Shock and Awe

[andyfox]

Does shock and awe ever work? Shock and awe was developed in the interwar period by the first theorists of air power (Douhet, Mitchell, Trenchard): the threat of massive air strikes, and the effect of them, would render the bombed or those threatened with bombing, rudderless, fearful that they would be defenseless and they lose their will to resist.

Seems like Rumsfeld has fallen victim to this strategy, which should have been discredited by this point. At least if the reports about the disagreements between him and the professional military men are accurate. Rumsfeld felts fewer ground troops would be required than the military men told him because the aerial bombardment would soften up the enemy.

Two good books about this are Michael S. Sherry's The Rise of American Air Power and Robert Pape's somewhat drier Bombing to Win. I wonder if Rumsfeld has read them.

[MMMMMM]

Given that the Pentagon was in contact with many high Iraqi military officials prior to the war, trying to encourage surrenders, the advertisement and promotion of Shock and Awe may have been part of the psych campaign even before the bombing started. If the decapitation strike had clearly worked for all the world to see we might already have received a great many more surrenders. But yes, Rumsfeld might have overestimated the psychological value of the air campaign. On the other hand it leaves one wondering just how these Iraqi commanders could be so foolish as to appear not to have learned from the first Gulf War what an air campaign could do to their forces. And even now, the air campaign is not only softening up the Republican Guard Divisions, it is pretty much physically destroying them along with some help from our ground forces.

One good point: the air campaign has been so precise that it now appears that those doom and gloom estimates of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis expected to be killed by the bombing are yet living and probably will survive the war;-) My prior argument (which was scoffed at by at least one poster) that we will probably kill fewer Iraqis in this war than Saddam and his sons would have killed over the next couple decades anyway, is probably quite true, though we may never know for sure.

[andyfox]

Just a guess here, but maybe with the 250,000 troops massed on its borders, they Iraqi military's concentration on defending against air strikes, especially given the publicity given to the fact that we were going to utilize a surgical technique, rather than carpet bombing, was compromised.