Murray and Scales stress the degree to which the U.S. military had changed since the Gulf War. They point out that the improved firepower, mobility and air support meant that the division was no longer the essential unit of organization, but that, rather like the German military in World War II, the U.S. Army had sufficient common doctrine and training that it could be swiftly and flexibly re-organized to fight in ad hoc task forces. There are usually three brigades in a division, and the authors suggest that by 2003, each of the Brigade Combat Teams could match the weight and coverage of a Gulf War-era division. They also point out the advances in the deployment of precision weapons:

"In previous wars, the measure of effectiveness was the number of sorties necessary to destroy a single target: in this war, the measure of effectiveness was the number of targets a single sortie could destroy."

The air war was shatteringly effective. By the eve of the assault on Baghdad, the three Republican Guard armored divisions that had been holding the approaches to the Iraqi capital had been destroyed. At the start of the war, they had deployed some 850 tanks; by April 8, just 19 remained still operational. Of their 550 artillery pieces, 510 had been eliminated. The skilled combination of the use of sensors, drones, battlefield intelligence and ground-air cooperation (particularly in the case of the Marines, who deployed Marine pilots in their front-line units to coordinate air strikes) was extraordinarily effective. But this was not achieved without loss. Murray and Scales discuss how not to use air power in their account of the ambush of the Army's 11th Attack Helicopter Regiment when it tried to soften up the Republican Guard's Medina Division. Fuel shortages and logistical foul-ups meant there was only enough fuel for two-thirds of the Apaches assigned to the attack, and the attack went in three hours late. But nobody told the artillery, which was meant to prepare the battlefield with a barrage of shells and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missiles) just as the Apaches went in. In the three post-barrage hours before the helicopters went in unsupported, a spate of intercepted cell phone calls suggested that the Iraqis suspected what was to come, and they met the helicopters with a storm of steel from every gun and RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) in the division. The 11th was lucky that only one Apache was shot down, although all of the helicopters were hit.

Apart from the grueling battles of attrition around Najaf and Nasariyah as the Saddam Fedayeen forces tried to interrupt crucial U.S. supply lines, the three hardest battles of the war took place on the outskirts of Baghdad. The relative absence of embedded reporters with the ability to transmit their stories and images out meant that the battle of Highway 8, on the way into Baghdad, the Objective Titans battle and the Marines' tough assault across the Diyala river received far less attention during the war that each deserved. (Oliver North has a good account of a preliminary skirmish of the Diyala crossing, when his helicopter was shot up when scouting for a crossing point and forced to land.) At Diyala, the Marines finally had to mount an infantry assault across a half-demolished bridge, pushing planks across the gaps while under fire, before finally storming the Iraqi defenses, some of them with the bayonet.

On Highway 8, the main highway into Baghdad from the southwest, the 3rd Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team forced their way into Baghdad with an armored column, but then the defenders ambushed the soft-skinned vehicles that were following. At Objective Curly, one of the Highway 8 intersections, the U.S. troops came within an ace of being overrun. The medics and the chaplain picked up guns, armed the wounded, and fought for their lives as artillery was called in almost on top of them to scrape off the attacking irregulars.

Finally a rescue mission reached them, just as the air support arrived. But for the tiny ad hoc band of combat engineers, a mortar platoon and four Bradleys that made up the command of Captain Zan Hornbuckle at Objective Curly, it was a very close-run thing.

The Objective Titans battle has barely been covered at all, although this day-long fight to seal the Highway 1 northern exit road from Baghdad was ferocious, as the 3rd Brigade Combat Team fought to prevent Iraq's elite from escaping the city. The 7th Cavalry fought an intense battle for the last remaining bridge with a large Republican Guard tank force, knocking out eight of them. (The best account of this battle came almost live from CNN's Walter Rogers, attached to the 7th Cavalry, who was consistently one of the outstanding combat reporters of this war.)

The third form of instant war book is one that re-assembles the on-the-spot reporting of a team of journalists, tries to give some perspective with an introduction and conclusion, and cobbles it all together into some form of coherence. (Interest declared: this is precisely what the current reviewer sought to do in The Iraq War: As Witnessed by the Correspondents and Photographers of United Press International.) And from personal experience, to make a book out of the vast mass of day-to-day journalism filed by correspondents with the Marines and troops in Iraq, with Special Forces in the north, with the British troops at Basra, aboard aircraft carriers, from Jordan and Turkey and Kuwait and Egypt and Brussels and London and New York and Washington, is not as easy as it sounds. In her forward to the book, Margaret Thatcher kindly wrote that "written under the lash of the deadline, it passes every test of accuracy and prescience--history vividly told and shrewdly judged."

The BBC and Britain's Daily Telegraph each swiftly published excellent books of this kind, and unlike the New York Times account, that of Oliver North or, worse, Wesley Clark, they give the separate British operation at Basra the attention it deserves. Murray and Scales rightly devote a full chapter to the British war, and also point out the essential role of the Royal Air Force tankers in maintaining the U.S. air campaign. But the presence of the eminent military historian Sir John Keegan as the Telegraph's military correspondent gives their version the edge over the BBC account. Keegan repeatedly stressed the point, too often understated in much of the American reporting, that the Iraqis "ignored every rule of defensive warfare. They also handled their troops in an illogical fashion", he adds.

"Saddam had on paper nearly 400,000 soldiers at his disposal, consisting, in descending order of quality, of his Republican Guard of six divisions, his regular army of 17 divisions and his paramilitaries, including the Fedayeen irregulars and the Ba'ath Party militia, totaling perhaps 30,000. In orthodox military practice, the Republican Guard, less perhaps a portion held back for last-ditch defense, should have been committed first, to blunt the coalition onset. The regular army should then have been committed to reinforce the Republican Guard when and where it achieved success. The paramilitaries should have been kept out of battle, to harass the invaders if the regular defense collapsed. Saddam fought the battle the other way around."

The BBC and Telegraph books also differ in the crucial perspective, which bedevils all Western reporters who hope to maintain some kind of objectivity in the cauldron of war, of knowing what side one is on. Despite some superb reporters like John Simpson, with the Kurds and Special Forces in the north, there is a fastidious tone to the BBC book, as if to suggest that it would be beneath the institution to show the slightest partiality to the side represented by the government that sustains them (and even less to the Bush Administration). Keegan may be harsh when he concluded at the war's end:

"The brave young American and British servicemen--and women--who have risked their lives to bring down Saddam have every reason to feel that there is something corrupt about their home-based media."

And yet most of the nonsense about the Americans facing defeat at the hands of Saddam loyalists, or serious setbacks with the sandstorm, came from armchair strategists in London and Washington (and rather more gleefully in Paris, Berlin, Cairo and Amman) rather than with the reporters at the sharp end.

But one knows what Keegan means. And if objectivity be the test, then this reviewer for one has failed it. Still, I am not much embarrassed by re-reading some of my own understandably heated copy from the immediacy of the front lines, in which I confessed that I had

"learned to love the military. Time after time, they saved our necks. They put our soft-skinned vehicles behind their armor when the shells came in. They told us when to duck and when it was safe to move. They shared their food and water with us and were embarrassingly grateful when we let them use our satellite phones to call home. We were embarrassed that it was all we could do for them. . . . Forget journalistic objectivity. There were armed men across the road trying to kill me and my protection depended on these troops, many of whom I now knew by their first names. There was no question which side I was on."