NEWS ANALYSIS : Iraqi Leader Avoids an Early Knockout, Disrupts Pentagon’s Timetable : Tactics: Saddam Hussein achieves two key goals. He remains firmly in charge of a vast killing machine.

In seven days, the United States and its allies have conducted the most dazzling and intensive aerial assault in the history of warfare. Pentagon officials assert that space-age technology has immobilized Iraq’s air force, blinded its sophisticated air defenses and incapacitated its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons facilities.

Yet, while U.S. officials are confident of President Saddam Hussein’s eventual defeat, their first full accounting of what has been accomplished made it clear Wednesday that he has nonetheless achieved two of his apparent goals: He has survived the initial onslaught, and he has found ways to buy time by disrupting the Pentagon’s detailed timetable and slowing the war.

Successful as they believe the first week has been, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday conceded that Hussein remains firmly in charge of a vast and well-equipped killing machine.

The 545,000-member army in and around occupied Kuwait is virtually intact, as is its command-and-control network. And Iraq’s Scud missile force--its true size unknown--is still a vexing problem politically and militarily, according to Pentagon leaders.

Also, the Scuds and the weather have forced at least some delays in the Pentagon’s schedule and compelled U.S. commanders to divert some resources from their intended missions.

As a result, the Administration’s own reckoning, as upbeat as it was about the results of the first week, was a dash of cold water for those in Congress who saw an early end to the conflict.

It was also a straightforward effort to steel the public for the possibility of a longer war, albeit one that the Administration vows will end successfully.

And it was clearly a warning that the clean cut, high technology war shown so dramatically in Air Force and Navy videos may well become a bloody one before it is over.

“No one wants to declare that he (Hussein) no longer constitutes a threat,” Cheney said. “That would be a very serious mistake.”

For every bit of good news the Pentagon leaders had to offer, a major question or challenge remained.

Perhaps the greatest success has been registered in destroying or disabling Iraq’s air defense and early warning radar network. It was the first target in the war because demolishing it would clear the path for American bombers to strike targets deep inside Iraq.

Powell displayed a graph of Iraqi radar activity that purported to show a 95% drop in radar emissions after the seven days of intensive U.S. bombardment. But the general conceded that he does not know whether that represents a stunning success of U.S. air strikes--or merely shows that the Iraqis had turned the radars off in a “clever operational technique” to avoid their detection.

The example of the Iraqi radars demonstrates how difficult it is to assess the damage done to the war-making capacity of an enemy who has chosen to “hunker down” and avoid engaging the technologically superior forces of the allies. It is impossible to gauge whether a capability has been eliminated by U.S. warplanes or whether Hussein is simply conserving it for future engagements.

Whenever U.S. and Iraqi aircraft have met, the Iraqi planes have gone down, Pentagon officials asserted. But of the 800 bombers and interceptors that the Iraqi air force possessed before Jan. 16, about 750 remain, riding out the aerial onslaught in hardened bunkers at widely dispersed airfields.

Powell declared that the United States and its coalition allies have achieved clear air superiority because the Iraqi planes refused to come up to challenge them.

He said that of 66 Iraqi airfields used by the military, aircraft had flown from only five in the previous 24 hours. The chairman also cited the following figures on Iraqi air sorties: At the end of December, the Iraqi air force was flying about 235 sorties a day; on Jan. 16, 116 sorties. And over the last few days, the Iraqis flew only 31 to 40 sorties.

Does that mean that Hussein is not capable of flying more missions? Or simply that he chooses not to at this point? Powell could not answer.

After the Iraqi air defense system, the second priority of the allied attack was the Iraqi command-and-control system, the nerve center of the enemy.

“They have redundant systems, resilient systems, and they have work-arounds. They have alternatives, and they are still able to command their forces. They have not lost command and control of their forces or of their country,” Powell said.

“But they are doing it without benefit of their Ministry of Defense, their Defense Intelligence Center, their main communication nodes, and they’re doing it for the most part on generator power because we have taken care of the central power system within the city.”

Don Hicks, a former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in the Reagan Administration and now a private consultant, said, “We’ve knocked out a lot of their capability, but it doesn’t take very much to keep information flowing, at least from the top to the bottom.”

A senior military official noted that destroying an opponent’s command network has been one of the most elusive goals of warfare throughout history. “So long as the head remains, he will find a way to communicate with the instruments of his aggression,” the official said.

The brief was designed in part, Powell said, to “dampen out the oscillations between euphoria and distress that sometimes catches us up every hour on the hour.”

But as initial optimism about a quick victory has given way to gloomier assessments of a potentially protracted conflict, lawmakers and some military officials have begun to worry aloud that the war appears to be behind schedule.

Among military officers, especially, concern has mounted over the impact of the stepped-up search for Scud missiles, ordered by the White House after Iraq fired several salvos into Israel and Saudi Arabia. Some officers have fretted that the diversion of resources to the missile hunt has left too few aircraft striking at targets that could have a more direct bearing on a possible ground war.

As a result, a ground offensive that was expected by some to begin as early as this weekend could be delayed by the White House’s insistence on what one senior military official called “the task of inefficiently scouring the countryside for Scuds.”

Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly and other Pentagon officials have repeatedly called the Scud missiles “militarily insignificant” and suggested that early war plans approved by the White House had devoted a smaller number of aircraft to the task of hunting them down. But Cheney conceded Wednesday that the missiles have caused a political furor, with strikes on Israel threatening to drag the Jewish state into the conflict.

As a result, Cheney said, aircraft initially slated to strike targets of military importance have been shifted to the round-the-clock Scud hunt.