Liberating Iraq from Space
The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story today looking at how satellites allowed the U.S. military to swifty adjust battle plans. The Times' site requires a free registration, and then will load your PC with pop-ups, so I've taken the liberty of excerpting a small portion of the story for you:

Stretched across a wall at the U.S. Air Force's Combined Air Operations Center near the Persian Gulf is a shimmering, ever-changing display, showing the location of every aircraft above Iraq. Throughout the war, commanders at the operations center used the map to reroute bombers the moment targets emerged - whether they were Saddam Hussein sightings or Iraqi missile launches. In a matter of minutes - not hours or days as in past wars - commanders identified targets and then sent out orders to bomb. This compression of time, known in the military as "shortening the kill chain," was possible for just one reason: satellite information. Flowing through a network of electronic eyes and ears above Earth, information bathed the battlefield, sending location data to GPS units in tanks, messages to sturdy portable computers with the troops and satellite images to weather stations set up on the dusty front lines.

The fire hose of information from space was a little-heralded but critical part of the swift victory in Iraq, providing a different kind of shock and awe: the ability to act almost instantaneously and cripple the Iraqi army's ability to respond. In the Iraq war, space became the ultimate military high ground. While last year's conflict in Afghanistan saw the use of space technologies in small skirmishes, the Iraq war marked the first effort to apply them across an entire battlefield swarming with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and a constant rush of tanks, jets and helicopters.

There's also a cool PDF illustration of how the system worked.