In 21 days, US and British ground forces seized oil fields in the south, drove up the Euphrates River valley, seized river crossings, fought off attacks by irregulars, blazed through Republican Guard divisions and captured Saddam International Airport.

Almost without pause, they took down the regime with bloody, slicing armored thrusts into the heart of Baghdad.

"The progress of the men and women in uniform who make up the coalition forces has been nothing short of spectacular," exulted US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as celebrations and looting swept Baghdad in the wake of the regime's collapse.

The full price of the campaign in civilian lives and damage is still unknown, and the fighting is not yet over. As of Wednesday, US forces had suffered 101 dead, their British allies about 30. Thousands of Iraqis are believed to have been killed.

Parts of Baghdad, northern Iraq and some cities in the south were still contested. The Iraqi leadership remained unaccounted for. Keenly aware of the risk of underground resistance, the Pentagon appealed to Iraqis for help in identifying the regime's Baath party henchmen.

But it was clear by Wednesday that that Army General Tommy Franks had achieved military success with stunning rapidity, even in the face of suicidal resistance, with a campaign that had been criticized by some retired military commanders as too risky.

Franks kept to a simple objective: to go for the throat of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

When the chance to kill the Iraqi leader with a single air strike arose on the eve of the war, he put aside a carefully crafted campaign plan and ordered F-117 fighters to drop bunker-busting bombs on a compound in Baghdad, followed by a volley of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Fittingly, the campaign may have ended with a second "decapitation" strike April 7 that also was launched in response to "time sensitive" intelligence.

"Any war plan reflects the reality that one would take opportunities that present themselves," Rumsfeld said the day after the first strike. "That is what will be done today and tomorrow and the next day. And to not do that would be a terrible mistake.

As promised, opportunism and improvisation characterized the US campaign.

A US and British ground offensive lurched into motion from Kuwait the day after the "decapitation" strike, hours if not days ahead of schedule, after wells began to burn in the southern oil fields.

A "shock and awe" air campaign that was to have opened the campaign and to have lasted five days was postponed until a day after the ground offensive and went on for 48 hours, expending huge amounts of ordnance but failing to crack the regime, much less bring it down.

An entire northern front was essentially eliminated when Turkey refused to let the US Army's 4th Infantry Division go through its territory.

But US ground forces, particularly the US Army's 3rd Infantry, blitzed through the south to Baghdad, bypassing towns and cities and blasting through determined but poorly trained irregulars armed with automatic weapons, rocket propelled grenades and mortars.

True to form, US forces did not wait for reinforcements to arrive before going into Baghdad. They drove straight for Saddam's seat of power on the Tigris River in a bold and deadly display of force.

Much of what US officials and their commanders had hoped would happen did not: Iraqi civilians did not rise up in the south and the Iraqi army did not desert en masse.

Another nasty surprise came in the form of Baathist irregulars who harassed supply lines, bloodied US troops and drew them into the southern cities. There, Baathists used civilians as shields.

But the Iraqi military, weakened by sanctions and exposed to devastating air strikes, was no match for the much smaller, but far superior, US force.

What the 125,000 US troops inside Iraq lacked in bulk, the air force made up for with satellite-guided 2,000 pound bombs that pulverized the Republican Guard.

"Again, it was less a matter of brilliance than sheer military dominance that carried the day," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution.

SPACE.WIRE