The swift three-week victory in Iraq was a vindication of a vision of military transformation that began with pioneers like former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Owens, was picked up and championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and former Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.), and is now being taken up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. What we witnessed was a new kind of warfare based on lightning speed, precise targeting, total information dominance and the adaptability and flexibility to react quickly to changing realities on the ground.

Operation Iraqi Freedom took half as many ground troops and two-thirds the number of attack planes as the 1991 Gulf War to accomplish a much more difficult task. In less than three weeks, U.S. forces were able to remove Saddam Hussein from power, achieve complete air superiority, seize the ports, secure nearly all the oilfields and prevent Iraqi forces from setting them ablaze f all without destroying religious sites or critical infrastructure.

The Gulf War of 1991 was really two wars -- air and ground -- each fought separately and in sequence. Operation Iraqi Freedom was a more integrated war, waged simultaneously by ground, sea and air. Desert Storm began with a 38-day air campaign, followed by a brief ground attack. Surprisingly, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, the ground war began before the air war.

In 1991, Saddam Hussein had time to set Kuwait's oil fields ablaze. In the current conflict, Special Forces seized hundreds of oil wells and pumping facilities in southern Iraq before Iraqi forces could blow them up. During Operation Desert Storm, Hussein managed to fire Scud missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia. This time, special operations forces seized control of most of the missile launch baskets in western Iraq, preventing their use.

Despite the daring battle plan and a force of more than a quarter-million troops, coalition forces suffered fewer casualties than in the entire course of Desert Storm. Accidental deaths were reduced by 75 percent. Although the Iraqi people clearly suffered, improved intelligence and much more precise weaponry helped reduce the number of civilian casualties.

A growing inventory of new precision-guided weapons allowed U.S. airpower to destroy more targets with fewer aircraft sorties. As many as 70 percent of all munitions dropped on Iraq were precision-guided bombs, compared to 7 percent during Desert Storm. Using the newest generation of guided bombs, called joint direct-attack munitions (JDAM), it was possible to continue precision bombing through sandstorms in the early days of the war. Each bomb is so accurate that a single aircraft can use its payload for multiple targets, requiring fewer sorties.

The ability to closely link and share intelligence and reconnaissance through an effective command-and-control structure gave U.S. forces the ability to operate with enormous speed and unprecedented flexibility in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Computers installed in U.S. tanks, personnel carriers and other vehicles displayed updated digital battlefield maps showing the location of friendly and enemy forces and provided intelligence updates from commanders. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator and Global Hawk, high-flying Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (Joint STARS) aircraft and other reconnaissance assets enabled U.S. forces to use combat aircraft in urban close air support in ways no air force has ever been able to before. Troops on the ground could call in fire from above in minutes. During Desert Storm, it usually took up to two days for target planners to get a photo of a target, confirm its coordinates, plan the mission and deliver it to the bomber crew.

America's edge in information technology gave the U.S. military an unprecedented view of the battlefield. The military's sensors, weapons, communications systems, commanders and soldiers were linked in a giant computing grid that gave troops the clearest picture of the battlefield that soldiers have ever known.

The increased inclusion of special operations forces, which were not used much in Desert Storm, was a key element in this campaign's success. Building on their success in the war in Afghanistan, those forces were central. From the beginning they mounted sneak attacks on targets inside Baghdad, collaborated with Kurdish forces that control northern Iraq and advanced Army and Marine divisions from Kuwait to Baghdad, scouting targets and transmitting their positions to air commanders back at headquarters.

The United States should accelerate the transformation it has pioneered. With the world's most powerful industrial-age military, we have a buffer of capability that allows us the freedom to change. Even with an accelerated transformation, we could easily sustain and support enough old-era tactics to deal with any conceivable military challenge that might emerge during the transition. And, as the war in Iraq has shown, transformation brings more capability, not less. It might mean somewhat higher defense budgets in the near future to kick the defense establishment into a higher transformational gear. But once acceleration began, savings would emerge that are inherent in transforming a massive, slow-moving institution designed for attrition warfare into a smaller, faster, more agile force designed for quicker, decisive warfare -- as we saw in Iraq.

Read the article in The Hill.