COALITION forces plan to launch the deadliest first night of airstrikes on a single country in the history of air power. Hundreds of targets in every region of Iraq will be hit simultaneously.

The aim is to shock the regime of President Saddam Hussein into submission. By the time that more than 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles have hit their targets on the first two nights of the campaign, it is expected that Saddam’s military units will be unable to function.

The “shock and awe” concept is predicated on such overwhelming firepower from the air that the ground forces waiting in Kuwait could be able to advance rapidly to Baghdad in three or four days.

In one way, the bombardment of Iraq has already begun — with missives, not missiles. With pinpoint accuracy and mounting intensity, Washington is targeting senior Iraqi commanders with e-mail messages, faxes and even calls on their personal mobile telephones to put pressure on them to defect or rebel against Saddam.

The feedback from these conversations has been so positive and encouraging, according to authoritative sources, that it is already becoming clear that even so-called elite units, such as the Republican Guard, will be ready to surrender without a fight. Western intelligence sources believe that they already have a good understanding of which commanders will fight and who may speedily defect.

They say that the sophisticated technical means available to the Americans and the British — the signals intelligence apparatus of the US National Security Agency and GCHQ in Cheltenham — made it easy for them to acquire the commanders’ mobile phone numbers.

The Americans have been particularly keen to find out what Saddam intends to do with his oil wells, and whether he will really use weapons of mass destruction against advancing American and British forces. There have been clear signs that the Iraqi leader has ordered the oilfields to be blown up once the invasion begins, but the contacts have raised expectations that he will be defied. The Americans have also been dropping thousands of leaflets over Iraq, encouraging Iraqi soldiers to stay in their barracks.

The arsenal waiting to be launched includes an inventory of weapons designed to hit their targets with an error margin of a few feet. In the 1991 Gulf War, the coalition dropped 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq, of which 6,520 tons were precision-guided. In 1999 in Operation Allied Force over Yugoslavia, Nato dropped 6,303 tons of munitions in 78-day campaign, but many missed their target.

This time the coalition airstrike planners will have to fulfill the promise that they have made to the American and British political leaders — that the raining of bombs and missiles on Iraq will be so selective and focused that the country and its people will survive . . . and be grateful.

The weapons of war will include the Tomahawk cruise missile, the Joint Direct Attack Munition, guided by satellite, possibly the so-called microwave E-bomb to knock out Iraqi military communications, and the “massive ordnance air blast bomb” (Moab), the 21,000lb successor to the “Daisy Cutter” used in Afghanistan. The key will be precision as well as firepower.

“It will have to be tapestry bombing, not carpet bombing,” Andrew Brookes, of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, said yesterday.

If all goes according to plan, the war itself and the downfall of Saddam could be achieved in a week to ten days. Airstrikes in the 1991 Gulf War lasted 39 days before the ground troops of the US-led coalition force crossed the border of Saudi Arabia to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

Many questions remain unanswered, not least what will Saddam do if he is cornered in his bunker? The Iraqi President has always dreamt of being the new Saladin in the Arab world, and if he sees that this place in history is to be wrested from him what steps might he take?

Those involved in the coalition’s complex plan of attack assume that Saddam will try to launch artillery shells and rockets armed with biological warheads. Intelligence from people inside Iraq will be vital in pre-empting his final gesture of defiance.

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