Shock and Awe: The Book that Turned War Into Terrorism

Many writers have noted, usually to extreme scorn and ostracism, the great resemblance between the way the United States does its periodic presidential wars and the way the typical victims of these wars do their terrorist responses. In fact, this is a calculated strategy in which a military attack is intended to do the same thing that terrorists do, only larger and with a little more warning. This blurs the line, if there was one left to blur, between psychological warfare and the more old-fashioned variety.

"Shock and Awe" became a buzzword in the bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iraq, but this was not its origin. The term comes from a remarkable think-tank book written in 1996 by the National Defense University, in which it is suggested that every attack should be as stunning as the first use of nuclear bombs was in Japan, delivering an almost incomprehensibly terrifying blow to whatever civilian population is the latest target of US foreign policy.

Upon reading this book, one is struck by how much of the neocon manifesto originates right there. It is probably just as influential upon the current band of rogues as the more often mentioned Project for a New American Century.

Fortunately, people can see the book that gave Rumsfeld the idea of Shock and Awe. It is online at a good web site for this kind of thing.

Here are some of the more telling excerpts from Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance that underscore American power's slow drift into terrorist-in-chief.

The aim of Rapid Dominance is to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe. Clearly, the traditional military aim of destroying, defeating, or neutralizing the adversary's military capability is a fundamental and necessary component of Rapid Dominance. Our intent, however, is to field a range of capabilities to induce sufficient Shock and Awe to render the adversary impotent. This means that physical and psychological effects must be obtained.

[...]

Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese.

[...]

Second, if achievable, can Rapid Dominance lead to a form of political deterrence in which the capacity to make impotent or "shut down" an adversary can actually control behavior? What are the possible political implications of this capability and what would this power mean for conducting coalition war and for how our allies react and respond?

Because Rapid Dominance is aimed at influencing the will, perception, and understanding of an adversary rather than simply destroying military capability, this focus must cause us to consider the broadest spectrum of behavior, ours and theirs, and across all aspects of war including intelligence, training, education, doctrine, industrial capacity, and how we organize and manage defense.

[...]

A third goal, should it be achievable, would be to promote a regime of political deterrence that might restrain aggression in the first place.

[emphasis mine]

More recently, it has often been said that there is no excuse for terrorism. Of course, this is true. There is none whatsoever. But, if terrorism is wrong, what is the morality of viewing war as pretty much the same thing?