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The Flaw in ‘Shock and Awe’

War planners’ theory of quick capitulation by Iraq hasn’t panned out

By Fred Kaplan
Slate.com

Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters on March 22, “This will be a campaign unlike any other in history -- a campaign characterized by shock, by surprise, by flexibility ...”

Officials from President Bush on down are scrambling to say they never claimed the war would be won quickly. But this was precisely the message from officers involved in planning the war. It was, in fact, the premise underlying the whole war plan.

On March 19, the day the airstrikes got under way, U.S. Air Force Col. Gary L. Crowder, chief of strategy, concepts, and doctrine for the Air Combat Command, told reporters that the war would be an “effects-based” campaign. “The effects that we are trying to create,” he explained, will be “to make it so apparent and so overwhelming at the very outset of potential military operations that the adversary quickly realizes that there is no real alternative here other than to fight and die or to give up.” Once the Iraqis realize this, Crowder added, ”[T]here will be a greater likelihood that they might choose not to fight for the regime.” (Italics added.)

Three days later, Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained further, “We are running an effects-based campaign that is partially kinetic, partially non-kinetic, partially information operations.” The success of effects-based bombing is “not just whether there is a hole in the room of a building but whether or not the function that the element did before ceases to be effective ... In an effects-based campaign, we can achieve much shock and awe by hitting just critical points.” This echoed Crowder, who had said that hitting a few key nodes would “collapse the system from the inside.”

* BOMBING FOR EFFECT
* SMART WEAPONS
* ‘EFFECTS-BASED OPERATIONS’
* INSIDE THE ADVERSARY
(More: MSNBC.com)
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