Shock tactics not new

By Professor John McCarthy
Historians tend towards caution: truth is the daughter of time.

Nevertheless articles are now appearing headed “Lessons of Iraq”. One such lesson apparently is, as Clive Williams, director of terrorism studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University puts it “… having a larger force is no longer a key issue in modern warfare, it’s the ability to concentrate overwhelming combat power which makes the difference”. Is that anything new? As Richard Widmark would have said – go figure.

The aim of concentrating and applying “overwhelming power” lies at the centre of the buzz phrase “shock and awe” which we were led to expect at the beginning of the war would govern the Coalition’s strategy. The initial attack on Saddam Hussein’s bunker, lighting the sky over Baghdad, seemed to usher its air power-led introduction.

From the October 1996 framers of the strategy, shock and awe was a way of achieving rapid dominance. The goal of rapid dominance was to destroy or confound an adversary’s will to resist and to leave that adversary with no alternative but to accept whatever terms the victor offered.

Shock and awe rested, it was argued, ultimately on the ability to “frighten, scare, intimidate and disarm”. In fact, shock and awe remains a coercion strategy and the framers of this strategy quote with apparent approval the atomic bombing of Japan as an example of administering such a national shock.

There is nothing new in the concept of shock and awe – only the employed technology is partially different. A few examples from the 20th Century might make this point.

Guilio Douhet, in his seminal Command of the Air published in the early 1920s, suggested a form of rapid dominance to be achieved by a dominating bomber force pursuing a shock and awe coercive strategy of directing high explosive, incendiary and poison-gas bombs against the civilian population. Morale would collapse and with it the will to resist. RAF Bomber Command from March 1942 followed such a policy without using, of course, poison gas.

You could argue the German doctrine of blitzkrieg, or lightning war, was firmly based on a shock and awe concept. Quick-moving armour, motorised infantry, the Luftwaffe flying both as artillery and as close support resulted in rapid dominance. France, which had fought for four tragic years between 1914-18, fell in just six weeks.

Consider the superb initial Japanese campaigns of 1941-1942 and particularly the conquest of Malaya leading to the capture of the “impregnable” fortress of Singapore. With command of the air and sea and using in effect two infantry divisions rapid dominance was achieved in a little over two months.

For the framers of the 1996 policy, “rapid” meant the ability to move quicker than an opponent, to operate within his decision cycle and to resolve conflict favourably in a short period of time by possibly using forces smaller than the opposition but with a decisive edge in technology, training and technique.

You might agree, it has been done before?
- Professor John McCarthy is the academic supervisor for the CAF Fellows at the Aerospace Centre.

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