WP: Disturbing Turn for Shock and Awe

By Courtland Milloy
Monday, May 3, 2004; Page B01

So this is what "shock and awe" has come down to a year later -- a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a box, his hands connected to electric wires in such a way that he fears he'll be electrocuted if he lowers his arms or falls off.

From the awesome U.S. bombings that were supposed to help quickly end the war to allegations that U.S. forces have resorted to Saddam-style torture now that an end to the war is nowhere in sight, Operation Iraqi Freedom sure has come a long way.

The Bush administration cribbed its popular war chant from a book, "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance," by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade.

"The basis for Rapid Dominance rests in the ability to affect the will, perception and understanding of the adversary through imposing sufficient Shock and Awe to achieve the necessary political, strategic and operational goals of the conflict," they write.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61595-2004May2.html

Nothing new under the sun?

:evilfrown:

it proved that "Shock and Awe" doesn't work...

It follows from the asumption that since your enemy has
technologicaly inferior hardware it must be because they are no more
than a horde of retarded cavemen.

From that follows that faced with the show of your superior military
might they will automaticaly surrender, bow down and treat you as
a godlike being.

Needless to say that any military doctrine that is based on underestimating
your foes is doomed to failure.

I won't even go into the thinly disguised racism implicit in this doctrine...

it seems to me that the major difference between these "shock and awe" tactics, and those of a more "traditional" war of aggression, is that a more traditional war is won by killing and/or incarcerating the vast majority of those who are both willing and able to resist. old-fashioned wars were "won" by killing off almost all the enemy, in the end, or enough of them to remove their will to resist. at least for a while. this one tried to remove their will to fight by impressing them with superior hardware and firepower. unfortunately (for our military aims) they seem to have gotten over it.

and wasn't blitzkreig most effective against nations whose resistance wasn't all that strong in the first place? many in those nations embraced those nazis with open arms. and france, most notably, had not recovered from the first world war. it suffered, in that previous war, one of the greatest losses (if not the greatest) of any of the nations involved.

to me it seems as though this is becoming, or already has become something not so different from an old-fashioned war of attrition. one side is using guerilla tactics, but that isn't anything new either.