Roll up, roll up for the General Tommy Franks media show ...

It had been a long time coming. The famous Hollywood set in the Al-Saliyah briefing room with its soft-blue plasma screens – so surrealistically out of kilter with the terrifying TV pictures from Baghdad – had been ready for days. But for the first 72 hours of the war in Iraq, the man making all the key decisions had other things on his mind – even in this most media-focused of major wars – than talking to a crowd of journalists.

When the hour came, however, the Tommy Franks show had all the build-up of a command performance. You had to jostle your way into the briefing room when the doors opened two hours before it was due to begin just to be sure of a seat. There was a 15-minute warning from one staff officer that the general was about to arrive. Then, with all the precision with which the war is being conducted, there was another two-minute warning before he stepped on to the stage in his camouflaged fatigues, a craggy, crew-cut figure, who looks younger than his 57 years, on the dot of 2pm local time.

And because this was above all for the networks, a pretty US anchor braved some sardonic applause just a few moments earlier to tell her viewers what to expect.

General Franks is a man who weighs his words carefully before he answers, less loquacious and less of a showman than Norman Schwarzkopf, who was doing this job in the last Gulf War. Nevertheless, his presentation was longer on rhetoric than hard fact; and he left what there was in detail to a tall, black Brigadier General, Vince Brooks.

Maybe this isn't a surprise. His stated reason to the "good question" of why he hadn't surfaced earlier was that he wasn't prepared to say things that might endanger his soldiers' lives. And there may be something in this. Franks – a much-decorated veteran of Vietnam and the last Gulf War – is a general who has been known to irritate politicians by being over-cautious. A muddy-boots soldier from Oklahoma who, unlike his Yale-educated friend George Bush, went to the plain old University of Texas, and would rather sit with the sergeants at a military dinner than with the brass.

And it didn't sound forced when he said of the mostly British servicemen killed in two separate helicopter crashes: "My heart and the prayers of the coalition go out to the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice. Thanks to the courage and dedication of these heroes, the mission of Operation Iraqi Freedom will be achieved."

You felt that the inappropriately glitzy set wasn't exactly his idea, despite his occasional lapse into awful military-speak, such as "precision shock" to describe the bombing of Baghdad. It was built at an estimated cost of £200,000 to a design by George Allison, who creates sets for network news shows like Good Morning America and was art director on the imminent new Michael Douglas movie, It Runs in the Family. It just happens to be about a man coming to terms with the legacy of his father.

This was a network-dominated news conference. The first question was asked by George Stephanopoulos, once a Clinton adviser. And many of the other TV questions were distinctly soft – of the "what would you like to tell the American people about how well our troops are doing" variety.

Asked what his biggest surprise so far had been, he said there hadn't been any yet, after a year of planning in which every military "what if" had been chewed over. The only one so far had been when his wife Cathryn had sent him a "happy anniversary message, and I had forgotten to send her one back". But yes, there would be surprises in the coming days. When has there been a war when the unexpected doesn't happen?