Oct 04, 2011 Shock and Awe - Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: An F.A.E. Is as effective as a nuke, but friendlier to a post-battle environment. -Steve Jackson's Car Wars. The Shock and Awe trope as used in popular culture. The use of lightning, huge electrical discharges, and stuff resembling them as a weapon to fry things. The column printed below was sent on March 17, 2003 to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and rejected by both. It anticipates the spectacular coverage of the first days of the Iraq war by the mainstream media, and summarizes the philosophy that shaped the strategy journalists were preparing to watch unfold. A mixture of aesthetic admiration for the bombing -- which the Times reporter John Burns would look back on fondly as 'the air show' -- and bafflement at the meaning of the war was common even then and remains so today. This column suggested that the purpose of the coming war was to be sought in its exhibition of overwhelming force, and not in any publicly declared moral intention or military necessity. Indifference to the mass suffering and the thousands of deaths inflicted on Iraqis by the unprovoked American attack of March 2003 has been an unaltered fact of American public discussion in the decade since the start of the war. DB Now that the is over and war with Iraq seems imminent, it may be time to recall some quiet but significant hints dropped by General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, in a session with reporters two weeks ago. General Myers hardly mentioned a single detail of the 48-hour bombardment that will open the war. But it was already known that 3,000 precision bombs and missiles are to be launched, and General Myers chose his moment, on March 4, to add that the coming war would be 'much, much, much different' from the Gulf War. The pounding of Shock and Awe, a precision hit every minute, would produce ',' a shock so great that 'the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on that the end was inevitable.' When language turns as blank and euphemistic as this, it becomes a civic duty to decode it. The phrase 'Shock and Awe' derives from the nineteenth-century German military theorist Clausewitz. It was brought to the United States by, a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a man of deep influence in the Bush administration, whose acumen as a strategic thinker has been lauded by Colin Powell. ![]() The doctrine of 'rapid dominance' expounded by Dr. Ullman is the key to the strategy that General Myers and others now find themselves preparing to execute. Extreme clarity marks the doctrines and maxims of Dr. For him, a major precedent to guide American military policy in the twenty-first century, and a clue to the effect on enemy morale intended by Shock and Awe, was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese were shocked into immediate surrender. The greatness of such an overwhelming attack, lies in its capacity to inflict on the enemy an instant paralysis of the will to fight. It assures that an entire people will be 'intimidated, made to feel so impotent, so helpless, that they have no choice but to do what we want them to do.' It might be objected that this amounts to an endorsement of the use of weapons of mass terror, since concussive paralysis and the injury of non-combatants are among the intended effects of such an attack. The implicit answer offered by Ullman and his admirers is that the end justifies the means, and in a case involving the United States, the end is always benign. 'Super tools and weapons -- information age equivalents of the atomic bomb -- have to be invented,' Dr. ![]() Ullman in an opinion piece for the Economic Times. 'As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed towards a similar outcome' against the smaller and less threatening countries that now stand in the way of American power. But terrorism has many hiding places in a city. In order to eradicate it, you must destroy every common resource for survival. 'You have this simultaneous effect,' says Ullman, 'rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes.' In the first Gulf War, 10 percent of the weapons were precision guided. In this war, 80 percent will be precision guided. The Air Force has stockpiled 6,000 guidance kits in the Persian Gulf to convert ordinary bombs into satellite-guided bombs, a weapon that did not exist in the first war. So, 'you're sitting in Baghdad' Ullman told the CBS News reporter, in anticipation of the first missiles that are to be launched, 'and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. ![]() ![]()
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