At the same time military public relations specialists were putting the final touches to a press center at the base, where a professional set designer was employed to create a military ambiance -- hundreds of (kilometres) miles from the front -- for broadcast journalists.

Elsewhere on the base, military strategists, peering into banks of computers, were gearing up to receive and digest data from the US aircraft, naval vessels and ground units that are now poised to attack Iraq and overthrow President Saddam Hussein.

"That information will be put into a coherent package and then relayed back to the field commanders," said Major Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the US military here at As-Saliyah, a complex of around 30 warehouses that has been transformed into the nerve center for an expected US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

As-Saliyah is located just 15 kilometers (10 miles) outside the Qatari capital Doha on a forbidding and wind-whipped patch of scrub desert.

There are an estimated 1,000 military personnel at the site, part of the US military's Florida-based Central Command. Nielson-Green said "a good portion" of them are involved in the actual planning of the campaign.

Are they ready to send the estimated 250,000 US troops stationed around Iraq into action?

"I don't like to say we're ready," Nielson-Green said. "We're constantly preparing and you can always prepare more."

As-Saliyah in effect is responsible for operations in 27 countries that the US military calls its southwest Asia area of operations, extending from Afghanistan to northwestern Africa.

The man who will direct the Iraq campaign is 57-year-old Tommy Franks, an army genneral and commander of all US forces in the Gulf. The military is rigorously circumspect about his movements, saying Wednesday that he was "somewhere" in the area of operations and declining to say when he was expected to take charge in Qatar.

Army spokesmen insist that given the technology at his disposal Franks can direct his troops from just about anywhere.

As the war unfolds, television viewers around the world will become most familiar with Building 406 at the base, where hundreds of journalists are camping out, waiting to briefed by US military explainers.

The problem for television correspondents had been that there was little of Qatar in Building 406, indeed little to suggest that it had anything to do with war in the desert.

The military accomodated by draping camouflage netting along the walls in the main briefing room, where five liquid crystal television screens will also be used to give rear-guard correspondents the sounds and sights of actual combat.

WAR.WIRE