saddam Hussein's miscalculations. Chief among them had to be going to war without an air force, a fatal mistake for any fighting force. He underestimated American equipment, munitions and fighting skill, and underestimated American political will to carry through with the threat of invasion.

He fought the wrong war strategically. If his aim was to delay coalition forces sufficiently to allow public opinion to build against them, as it seemed to be, then he really should have stood up to them with his best troops, beginning right at the Kuwaiti border. He should have conducted a fighting withdrawal up the Tigris and Euphrates valleys to Baghdad, inflicting maximum damage on the way. Bridges should have been blown. Port facilities at Umm Qasr, Iraq's only deep-water port, should have been sabotaged before the coalition arrived. Paramilitary troops should have been held back, to be used for harassment in the event defence by regular forces collapsed.

Smart bombs and missiles were the most obvious advantage for the coalition. During the first Gulf War, these weapons were reserved for difficult missions and special operations. They were used in about nine per cent of cases only, and there were kinks in their use that needed ironing out. This time, 70 per cent of the bombs used in Iraq were smart, having the ability to hit their targets with extraordinary accuracy. Quite apart from the obvious advantage a good aim gives, smart weaponry gave an enormous boost to the allies in enhancing their ability to avoid civilian casualties. Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly relying on a certain amount of collateral damage to whip up anti-US feeling and give him leverage on the world stage.

There are other advantages to being able to bomb with pin-point accuracy. It allowed the coalition to demonstrate quite clearly that they were fighting the Iraqi regime, not the Iraqi people, which bodes well for a smooth transition to a new regime. It also allowed coalition forces to be more selective in their bombing, giving them the freedom to avoid targets like power plants, bridges and water purification plants, all of which were targeted in the 1991 Gulf War.

The United States was able to take advantage of a relatively new technology during this war in Iraq - unmanned aircraft used for intelligence purposes. Many will remember the pictures taken early in the war in Baghdad of Iraqis firing into undergrowth on the banks of a river, trying to shoot an American pilot who had supposedly parachuted from an aircraft damaged by anti-aircraft fire. In fact, this was an incident that apparently arose from a 33-hour flight over the city by an unmanned Predator drone, whose mission was to pinpoint Iraqi air defence units. These units, able to see the aircraft, had directed withering fire at it for hours. When it veered away at the end of its mission (it landed safely), they thought it had been shot down and that its pilot must have ejected. Use of such aircraft was widespread during the war, and provided much-enhanced battlefield intelligence.

Global satellite positioning devices also gave the coalition troops a big advantage. Not only were they used in smart missiles and bombs, their use with troops on the ground is a key element of the computer mapping system called FBCB2, often referred to as "blue-force tracker". This allows soldiers down to a very low level to follow the advance of friendly forces on a computer screen. It also allows them to dial up the coordinates of a particular piece of ground and see whether the troops or vehicles they can see occupying it are blue - friendly, that is - or not.

Significant improvements had been made to equipment used by individual soldiers. Bullet-proof vests reduced casualties. Night vision systems allowed them great advantage over their Iraqi counterparts at night. Helmets with radio facilities, including a microphone at mouth-level, make it possible for troops at section level to keep in touch and issue commands in a whisper. New M4 rifles are a great improvement over the standard M16 rifles. Soldiers can now see - and shoot - around house corners without exposing themselves unduly by using an infrared imaging system with a removable targeting lens. A laser targeting system assures increased accuracy of fire.

And mention must be made of the advantage lent the coalition in three other ways. First, communication advances have allowed extraordinarily good coordination of air, navy, ground and special forces.

Second, the contribution made by determined and able supply units in keeping blitzkrieging troops and armour topped up with fuel, food, ammunition and other necessities of military life as they sped northwards cannot be underestimated, or praised sufficiently.

And third - the use of special forces, especially those of the US, Britain and Australia. I suspect we are going to hear a great deal more about their role as time goes on. They played a bigger part in this war than they have ever played in a campaign before. They were in Iraq, and in Baghdad, long before coalition forces arrived even in Kuwait, providing unprecedented battlefield intelligence to troop commanders. Their management of Kurd fighters in the north of Iraq met with great success, not only in dealing with Iraqi troops in that part of the country, but also in routing the al Qaeda-linked Islamic terrorist group Ansar al-Islam. Their use in the western desert - the so-called Scud box - undoubtedly prevented Iraqi missiles from playing much more than a nuisance role in the campaign, and may well have saved Israel from attack.

They are also said to have brokered at least three highly significant deals with Iraqi troop commanders. In Kirkuk and Mosul in the north, Iraqi troops agreed not to resist, and to surrender to advancing US forces when they arrived. The Kurdish fighters who moved south to take advantage of weakness they saw on the ground rather jumped the gun on that arrangement.

In al Amara, on the border with Iran, the Iraqi 4th Corps was allowed to quietly disappear northwards and disband without interference.

And in Baghdad, General Maher Safian al Takriti, a cousin of Saddam Hussein, agreed not to blow up key bridges and allow US troops to enter Baghdad unopposed by regular forces, in exchange for a promise that his troops would not be pursued as they fled north, presumably also to disband.

Those agreements undoubtedly shortened the war and prevented many casualties.

gshorto@ibl.bm