Tuesday - May 11, 2004

Category Image Am I the Only One Who Understands "Shock and Awe?"


The Iraqi War started in early 2003 with a "shock and awe" campaign. It was never clearly stated what that exactly was, and with all the hype given to the Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB). I thought it was clear to all but the most infantile idiots that there was no substance to the shock and awe promise. Even now that the offensive part of the war is over and the Hussein regime is toppled, people frequently refer to "shock and awe" like it was really something worth talking about.



Even people who should know better use the term "shock and awe" as though it were more than what it was. This month's U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine has an article by Col Dana, the plans officer for the 3d Marine Division, where he uses the title "Shock and Awe has Failed" in an article about a future conflict with China and bemoaning that our strategy of relying on overwhelming precision guided munitions has failed.

With all due respect to the good colonel, I think he's missed the boat.

I won't dispute Col. Dana's thesis that China is focusing on unrestricted warfare in its war plans. China is clearly the biggest immediate threat to our survival. Islam is a long term threat to our survival and the most evident threat to our immediate safety, but they haven't the means to threaten our survival for a long, long time. That China is planning for unrestricted warfare against us is frankly only prudent of them and not a big cause for alarm in and of itself. I disagree with Col. Dana's characterization of Asian mentality as he presented it. It is stereotyping and mildly racist to say that Asian culture is capable of more nuanced understanding of the world's events than are we. But this is not my point.

My point is that I thought it was obvious how the war against Iraq was waged that the "shock and awe" portion was a feint. How anyone can miss this from the events that unfolded is hard to fathom.

The war was preceded by a lot of big talk. The press releases about the MOAB were suspicious to me. Why would we publicize the creation of such a powerful non-nuclear bomb? When was the last time we did that? I didn't even notice when this poorly guided weapon might have been used in this war. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but its employment certainly didn't stand out, despite the attention paid to this weapon before the war started.

Once the war started, we saw a lot of precision bombs being dropped, but the psychological impact of lots of bombs to shock and awe anyone never materialized. In fact, shock and awe is completely antithetical to the whole principle behind precision guided munitions. Precision is the ability to destroy only what is desired, that is, only legitimate targets with little to no collateral damage. Shock and Awe implies the opposite, the desire to inflict terror on a population by creating spectacular visual and otherwise perceived bombing attacks. No one was shocked and no one was awed unless they were a target, and if they were a target, it's highly unlikely that they survived.

So what was shock and awe, then? I think it was clearly a feint. In the previous war against Iraq, our ground invasion took place only after a long bombing campaign. By promising shock and awe, we were telling Hussein that the same plan was in place. But instead of a long bombing campaign, we invaded immediately with only a quick, and unplanned, strike on a building he was thought to be in, and a highly focused simultaneous bombing campaign against carefully selected command and control facilities.

So the war began with an immediate land invasion and the Saddamitic army was caught with its pants down. Among other absurdities I've heard, I once listened to a self-proclaimed and pompous expert on national public radio right after the war reached Baghdad tell us listeners that we only won the war because Saddam was a tactical idiot. He based this on the fact that Saddam didn't defend key passes very well.

Yet, I think it's more accurate to say that Saddam sought to protect his army from annihilation from a US bombing campaign by hiding them within cities. I'm sure part of his plan was to wait out the bombing campaign of shock and awe and then deploy his army only once the invasion began, if it ever did. But he was completely fooled. Partly because he was fooled into hiding his army within cities, our army was able to enter Iraq and advance more rapidly than any army in history. While we were advancing at a pace of hundreds of miles a day, he was struggling to deploy his key units out of their protective positions and into key terrain defensive positions. It's no wonder that his army balked at meeting ours when they saw how fast we moved against them.

Shock and awe was nothing. The bombing campaign in the first Iraqi War was more impressive by a long shot. Creating the name "shock and awe" was nothing more than a psyops tactic to conjure images of the fallacy of Billy Mitchell's and Giullio Douhet's crackpot theory of winning wars solely through aerial bombardment. It's a credit to our general staff that they rejected this kooky theory and exploited its past popularity with such stunning results.

Shock and Awe never existed. It was only in the minds of our enemy, and apparently in the mind of everyone else that wasn't paying attention.

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