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The original
problem of declining budgets no longer applies, but now the application moves
forward. Brave New World. KWC 'Shock and Awe' Author Uneasy
With New Fame By David Von Drehle, Washington
Post Staff Writer @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7837-2003Mar21.html Monday, December 1, 2003; Page
Z01 Two months ago,
"shock and awe" was just a complex and slightly vague notion from the
abstruse world of military eggheads. Now, the phrase is on tongues and TV
screens around the world, serving as a virtual marquee for boom and blast in
Baghdad. Along the way, a lot was
lost in the translation -- to the chagrin of many American generals who say the
phrase gives the wrong impression of what they are trying to do. Even Harlan Ullman, one of the principal authors of "Shock and Awe," a dense tome
written in 1996,
said Friday he is sorry to see what has become of his catchy phrase. True, he
is all over television and the Internet, but not without reservations. "It will be bad public relations for the United
States,"
he said. "Clearly,
there will be people who want to take it out of context and say we are trying
to terrorize the Iraqi people.
That we are threatening
to do to them what we did to the people of Hiroshima." If some people say
that, it is because Ullman himself has made the comparison.
"Theoretically," he and co-author James P. Wade wrote, "the magnitude of Shock and Awe . .
. seeks to impose (in
extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that atomic weapons
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese." In another passage, the authors
conjured up the image of glassy-eyed veterans of the World War I trenches. For this, Ullman is
identified by some antiwar groups as the "Dr. Strangelove" of the Iraq war. The authors could not have known that
they were coining
a name for history's first made-for-TV war. The theory of "shock and awe" began as
an attempt to answer a question that dominated defense intellectuals in the
1990s: how to maintain U.S. military strength in the post-Cold War
era of declining military budgets? Working with a small
grant from the National Defense University, Ullman and Wade gathered commanders
from the 1991 Persian Gulf War to talk about how they might have achieved the
same victory in less time and with fewer forces. Wade was a former
undersecretary of defense. Ullman was a Naval Academy graduate and Vietnam War
veteran whose students at the National War College had included a young Army
colonel named Colin L. Powell. "Ullman," Powell once wrote, "was
that rarity, a scholar in uniform . . . possessed of one of the best, most
provocative minds I have ever encountered." As it turned out, the
military principle dominating U.S. strategy in the mid-'90s was "the
Powell Doctrine," which held that the United States should go to war only
with overwhelming force. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1990,
Ullman's former student put his doctrine into practice in the Gulf War,
marshalling a half-million troops to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Ullman, Wade and their
panelists envisioned
a now-familiar world in which rogue states threatened U.S. security with
weapons of mass destruction,
and wondered if there might be a way to defeat them without the slow and
expensive build-up of forces that Powell had applied in the Gulf War. What they came up with was "shock
and awe" to achieve "rapid dominance."
"The
idea," Ullman said Friday from the back of a sedan on the way to his next
interview, "is
to crack the enemy's will as quickly as possible." This can be achieved
in many ways -- in fact, it is probably best achieved by a blitz of activity. Some of the tactics are purely
psychological, such as campaigns of deception, propaganda and disinformation.
Some of the tactics work on the mind more violently. To borrow a phrase from
the 1996 book: "very
selective, utterly brutal and ruthless and rapid application of force to
intimidate."
In this sense, the strike against
Hussein's bunker Thursday morning, Baghdad time, was "a classic example of
shock and awe if it worked," Ullman said. The theory also
contemplated overwhelming strikes to knock out electricity, water supplies and
other necessities in an effort to break the will of civilians to resist. So
far, U.S. planners have not taken such steps in Iraq. Successfully
applied, Ullman said, shock and awe can save lives: "You get them to quit
before they die." The phrase entered the
consciousness of America's television news producers late in January, after CBS
quoted an unnamed
Pentagon source
using "shock and awe" to describe the emerging plan for Iraq. One
database of news reports from around the world reveals a few dozen uses of the
phrase in January, a couple of hundred in February and early March, and more
than 600 in the past week. Air Force Chief of
Staff Gen. John P. Jumper recently dismissed the phrase in an interview, saying
it had not been used in formulating the air campaign for Iraq. Some military
analysts in Washington said that it may have been dangled before the press as part of the
months-long campaign to demoralize Iraqi troops and citizens before the war. But whether the stern and chilling
phrase shaped American strategy or is just superpower trash talk, there is no erasing it from the world's heated
debate over U.S. actions. "I'm
a pi�ata for the antiwar forces," Ullman complained, as he prepared for
his next interview. Outgoing mail
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