Tampa, Florida
PRESIDENT BUSH had a slightly anxious question for General Tommy Franks, the commander of American and allied forces in Iraq. It was a week or so before the fighting began, and Bush was looking at a war plan with a dizzying array of separate but simultaneous actions, plus options and alternatives. It looked risky. "Is it normal for a war plan to have this many variables this late in the day?" the president asked.

It was anything but normal. But Franks, a self-confident artilleryman who had spent a year fashioning the plan in hands-on collaboration with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, reassured the president he'd made the right call in adopting it. Franks believes warfare requires risk--"prudent risk" or "moderate risk" is how he puts it--but never a gamble. He mentioned to Bush the plan involved political circumstances in Iraq's neighborhood which themselves had many variables.

The principal reason for the variables was the war plan itself. It represented a radically new kind of warfare that was bound to accelerate the transformation of the American military and redefine the concept of "overwhelming force." In Iraq, the plan meant that three different ground wars would be fought at the same time: a secret commando war in western Iraq, a war relying on Kurdish troops in the north, and an invasion by three divisions of American and British soldiers from the south. And in Franks's view there were two other fronts--the air and information (or mind-game) wars.

A myth surrounds the war plan. It is that

But the plan belonged to Franks, who began thinking about Iraq while the war in Afghanistan was still being fought. When he joined the president at his Crawford, Texas, ranch in December 2001, he promised "a small option [for Iraq] that's extremely fast and very risky" if war with Iraq became necessary--a plan quite different from that of the Gulf War a dozen years earlier.

With the Franks plan, American forces repeatedly achieved tactical surprise in the war, notably when American, British, and Australian special forces from Jordan captured Iraq's Scud missile sites in western Iraq two days before the larger war began. Iraqi defenders there "didn't have a lot of time to be caught by surprise because we killed them," Franks said in an interview last week at Central Command headquarters in Tampa. "I have to believe the regime was surprised."

There's a debate over whether operational (or strategic) surprise was attained--that is, something approaching total surprise of the Pearl Harbor variety. Franks thinks it was. Even though Saddam Hussein was aware of the gradual military buildup just outside Iraq, he was led to believe an attack was weeks away at the earliest and might still be averted altogether. The strongest evidence of operational surprise is that the Iraqi army neither went on the attack nor mounted a serious defense of any region, installation, or city, Baghdad included.