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Hijacking Catastrophe! How Bush Took Advantage Of 9/11 To Take Over The World - Part 2 of 4: Shock And Awe
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posted Tuesday, 20 December 2005
Hijacking Catastrophe!
How Bush Took Advantage Of 9/11
To Take Over The World -
Part 2 of 4: SHOCK AND AWE
Shock and Awe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
According to its original theorists, Shock and Awe renders an adversary unwilling to resist through overwhelming displays of power. Frequent comparisons are made by these theorists to the effect of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Shock and Awe is a method of unconventional warfare that attempts to destroy an adversary's will to fight through spectacular displays of power. Its authors label it a subset of Rapid dominance, a doctrine that advocates defeating an adversary by swift action against all aspects of their ability to resist, rather than by strictly military forces. It is a product of the National Defense University of the United States, and has been notably applied in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Doctrine of Rapid Dominance
Rapid Dominance is defined by its authors, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, as attempting "to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe." Further, Rapid Dominance will "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 . . . [to] 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 the tactical and strategic levels."
Introduced in a report to the United States' National Defense University in 1996, Ullman and Wade describe it as an attempt to develop a post-Cold War military doctrine for the United States. Rapid Dominance and Shock and Awe, they write, may become a "revolutionary change" as the United States military is reduced in size and information technology is increasingly integrated into warfare. Subsequent U.S. military authors have written that Rapid Dominance exploits "superior technology, precision engagement, and information dominance" which they attribute to the United States.
Ullman and Wade identify four vital characteristics of Rapid Dominance: "near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment."
Shock and Awe is most consistently used by Ullman and Wade as the effect, which Rapid Dominance seeks to impose upon an adversary. It is the desired state of helplessness and lack of will. It can be induced, they write, by direct force applied to command and control centers, selective denial of information and dissemination of disinformation, overwhelming combat force, and rapidity of action. The development of precision-guided munitions is one enabling technology for the doctrine of Rapid Dominance.
Ullman and Wade identified a number of previous events or lines of military thought, which they claim, relied upon inflicting shock and awe. Most cited by Ullman during the Iraq War is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ullman and Wade hold it as a case in which "nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction" caused complete shock and capitulation. Rapid Dominance should seek to impose a similar though non-nuclear effect upon an adversary's psychology, they write. Concepts which they term "Overwhelming Force" and "Massive Bombardment" are noted as apparently similar to Rapid Dominance; however, they argue such approaches are not time-sensitive or suitable to small forces. Ullman and Wade write that Blitzkrieg employed their concepts of brilliance, rapidity, and dominance.
Differences from "AirLand Battle"
Rapid Dominance differs substantially from the previous United States doctrine of AirLand Battle. Principally used in the 1991 Gulf War, AirLand Battle was introduced as the overarching doctrine of the United States Army in 1982. It is a force-on-force attrition-based method of war, which advocates the destruction of its adversary's military forces. To this end, U.S. forces would concentrate all ground and air fires against an enemy's military command, logistics, and main force units throughout their depth to achieve favorable attrition. In contrast to AirLand Battle, Rapid Dominance targets the will of the adversary's entire society; whereas AirLand Battle identified an adversary's core as its military concentrations, Rapid Dominance sees it as the adversary's psychological will to fight.
In the United States Army's Field Manual 1 of 2001, the concepts of Shock and Awe are visible. "The goal of future Army operations will be to simultaneously attack critical targets throughout the area of operations by rapid maneuver and precision fires to break the adversary's will and compel him to surrender," it reads.
This lightning-fast, highly efficient type of war, where hundreds of targets are destroyed in the first minutes, is based on a new doctrine: Network-centric warfare. Using technological advancements brought by the Digital Revolution, revolutionary capabilities are possible, which the commanders in the 1991 Iraq War could only dream of.
Shock and Awe vs. Terrorism
American supporters of Shock and Awe claim that unlike terrorism, Shock and Awe does not deliberately target civilians, although civilians could be killed. Critics however, point to the difficulty in reducing civilian casualties while bombing locations with high civilian population density.
Furthermore, many have reasonably argued that the label of terrorism does not hinge on civilian casualties, as terror can be elicited through many other means as well. One historical example is the terrorist group, the Weather Underground Organization of the United States, which conducted an extensive domestic bombing campaign for many years against government and corporate property without killing a single person, through the use of extensive prior warnings and strategically flamboyant targets. Such attacks are clearly intended to elicit terror, in that case among the state and corporate apparatus itself, as well as to build a domestic insurgency, as stated in the claims of responsibility issued by the WUO, and so clearly fall under the realm of terrorism.
Excluding any arbitrary framework of moral supremacy, it is difficult to determine if Shock and Awe is empirically different from terrorism, as both tactics' primary goal is to elicit terror, shock and awe.
Criticism
Shock and Awe met significant criticism from both military and civilian sectors. United States theorists had criticized its assumptions of total information awareness, unmatched technology, and assumptions of symmetric warfare.
In coverage by mass media before the United States' invasion of Iraq, "Shock and Awe" was often used to mean an indiscriminate "Doomsday" or terror aerial bombardment. Critics of the war compared the plans of the United States to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and termed such plans as savagery. The United States armed forces had said that targets, munitions and attack times were chosen to minimize civilian casualties.
Shock and Awe–style warfare also seems to be less effective against an extended insurgency than against an enemy's military.
U.S.-Iraq War
Before the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, officials in the United States armed forces described their plan as employing Shock and Awe. During the war, Harlan K. Ullman, principal author of Shock and Awe, said the United States' did not execute a Shock and Awe campaign.
Limited bombing began on 19 March 2003 as United States forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Saddam Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until 21 March, when at 1700 UTC the main bombing campaign of the Coalition began. Its forces launched approximately 1700 air sorties (504 using cruise missiles). Coalition ground forces had begun a "running start" offensive towards Baghdad on the previous day, attempting to strike quickly. Coalition ground forces seized Baghdad on 5 April, and the United States declared victory on 14 April.
Whether or to what extent the United States fought a campaign of Shock and Awe is unclear by contradictory post-war assessments. Within two weeks of the United States' victory declaration, on 27 April, the Washington Post published an interview with Iraqi military personnel detailing demoralization and lack of command. According to the soldiers, Coalition bombing was surprisingly widespread and had a severely demoralizing effect. When United States tanks passed through the Iraqi military's Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units outside Baghdad to Saddam's presidential palaces, it caused a shock to troops inside Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers said there was no organization intact by the time the United States entered Baghdad, and that resistance crumbled under the presumption that "it wasn't a war, it was suicide."
In contrast, in an October 2003 presentation to the United States House Committee on Armed Services, staff of the United States Army War College did not attribute their performance to Rapid Dominance. Rather, they cited technological superiority and "Iraqi ineptitude." The speed of the Coalition's actions ("rapidity"), they said, did not affect Iraqi morale. Further, they said that Iraqi armed forces ceased resistance only after direct force-on-force combat within cities.
Later, another theory was proposed that Saddam Hussein may have set up conditions for a long guerrilla insurgency. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/041220/20baghdad.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe
Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2003(CBS) They're calling it "A-Day," A as in air-strikes so devastating they would leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight.
If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. As CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports, this is more than number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War.
On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan.
"The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before," the official said.
The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It's called "Shock and Awe" and it focuses on the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces.
"We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept, which relies on large numbers of precision-guided weapons.
"So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman.
In the first Gulf War, 10 percent of the weapons were precision guided. In this war 80 percent will be precision guided.
The Air Force has stockpiled 6,000 of these guidance kits in the Persian Gulf to convert ordinary dumb bombs into satellite-guided bombs, a weapon that didn't exist in the first war.
"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted," Ullman tells Martin.
Last time, an armored armada swept into Kuwait and destroyed Saddam's elite republican guard divisions in the largest tank battle since the World War II. This time, the target is not the Iraqi army but the Iraqi leadership, and the battle plan is designed to bypass Iraqi divisions whenever possible.
If Shock and Awe works, there won't be a ground war.
Tabacco: It didn’t, and there is!
Not everybody in the Bush Administration thinks Shock and Awe will work. One senior official called it a bunch of bull, but confirmed it is the concept on which the war plan is based.
Last year, in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, the U.S. was badly surprised by the willingness of al Qaeda to fight to the death. If the Iraqis fight, the U.S. would have to throw in reinforcements and win the old fashioned way by crushing the republican guards, and that would mean more casualties on both sides.
Statement from CBS News Anchor Dan Rather: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military
© MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/24/eveningnews/main537928.shtml
Published on Monday, January 27, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?
by Ira Chernus
Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima.
Ullman is what they call a “defense intellectual.” He was the Navy's “head of extended planning” and taught at the National War College. One of his students was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who says he “raised my vision several levels.”
What Powell and everyone in the Bush administration sees now is Ullman’s vision for high-tech war. He calls it “rapid dominance,” or “shock and awe.” The idea is to scare the enemy to death. To win, you don’t need to inflict physical pain and destruction. Just the fear of pain, and the massive confusion it creates, is enough.
Ullman wants the U.S. to (in his words) “deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary’s perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility.” “This ability to impose massive shock and awe, in essence to be able to 'turn the lights on and off' of an adversary as we choose, will so overload the perception, knowledge and understanding of that adversary that there will be no choice except to cease and desist or risk complete and total destruction."
Ullman is ready to use every kind of weapon to create shock and awe. He once said it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves that attack peoples’ neurological systems, “to control the will and perception of adversaries, by applying a regime of shock and awe. It is about effecting behavior."
When it comes to Iraq, Ullman likes the idea of cruise missiles -- lots of them, right away. CBS News reports that Ullman’s ideas are the basis for the Pentagon’s war plan. The U.S. will smash Baghdad with up to 800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war. That’s about one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours.
The missiles will hit far more than just military targets. They will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable. "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. So “you take the city down. You get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."
Ullman is sure it will work as well in 2003 as it did in 1945: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." "Super tools and weapons -- information-age equivalents of the atomic bomb -- have to be invented," he wrote in the Economic Times. "As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed towards a similar outcome.”
When he first invented “rapid dominance,” Ullman talked about an “eight-level hierarchy of shock and awe,” with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the top. Now, it seems, that’s where he wants to start.
Is the Hiroshima model just a metaphor? Ullman recently wrote that one way to “shock and awe” Saddam is to remind him that the U.S. has “certain weapons” that can destroy deeply buried facilities. That’s a not-even-thinly-veiled reference to the newest kind of nuclear weapons, the B-61 “bunker-busters.” L.A. Times columnist William Arkin has confirmed that the U.S. is preparing to use “bunker-busters” against Iraq. That would “break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else,” Arkin warns, and “forever pit the Arab and Islamic world against us.”
Suppose we drop the nuke in the wrong place? Even Harlan Ullman admits it could easily happen: “Of course, there will always be intelligence gaps, and no solution is perfect.” But that’s just the point. “The threat would be a Damoclean sword that might or might not descend.” In other words, the fear of nukes falling who-knows-where would scare them into surrendering without a fight. Let other Islamic nations get as angry as they like. We’ll just shock and awe them too.
Tabacco: America, this is what we have become: a nation of Harlan Ullmans. Are you still proud to be an American?
And why not North Korea, while we’re at it? Ullman wants a nuclear threat there, if North Korean leaders don’t heel to U.S. commands: “To remind the North of its vulnerability, one or more Trident ballistic submarines could be permanently assigned to target North Korea.”
If memory serves me right, didn't John F. Kennedy blockade Cuba when the Soviets transported nuclear weapons 90 miles off the coast of Florida, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war? These guys have no appreciation for history! The U.S.A. is now worse than Iraq, worse than the U.S.S.R, and worse than Nazi Germany. If you were anyone else on earth but an American, you would admit it!
Tridents carry 240 nuclear warheads each. One Trident might not be enough, it seems. When you use shock and awe, you use it big-time.
So here we are, preparing to destroy a huge modern city, kill tens of thousands, and threaten nuclear attack -- all against people who have not fired a single bullet at us. Yes, it’s about oil. But it’s also about shock and awe, putting on a terrifying show for the whole world to see.
If all this leaves you in shock and awe, you have had your vision raised several levels too. You see what Ullman, Powell, and all the Bushies see: the U.S. frightening the whole world so badly that no one will dare fire a single bullet at us. Let them be as angry as they like, just so they know who is the meanest, toughest son of a bitch on the global block.
That is now becoming the essence of U.S. foreign policy. And they seriously believe it will put an end to war. I suppose the Romans believed it too.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
chernus@spot.colorado.edu
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm
Written By
Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
With:
L.A. "Bud" Edney, Fred M. Franks, Charles A. Horner, Jonathan T. Howe, and Keith Brendley
NDU Press Book
December 1996
http://www.shockandawe.com/index1.htm
If this kind of evil turns you on, be my guest. There are lots of unthinking, unfeeling, Neocon hawks, who will love this stuff. I’d like to remind Mr. Ullman that North Korea has a few nukes of its own. And if China and Russia decide that they might be next after North Korea, they might not wait for their turns. The earth could become a burnt out cinder. Is that what you want? This is no impossibility – these guys, who have the ear of George W. Bush, are on the road to total annihilation. Welcome to the 21st Century.
Now do you still think George W. Bush is looking out for your best interests?
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
How Bush Took Advantage Of 9/11
To Take Over The World -
Part 2 of 4: SHOCK AND AWE
Shock and Awe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
According to its original theorists, Shock and Awe renders an adversary unwilling to resist through overwhelming displays of power. Frequent comparisons are made by these theorists to the effect of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Shock and Awe is a method of unconventional warfare that attempts to destroy an adversary's will to fight through spectacular displays of power. Its authors label it a subset of Rapid dominance, a doctrine that advocates defeating an adversary by swift action against all aspects of their ability to resist, rather than by strictly military forces. It is a product of the National Defense University of the United States, and has been notably applied in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Doctrine of Rapid Dominance
Rapid Dominance is defined by its authors, Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, as attempting "to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary to fit or respond to our strategic policy ends through imposing a regime of Shock and Awe." Further, Rapid Dominance will "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 . . . [to] 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 the tactical and strategic levels."
Introduced in a report to the United States' National Defense University in 1996, Ullman and Wade describe it as an attempt to develop a post-Cold War military doctrine for the United States. Rapid Dominance and Shock and Awe, they write, may become a "revolutionary change" as the United States military is reduced in size and information technology is increasingly integrated into warfare. Subsequent U.S. military authors have written that Rapid Dominance exploits "superior technology, precision engagement, and information dominance" which they attribute to the United States.
Ullman and Wade identify four vital characteristics of Rapid Dominance: "near total or absolute knowledge and understanding of self, adversary, and environment; rapidity and timeliness in application; operational brilliance in execution; and (near) total control and signature management of the entire operational environment."
Shock and Awe is most consistently used by Ullman and Wade as the effect, which Rapid Dominance seeks to impose upon an adversary. It is the desired state of helplessness and lack of will. It can be induced, they write, by direct force applied to command and control centers, selective denial of information and dissemination of disinformation, overwhelming combat force, and rapidity of action. The development of precision-guided munitions is one enabling technology for the doctrine of Rapid Dominance.
Ullman and Wade identified a number of previous events or lines of military thought, which they claim, relied upon inflicting shock and awe. Most cited by Ullman during the Iraq War is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ullman and Wade hold it as a case in which "nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction" caused complete shock and capitulation. Rapid Dominance should seek to impose a similar though non-nuclear effect upon an adversary's psychology, they write. Concepts which they term "Overwhelming Force" and "Massive Bombardment" are noted as apparently similar to Rapid Dominance; however, they argue such approaches are not time-sensitive or suitable to small forces. Ullman and Wade write that Blitzkrieg employed their concepts of brilliance, rapidity, and dominance.
Differences from "AirLand Battle"
Rapid Dominance differs substantially from the previous United States doctrine of AirLand Battle. Principally used in the 1991 Gulf War, AirLand Battle was introduced as the overarching doctrine of the United States Army in 1982. It is a force-on-force attrition-based method of war, which advocates the destruction of its adversary's military forces. To this end, U.S. forces would concentrate all ground and air fires against an enemy's military command, logistics, and main force units throughout their depth to achieve favorable attrition. In contrast to AirLand Battle, Rapid Dominance targets the will of the adversary's entire society; whereas AirLand Battle identified an adversary's core as its military concentrations, Rapid Dominance sees it as the adversary's psychological will to fight.
In the United States Army's Field Manual 1 of 2001, the concepts of Shock and Awe are visible. "The goal of future Army operations will be to simultaneously attack critical targets throughout the area of operations by rapid maneuver and precision fires to break the adversary's will and compel him to surrender," it reads.
This lightning-fast, highly efficient type of war, where hundreds of targets are destroyed in the first minutes, is based on a new doctrine: Network-centric warfare. Using technological advancements brought by the Digital Revolution, revolutionary capabilities are possible, which the commanders in the 1991 Iraq War could only dream of.
Shock and Awe vs. Terrorism
American supporters of Shock and Awe claim that unlike terrorism, Shock and Awe does not deliberately target civilians, although civilians could be killed. Critics however, point to the difficulty in reducing civilian casualties while bombing locations with high civilian population density.
Furthermore, many have reasonably argued that the label of terrorism does not hinge on civilian casualties, as terror can be elicited through many other means as well. One historical example is the terrorist group, the Weather Underground Organization of the United States, which conducted an extensive domestic bombing campaign for many years against government and corporate property without killing a single person, through the use of extensive prior warnings and strategically flamboyant targets. Such attacks are clearly intended to elicit terror, in that case among the state and corporate apparatus itself, as well as to build a domestic insurgency, as stated in the claims of responsibility issued by the WUO, and so clearly fall under the realm of terrorism.
Excluding any arbitrary framework of moral supremacy, it is difficult to determine if Shock and Awe is empirically different from terrorism, as both tactics' primary goal is to elicit terror, shock and awe.
Criticism
Shock and Awe met significant criticism from both military and civilian sectors. United States theorists had criticized its assumptions of total information awareness, unmatched technology, and assumptions of symmetric warfare.
In coverage by mass media before the United States' invasion of Iraq, "Shock and Awe" was often used to mean an indiscriminate "Doomsday" or terror aerial bombardment. Critics of the war compared the plans of the United States to the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and termed such plans as savagery. The United States armed forces had said that targets, munitions and attack times were chosen to minimize civilian casualties.
Shock and Awe–style warfare also seems to be less effective against an extended insurgency than against an enemy's military.
U.S.-Iraq War
Before the United States' invasion of Iraq in 2003, officials in the United States armed forces described their plan as employing Shock and Awe. During the war, Harlan K. Ullman, principal author of Shock and Awe, said the United States' did not execute a Shock and Awe campaign.
Limited bombing began on 19 March 2003 as United States forces unsuccessfully attempted to kill Saddam Hussein. Attacks continued against a small number of targets until 21 March, when at 1700 UTC the main bombing campaign of the Coalition began. Its forces launched approximately 1700 air sorties (504 using cruise missiles). Coalition ground forces had begun a "running start" offensive towards Baghdad on the previous day, attempting to strike quickly. Coalition ground forces seized Baghdad on 5 April, and the United States declared victory on 14 April.
Whether or to what extent the United States fought a campaign of Shock and Awe is unclear by contradictory post-war assessments. Within two weeks of the United States' victory declaration, on 27 April, the Washington Post published an interview with Iraqi military personnel detailing demoralization and lack of command. According to the soldiers, Coalition bombing was surprisingly widespread and had a severely demoralizing effect. When United States tanks passed through the Iraqi military's Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard units outside Baghdad to Saddam's presidential palaces, it caused a shock to troops inside Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers said there was no organization intact by the time the United States entered Baghdad, and that resistance crumbled under the presumption that "it wasn't a war, it was suicide."
In contrast, in an October 2003 presentation to the United States House Committee on Armed Services, staff of the United States Army War College did not attribute their performance to Rapid Dominance. Rather, they cited technological superiority and "Iraqi ineptitude." The speed of the Coalition's actions ("rapidity"), they said, did not affect Iraqi morale. Further, they said that Iraqi armed forces ceased resistance only after direct force-on-force combat within cities.
Later, another theory was proposed that Saddam Hussein may have set up conditions for a long guerrilla insurgency. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/041220/20baghdad.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe
Iraq Faces Massive U.S. Missile Barrage
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24, 2003(CBS) They're calling it "A-Day," A as in air-strikes so devastating they would leave Saddam's soldiers unable or unwilling to fight.
If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in Iraq. As CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports, this is more than number that were launched during the entire 40 days of the first Gulf War.
On the second day, the plan calls for launching another 300 to 400 cruise missiles.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan.
"The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before," the official said.
The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the National Defense University. It's called "Shock and Awe" and it focuses on the psychological destruction of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical destruction of his military forces.
"We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock and Awe concept, which relies on large numbers of precision-guided weapons.
"So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman.
In the first Gulf War, 10 percent of the weapons were precision guided. In this war 80 percent will be precision guided.
The Air Force has stockpiled 6,000 of these guidance kits in the Persian Gulf to convert ordinary dumb bombs into satellite-guided bombs, a weapon that didn't exist in the first war.
"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted," Ullman tells Martin.
Last time, an armored armada swept into Kuwait and destroyed Saddam's elite republican guard divisions in the largest tank battle since the World War II. This time, the target is not the Iraqi army but the Iraqi leadership, and the battle plan is designed to bypass Iraqi divisions whenever possible.
If Shock and Awe works, there won't be a ground war.
Tabacco: It didn’t, and there is!
Not everybody in the Bush Administration thinks Shock and Awe will work. One senior official called it a bunch of bull, but confirmed it is the concept on which the war plan is based.
Last year, in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan, the U.S. was badly surprised by the willingness of al Qaeda to fight to the death. If the Iraqis fight, the U.S. would have to throw in reinforcements and win the old fashioned way by crushing the republican guards, and that would mean more casualties on both sides.
Statement from CBS News Anchor Dan Rather: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military
© MMIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/24/eveningnews/main537928.shtml
Published on Monday, January 27, 2003 by CommonDreams.org
Shock & Awe: Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?
by Ira Chernus
Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima.
Ullman is what they call a “defense intellectual.” He was the Navy's “head of extended planning” and taught at the National War College. One of his students was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who says he “raised my vision several levels.”
What Powell and everyone in the Bush administration sees now is Ullman’s vision for high-tech war. He calls it “rapid dominance,” or “shock and awe.” The idea is to scare the enemy to death. To win, you don’t need to inflict physical pain and destruction. Just the fear of pain, and the massive confusion it creates, is enough.
Ullman wants the U.S. to (in his words) “deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary’s perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility.” “This ability to impose massive shock and awe, in essence to be able to 'turn the lights on and off' of an adversary as we choose, will so overload the perception, knowledge and understanding of that adversary that there will be no choice except to cease and desist or risk complete and total destruction."
Ullman is ready to use every kind of weapon to create shock and awe. He once said it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves that attack peoples’ neurological systems, “to control the will and perception of adversaries, by applying a regime of shock and awe. It is about effecting behavior."
When it comes to Iraq, Ullman likes the idea of cruise missiles -- lots of them, right away. CBS News reports that Ullman’s ideas are the basis for the Pentagon’s war plan. The U.S. will smash Baghdad with up to 800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war. That’s about one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours.
The missiles will hit far more than just military targets. They will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable. "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. So “you take the city down. You get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."
Ullman is sure it will work as well in 2003 as it did in 1945: “You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." "Super tools and weapons -- information-age equivalents of the atomic bomb -- have to be invented," he wrote in the Economic Times. "As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed towards a similar outcome.”
When he first invented “rapid dominance,” Ullman talked about an “eight-level hierarchy of shock and awe,” with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the top. Now, it seems, that’s where he wants to start.
Is the Hiroshima model just a metaphor? Ullman recently wrote that one way to “shock and awe” Saddam is to remind him that the U.S. has “certain weapons” that can destroy deeply buried facilities. That’s a not-even-thinly-veiled reference to the newest kind of nuclear weapons, the B-61 “bunker-busters.” L.A. Times columnist William Arkin has confirmed that the U.S. is preparing to use “bunker-busters” against Iraq. That would “break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else,” Arkin warns, and “forever pit the Arab and Islamic world against us.”
Suppose we drop the nuke in the wrong place? Even Harlan Ullman admits it could easily happen: “Of course, there will always be intelligence gaps, and no solution is perfect.” But that’s just the point. “The threat would be a Damoclean sword that might or might not descend.” In other words, the fear of nukes falling who-knows-where would scare them into surrendering without a fight. Let other Islamic nations get as angry as they like. We’ll just shock and awe them too.
Tabacco: America, this is what we have become: a nation of Harlan Ullmans. Are you still proud to be an American?
And why not North Korea, while we’re at it? Ullman wants a nuclear threat there, if North Korean leaders don’t heel to U.S. commands: “To remind the North of its vulnerability, one or more Trident ballistic submarines could be permanently assigned to target North Korea.”
If memory serves me right, didn't John F. Kennedy blockade Cuba when the Soviets transported nuclear weapons 90 miles off the coast of Florida, bringing us to the brink of nuclear war? These guys have no appreciation for history! The U.S.A. is now worse than Iraq, worse than the U.S.S.R, and worse than Nazi Germany. If you were anyone else on earth but an American, you would admit it!
Tridents carry 240 nuclear warheads each. One Trident might not be enough, it seems. When you use shock and awe, you use it big-time.
So here we are, preparing to destroy a huge modern city, kill tens of thousands, and threaten nuclear attack -- all against people who have not fired a single bullet at us. Yes, it’s about oil. But it’s also about shock and awe, putting on a terrifying show for the whole world to see.
If all this leaves you in shock and awe, you have had your vision raised several levels too. You see what Ullman, Powell, and all the Bushies see: the U.S. frightening the whole world so badly that no one will dare fire a single bullet at us. Let them be as angry as they like, just so they know who is the meanest, toughest son of a bitch on the global block.
That is now becoming the essence of U.S. foreign policy. And they seriously believe it will put an end to war. I suppose the Romans believed it too.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
chernus@spot.colorado.edu
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0127-08.htm
Written By
Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
With:
L.A. "Bud" Edney, Fred M. Franks, Charles A. Horner, Jonathan T. Howe, and Keith Brendley
NDU Press Book
December 1996
http://www.shockandawe.com/index1.htm
If this kind of evil turns you on, be my guest. There are lots of unthinking, unfeeling, Neocon hawks, who will love this stuff. I’d like to remind Mr. Ullman that North Korea has a few nukes of its own. And if China and Russia decide that they might be next after North Korea, they might not wait for their turns. The earth could become a burnt out cinder. Is that what you want? This is no impossibility – these guys, who have the ear of George W. Bush, are on the road to total annihilation. Welcome to the 21st Century.
Now do you still think George W. Bush is looking out for your best interests?
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
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