Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid DominanceUllman, Harlan
History
Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid Dominance
Ullman, Harlan
Rapid dominance (Military science)
Rapid Dominance would therefore provide the ability to control, on an
immediate basis, the entire region of operational interest and the
environment, broadly defined, in and around that area of interest.
Beyond achieving decisive force and dominant battlefield awareness, we
envisage Rapid Dominance producing a capability that can more
effectively and efficiently achieve the stated political or military
objectives underwriting the use of force by rendering the adversary
completely impotent.
In Rapid Dominance, "rapid" means the ability to move quickly before
an adversary can react. This notion of rapidity applies throughout the
spectrum of combat from pre-conflict deployment to all stages of
battle and conflict resolution.
"Dominance" means the ability to affect and dominate an adversary's
will both physically and psychologically. Physical dominance includes
the ability to destroy, disarm, disrupt, neutralize, and to render
impotent. Psychological dominance means the ability to destroy,
defeat, and neuter the will of an adversary to resist; or convince the
adversary to accept our terms and aims short of using force. The
target is the adversary's will, perception, and understanding. The
principal mechanism for achieving this dominance is through imposing
sufficient conditions of "Shock and Awe" on the adversary to convince
or compel it to accept our strategic aims and military objectives.
Clearly, deception, confusion, misinformation, and disinformation,
perhaps in massive amounts, must be employed.
The key objective of Rapid Dominance is to impose this overwhelming
level of Shock and Awe against an adversary on an immediate or
sufficiently timely basis to paralyze its will to carry on. In crude
terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and
paralyze or so overload an adversary's perceptions and understanding
of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical
and strategic levels. An adversary would be rendered totally impotent
and vulnerable to our actions. To the degree that non-lethal weaponry
is useful, it would be incorporated in the ability to Shock and Awe
and achieve Rapid Dominance.
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. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until
both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was
sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese
citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of
Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the
destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension
produced a state of awe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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