NEWS ANALYSIS : Some Notions of Naysayers Bite the Dust : Strategy: The first days of the war prove that unity of command is not vital to achieve success.

“Astounded and delighted.” That’s how Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the gulf, described his reaction to the first phase of the allied air campaign against Iraq. And well he should be, for the war has gone better than anyone could have possibly anticipated.

Asked earlier about Iraqi casualties, Schwarzkopf, revealing his Vietnam War heritage, growled that the one thing we would never do, if he had anything to say about it, would be to get back in the “body count” business. His objections notwithstanding, however, it is obvious in this first week of the war that the corpses of a number of chimeras now litter the battlefield.

The first to bite the dust was the naysayer’s notion that the lack of unity of command for the coalition forces meant certain failure for the enterprise. What they failed to see was that unity of command was not an end in itself. The reason it is a principle of war is that it is the easiest way to ensure unity of purpose. But it is not the only way.

Though political sensitivities prevented subordination of all allied forces under one single commander, they did not prevent their cooperation toward a single goal, as the earlier successes of the allied integrated air campaign plan made obvious. Combat aircraft of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, working in unison, launched coordinated air strikes against targets across Iraq and in occupied Kuwait. Their phenomenal successes were indisputable evidence that unity of purpose had indeed been achieved.

And not only in the air was unity of purpose achieved. Turkey’s agreement to allow coalition air forces to use Turkish bases fromwhich to strike Iraq was especially significant, for it took away the Iraqi air force’s tactic of refusing combat by fleeing to northern bases outside the range of allied Saudi- and gulf-based aircraft.

The second chimera to come to grief was the contention that high-tech weaponry was a foolhardy waste of money on gold-plated gadgetry. They’ve never been tested in combat, said the critics, and they’re sure to fail when they’re needed most.

Those critics now have some apologizing to do, for the remarkable combat photos of the pinpoint accuracy of those high-tech “gadgets,” especially the shot of that smart bomb guided into the air shaft of the Iraqi Air Defense Ministry, was evidence that those dollars were well spent.

So were the success rates of the F-117A Stealth fighters and other sophisticated Air Force and Navy aircraft, as well as the 80% hit rate of the Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from the battleship Wisconsin and other Navy ships in the gulf. Especially significant were the successes of the Army’s Patriot surface-to-air missiles in shooting down Iraqi Scud missiles.

Not only was the accuracy of these weapons systems militarily significant; it had a human and moral dimension as well. One of the reasons U.S. weaponry is so expensive is that it is designed to discriminate and hit only the target at which it is aimed. Though its principal purpose is to destroy the target, it is also designed to avoid, so far as possible, causing civilian casualties and other non-target damage.

Scuds, on the other hand, are wildly inaccurate ballistic missiles that cannot be guided to their target. Even if the Iraqi gunners last week had intended to hit military targets in Tel Aviv (in itself a doubtful proposition), they didn’t have the capability to be so specific. The best they could do was to target the city itself. When used against population centers, Scuds, by their very lack of sophisticated guidance systems, can only be terror weapons. But as we have seen, U.S. missiles can literally come through the front door of military targets.

The most significant chimera to be mortally wounded, however, was the so-called Israeli connection. Ironically, rather than drawing Israel into the war, Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks on Tel Aviv might have had the opposite effect. Instead of splitting the coalition he may have further united it. In the wake of the attack, both Egypt and Syria acknowledged Israel’s right to self-defense.

Though Israel has so far shown remarkable restraint, even if it did respond it is now unlikely that the coalition would collapse. Hussein played his Israeli card and it turned out to be a joker. The threat of an Iraqi attack turns out to have been more powerful than the attack itself. That was especially true with the linkage that threat provided with the explosive Palestinian issue.

Ironically, the attack itself seems to have delinked these issues. If the PLO thought that Hussein was their great savior, it must have been dismayed by the feebleness and ineffectiveness of his attack, as well as by the ho-hum response of the Arab members of the coalition.

And instead of distancing the United States from Israel, as was intended, the Iraqi attack strengthened it. For the first time, U.S. military forces were deployed to Israel to operate Patriot anti-missile air defense batteries to help defend Israel from further attack. This can hardly be what Hussein intended.

“So far, so good,” said President Bush. But he warned not to be too optimistic. There is much war yet to come.