Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid DominanceUllman, Harlan
History
Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid Dominance
Ullman, Harlan
Rapid dominance (Military science)
_Desert Storm_ could have been a classic Blitzkreig maneuver if the
attack were mounted without the long preparatory bombardment and was
concentrated in a single sector-either the "left hook" or the Marine
attack "up the middle," and with total surprise. The major differences
between the operation in Kuwait and Germany's capture of France in
1940 were that the allies in Saudi Arabia had complete military and
technical superiority unlike the Germans and that, once under attack,
Iraq's front line collapsed virtually everywhere, giving the coalition
license to pick and choose the points for penetration and then
dominate the battle with fire and maneuver. The lesson for future
adversaries about the Blitzkreig example and the United States is that
they will face in us an opponent able to employ technically superior
forces with brilliance, speed, and vast leverage in achieving Shock
and Awe through the precise application of force.
It must also be noted that there are certainly situations such as
guerilla war where this or most means of employing force to obtain
Shock and Awe may simply prove inapplicable. For example, the German
Blitzkreig would have performed with the greatest difficulty in the
Vietnam War, where enemy forces had relatively few lines to be
penetrated or selectively savaged by this type of warfare.
The shortcomings of Blitzkrieg ironically rest in its strengths. Can
brilliance and superiority be maintained? Is there a flexible enough
infrastructure to ensure training to that standard, and can the
supporting industrial base continue to produce at acceptable costs the
systems to maintain this operational and technical superiority? Rapid
Dominance requires a positive answer to these questions, at least
theoretically.
The fifth example is named after the Chinese philosopher-warrior, Sun
Tzu. The "Sun Tzu" example is based on selective, instant decapitation
of military or societal targets to achieve Shock and Awe. This
discrete or precise nature of applying force differentiates this from
Hiroshima and Massive Destruction examples. Sun Tzu was brought before
Ho Lu, the King of Wu, who had read all of Sun Tzu's thirteen chapters
on war and proposed a test of Sun's military skills. Ho asked if the
rules applied to women. When the answer was yes, the king challenged
Sun Tzu to turn the royal concubines into a marching troop. The
concubines merely laughed at Sun Tzu until he had the head cut off the
head concubine. The ladies still could not bring themselves to take
the master's orders seriously. So, Sun Tzu had the head cut off a
second concubine. From that point on, so the story goes, the ladies
learned to march with the precision of a drill team.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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