Christopher Bellamy: In scale, scope and sweep, this dwarfs any other war operation

"Shock and awe", they promised, and so it was. Donald Rumsfeld had threatened Iraq with attacks of "unprecedented brutality" if it did not give in. After unexpected resistance by Iraqi forces in the south of the country yesterday morning, the Americans struck last night.

Brutal does not have to mean indiscriminate, and this was carefully directed brutality.

Even so, pictures from Baghdad last night, as well as cities in the north – Mosul, Tikrit and Kirkuk – suggest there must be significant civilian casualties. There will be comparisons with Hamburg and Dresden and fallacious allegations of "carpet bombing". Be quite clear: never in the history of war has consummate brutality been so precisely aimed.

The US strategy relies on improvements to intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance and also on quantum improvements to conventional weapons. In the past couple of years these have included special weapons to take out deep bunkers and caves, and conventional area munitions such as the MOAB, Massive Ordnance Air Burst – not mother of all bombs – which to the inexpert eye looks much like a nuclear weapon when it goes off. At this stage, there is no evidence that either of these weapons was used last night.

But behind these supremely accurate blunt instruments, there lurks a medieval concept. You offer talks. You negotiate. The opposition does not play. So you apply a bit of torture, a bit of terror. You up the ante. Then you offer to talk again. The tactics would be familiar to Caesar, to the Sheriff of Nottingham, to Genghis Khan,to Edward I, to Stalin.

This awesome air attack is how many had expected the conflict to start: instead, the order of events was changed. After the first strikes early on Thursday morning, about 40 hours before the "shock and awe" offensive began, people asked "what happened to the air campaign?" Given the improvements to precision-guided weapons and the development of more powerful conventional weapons, it was reasonable to expect that an initial air campaign would be much shorter.

Instead, at first, there was no discrete, even if relatively brief, air campaign before the ground attacks went in. That was, in part, because of the need to secure vital installations, particularly the oilfields and terminals, before the Iraqis could torch or contaminate them, but there is a much simpler reason.

Previous interventionist wars have always had a discrete, preliminary air campaign to "soften up" the enemy. In the Gulf War in 1991, it lasted six weeks before the ground campaign started. In Afghanistan, Western support to the Northern Alliance was initially limited to air attacks and advice from Special Forces. But this time, after the initial strike on Baghdad ground troops went straight in that evening.

The air campaign is, in large measure, already over. It has been taking place for years under the guise of operations Northern and Southern Watch, to enforce the northern and southern No-Fly Zones. They covered most of Iraq: all but the middle bit. The constant air attacks to support the no-fly zones dealt with practically every Iraqi anti-aircraft system in those areas. Understandably, therefore, serious Iraqi air defences were marshalled, concentrated and concealed in the central region. So the strategic bombing offensive only has to concentrate on that.

It could be that the absence of an initial air campaign also lulled the Iraqis into a false sense of security. If so, they were rudely awakened. As Sun Tzu (400-320BC), said: "May your plans be dark and impenetrable as the night. But when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."

Yesterday's events revealed other aspects of the meticulous and cerebral strategic planning. The Al-Faw peninsula, captured yesterday by the British 3 Commando Brigade, was a true strategic objective – meaning that its importance can be measured not just in military and logistic terms, but in economic, political and, in this case, environmental ones.

Seizing the peninsula and its oil terminals turned off the taps that would have enabled Saddam Hussein to pour oil into the Gulf. Over the past 12 years, military scholars have become interested in the environment. With the seizure of a strategic objective determined, in part, by the need to protect the environment, the validity of that approach has been demonstrated. But preserving and exploiting the Iraqi oil fields is also a key economic objective of the war.

The Al-Faw peninsula gives the Allies access to the main water route into Iraq: the great biblical rivers of the Tigris and, diverging from it a few miles on, the Euphrates. In military operational terms, it is vital. This is a well-thought out campaign.

Christopher Bellamy is professor of military science and doctrine at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire. He reported on the 1991 Gulf war for "The Independent"