Tuesday - May 11, 2004
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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