Support the Troops reduxe...

[Marvin Gandall]

I'm not sure it did differentiate. In fact, I think it was a distillation of
experience from the Gulf War. Harlan Ullman and his co-author, James Wade, a
former defence undersecretary, brought together a group of staff and field
commanders from Gulf I and published their theory on the basis of those
discussions. This was, of course, before Kosovo. Anyway, as you know,
leapfrogging over the enemy's armies to terror bomb civilians in cities and
provoke regime change is not really new doctrine; it begins with the
development of air power in WW I.  The advent of precision weapons, as you
note, does promise to reduce the number of civilian casualties, but at the
same time it probably makes it easier for the US to coerce populations by
threatening to ("humanely") destroy overnight the entire economic edifice
they built over generations.

MG

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Pollak" <mpollak at panix.com>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 23, 2003 3:41 PM
Subject: Re: Support the Troops reduxe...


>
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> > The current air and missile assault on Baghdad can't properly be
> > described as the application of "shock and awe" tactics. The doctrine
> > propounds the obliteration of the civilian infrastructure to break the
> > will to resist of a war-weary population.
>
> That might be how the original author used the term in a paper in 1996.
> But that's now a footnote.  The military and state broadcasting system
> applied explicitly it to what they did in Baghdad.  So that's what
> actually existing Shock and Awe means.
>
> What you describe is exactly what we did in Gulf War I and the Kosovo war.
> It wouldn't represent a strategic or tactical shift.  What happened in
> Baghdad, though, as you point out, clearly is one, meritting a new name.
>
> Out of curiousity, if the original paper described the Shock and Awe
> strategy as you describe, how did it differentiate itself from the GWI and
> Kosovo strategies?
>
> Michael