While the phrase and concept for "shock and awe" were invented over a decade ago, it was not until the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003, that the term gained its veritable 15 minutes of fame. As the inventor of the phrase and the co-chairman of a group of retired senior military and former civilian defense officials responsible for creating the construct, the brief attention was both an interesting and frustrating moment. With bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles raining down on Baghdad and other targets in Iraq, the Pentagon announced that a campaign of "shock and awe" was being waged against Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi army.

A day or so after the attacks began, London's Daily Telegraph ran, under a two-inch headline that trumpeted "Baghdad Blitz", a spectacular photo of an American bomb exploding somewhere in the Iraqi capital. The print and electronic media erroneously seized on the notion of shock and awe as a massive and therefore indiscriminate bombing campaign reminiscent of World War II, designed to cripple and incapacitate the entire country--not just destroy the regime. The Bush Administration recognized this public relations disaster in the making, and as suddenly as it had attracted attention, the phrase vanished without a trace.

Shock and awe, and the attendant concept of "rapid dominance", were meant to be the polar opposites of what was being portrayed in the press as akin to the massive bombing campaigns of World War II and the use of overwhelming force to defeat an enemy by literally destroying its army, navy and air force in a firepower-dominated, attrition style of warfare. Attrition-oriented warfare aims to wear out or destroy the enemy by wearing down his forces far more quickly and efficiently than our forces are degraded in combat.

Indeed, the basis for shock and awe sprang from the great Chinese military philosopher and general Sun Tzu. Ironically, the key question with which the group wrestled was how to defeat an enemy without firing a shot (or with minimal use of military force), by overcoming the adversary's means and will to resist. A corollary was that less collateral damage would lead to swifter and less expensive reconstruction. Critics argued that this form of "immaculate warfare" was impractical. We disagreed, believing that the theoretical and intellectual construct of shock and awe should be tested and evaluated through war games, seminars and then operational tests. None of that has happened--yet.

This article carries on those aims. First, because of the widespread misuse of the term, this piece explains the original intent and application of "shock and awe." Second, despite the hype, it shows how shock and awe were never inherent in the planning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Finally, this article takes an abbreviated look at the future to determine where and whether shock and awe have any applications beyond conventional war.

In the Beginning

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming victory won in the 1991 Gulf War, the time seemed right for major changes in the military capability and force structure of the United States. Under then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and the all-powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, the administration of George H. W. Bush proceeded cautiously with its "Base Force" study, choosing to trim American forces numerically by about a third but keeping the same type of strategy and force structure. Hence, the "base force" was a smaller version of the military that won the Cold War with its emphasis on engaging and defeating an enemy power through attrition-style warfare, enabled by "maneuver" (or the ability to move more quickly than the enemy), and equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.

The Clinton Administration entered office in 1993 and conducted its own defense assessment under Secretary of Defense Les Aspin called the "Bottom Up Review." The driving force behind what became known as the BUR was also Colin Powell, in his last months as chairman. The BUR made no fundamental course corrections and progressed only modestly from Bush's base force, even though great lip service had been paid to the "revolution in military affairs" (RMA) and the level of American military prowess so vividly demonstrated in Operation Desert Storm, which, after a deadly bombing campaign, routed the Iraq army in a ground campaign lasting one hundred hours. The BUR made no radical change, continuing the scope and pace of evolution that had characterized military reform since the Kennedy Administration shifted from Eisenhower's strategy of massive retaliation to a flexible-response formula for tailoring U.S. forces. Flexible response meant having the capability to counter the Soviet Union at every level of conflict, from thermonuclear to guerrilla and counter-insurgent warfare.

In simple terms, American military strategy and force structure were based on several long-standing concepts. First, military force was "kinetic"--in that it attempted to destroy an enemy army with an overwhelming use of firepower and the superiority of its weapons and technology--and attrition oriented. Second, force would be applied according to the doctrine of overwhelming and later decisive force. The late Caspar Weinberger, Ronald Reagan's first secretary of defense, coined the phrase "overwhelming force." "Decisive force" was Powell's addition when he became chairman, though as Weinberger's senior military assistant, he had a hand in fashioning the so-called Weinberger Doctrine.

The Army was organized around its infantry, modern tanks and fighting vehicles, artillery, helicopters and support; the Air Force around its dazzling arsenal of aircraft; the Navy around aircraft carriers, air wings, surface ships and submarines; and the Marine Corps much like the Army but with amphibious ships to take it wherever it had to go. While maneuver warfare was always important, at the end of the day, firepower and attrition were the ultimate means to achieve victory, enabled by other capabilities, including electronic warfare and highly sophisticated surveillance.

What brought our group together was the discomfort that despite the daunting military capacity that the United States possessed, other concepts might be more relevant to the evolving post-Cold War era. So James Wade, a former senior Defense Department official, and I recruited a bevy of distinguished retired officers, all but one who had been in service during Desert Storm, to take on this problem. That group included retired Admirals L. A. "Bud" Edney, Jonathan T. Howe and Leighton "Snuffy" Smith; and Generals Chuck Horner (who ran the air war during Desert Storm), Fred Franks (who commanded VII Corps during that war), Tom Morgan and later Gary Luck (who had commanded XVIII Corps). Dr. John Foster, a former head of Pentagon research and engineering, was also a charter member, and Donald Rumsfeld was a later participant and observer.

It was Chuck Horner's frustration with being unable to topple the Iraqi regime during the first war that focused our thinking. Horner often remarked that during Desert Storm he simply did not know where to "put the needle" in order to bring down the enemy. We went about searching for those needles and the appropriate entry points to defeat an adversary with minimal effort and presumably at the least cost to us and to the other side.

Behavior and Key Elements

Affecting behavior is crucial to life, whether in war (most dramatically), high-stakes politics or business, or any other form of human activity. The key in affecting behavior is to get people to do what we want or to stop what is harmful or contrary to our interests. But how could that be done through war, where the traditional means to victory was to destroy the enemy's will to resist by destroying his military? Could behavior be so affected and victory achieved without the need to impose large amounts of physical and direct force to destroy or neutralize the enemy?

Clearly, will and perception were the intended targets of what Prussian military philosopher Karl von Clausewitz called the centers of gravity. War was about breaking an enemy's will to resist and forcing the adversary, as he wrote, "to do our will." Consequently, our approach was to focus on understanding how to affect, influence and even control will and perception principally through military means. Of course, compelling behavior can be done coercively. In military parlance, that led to firepower and attrition solutions, usually with high levels of destruction and damage, certainly to the enemy. Yet, as Sun Tzu counseled, the best outcome is to win without firing a shot.

After much debate, the mechanisms that we believed could affect, influence and control will and perception were distilled into the notion of shock and awe. "Shock" was defined as the momentary reaction to some event leading to paralysis, impotence and a feeling of helplessness. In other words, it meant overcoming an enemy so quickly and rendering that enemy incapable so as to make any resistance futile or impossible. Shock, of course, is as old as war. The issue became applying it strategically and politically, as well as tactically.

"Awe" went beyond intimidation. It was an effect that translated the initial shock into an enduring quality, so that will and perception would not revert back to a pre-existing condition. If shock was sudden and stunning, awe was the inoculation that made the effects on will and perception lasting. The combination of shock and awe would either so immobilize an adversary that the only choice was surrender, or create a paralysis tantamount to defeat. The means for translating shock and awe into operational effects were principally military. However, at the time we believed that non-military means such as diplomacy, economics, disinformation, logic and even threat could also produce sufficient shock and awe as to affect will and perception.

Gradations of shock and awe have ranged from the very discrete to the massive. The examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate the latter, with the understanding that the reference to nuclear weapons could inadvertently suggest that the concept depended on them. That was untrue. However, the effect was to transform a society bent on suicidal resistance to benign and total passivity, the most visible example of how shock and awe could work. To some, the deaths of scores of thousands of Japanese in the bombings implied maximum uses of force. However, when balanced against estimates of a million allied casualties and many millions of Japanese had an invasion been required, the use of nuclear weapons was not without justification. The questions were whether and how those effects might be achieved using minimal amounts of force and coercive tactics.

To achieve these effects, we developed four basic characteristics to shock and awe. First was what we called "perfect knowledge", meaning comprehensive understanding of the environment, the enemy, ourselves and other relevant items beyond orders of battle and what passes for "intelligence" on the adversary, including culture. Knowledge could never be perfect. However, as Sun Tzu observed, understanding the enemy is the commander's first objective.

Second was to assure control of the environment. The environment meant everything from the airspace, the land and, where needed, the subsurface. Using the environment to our advantage, we would deny the enemy any use of that environment. The enemy would "see" whatever we wanted, and we would have the ability to cut off and limit all crucial intelligence and information available to the adversary--a capability built around knowledge of how to achieve these aims and the technology to achieve them, rather than a reliance on masses of forces.

Third was rapidity--meaning the ability to move faster than the enemy across all dimensions of land, sea, air and space, including the ether. It also meant being able to think, anticipate and react faster than the enemy, as well as having the physical capability for rapid movement.

Fourth was brilliance in execution--which we believed should be the focus of training and education. Brilliance was the standard for operational prowess.

The engine that we saw putting these characteristics to use was "effects-based" planning and operations: focusing on the outcomes to be achieved by using all of the tools in the military kit with maximum effectiveness and minimum effort. That also meant taking an adversary or target and slicing down to the absolutely key components, which, if destroyed or rendered inoperable, would negate its capability.

Take, for example, targeting an enemy power plant. In earlier wars, a bombing raid would attack the entire facility, destroying as much as possible to neutralize the target. Using effects-based thinking, that power plant would be analyzed to find the critical components such as transmission lines, transformers or other vulnerabilities that if severed or destroyed would make the entire plant inoperable. Given the revolutionary advances in accuracy, precision and lethality, a handful of weapons could impose effects that would have required hundreds or thousands of weapons in the past. And here the transformation of warfare from a time when any number of sorties was needed to destroy a single target to the reality today that a single sortie can engage and destroy a number of targets has provided an order-of-magnitude advantage in carrying out a campaign of shock and awe. The implication was that effects-based planning could be applied to toppling a regime, the goal that eluded and frustrated Chuck Horner.

Operation Iraqi Freedom--Test Case?

George W. Bush entered office promising, among other things, to transform the military for the 21st century. After a rocky start, and impelled by the attacks of September 11, "transformation" took on clearer form. A process rather than an end state, transformation sought to make military power more lethal, agile, precise and flexible. While the shape and composition of the forces have not changed dramatically, the capability and versatility have been greatly enhanced. The successful military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were used as proof of the power of transformation.

Despite the initial hype, and for all the transformational efforts, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not an example of shock and awe. Instead, shock and awe were used as a slogan, not a strategy. To be sure, effects-based operations were fundamental to planning and execution. However, the campaign was conventionally based on using the overpowering advantages of American military power in a race to Baghdad to overthrow the regime. That relatively fewer forces were needed for the combat phase camouflaged the demands of what followed. Ironically, more forces are needed for these so-called postwar stability operations than for actually fighting the war.

The Bush Administration's military objectives for the campaign were to seize Baghdad, protect the oil wells and neutralize the Iraqi army en route, along with any weapons of mass destruction encountered. But no serious thought was given to influencing, affecting and controlling Iraqi will and perception to achieve postwar aims, such as producing a secure, democratic and stable successor state to Saddam's despotic rule. Since the administration failed to plan its postwar strategy around that central component of shock and awe, it cannot be said to have deployed the concept.

Indeed, little thought was given to the new government, who would form it, how the major religious, tribal and ethnic groups would be motivated to support it, and whether Iraqi will and perception could be directed toward that end. That absence of planning highlights the difference between the concept of shock and awe and the basis for the thinking that went into Operation Iraqi Freedom. The presumption was that a quick military victory would form the conditions for a successful postwar government. Properly applied, shock and awe could potentially have corrected such misperceptions by obligating the administration to identify its longer-term goals, such as establishing a working postwar government, and carefully plan a strategy for obtaining from the Iraqi population the broad support for (or at least acquiescence to) such objectives.

Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrated only two of the four characteristics of shock and awe: rapidity and brilliance in execution. Knowledge of the enemy was deficient. And our control of the environment really only extended to the Iraqi military. Knowledge of the enemy was so imperfect that it contributed greatly to the failure to understand the nature of the post-hostility operations, or Phase IV, as they were called.

Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's priority was dealing with internal insurgencies, and he therefore kept bridges open in order to deploy his forces to put down internal rebellion. Importantly, the Saddam fedayeen, a paramilitary force loyal only to Saddam, had been deployed to the south to guard against rebellion and insurgency. On each of these crucial points we were ignorant.

America's ignorance of the existence and intent of the Saddam fedayeen was a critical blind spot, demonstrating the importance of the intelligence-gathering aspect of shock and awe. Superior U.S. military prowess across multiple categories, including state-of-the-art surveillance technology, did not compensate for that blind spot. Hence, the administration did not understand that bypassing the fedayeen on the race to Baghdad would have highly negative long-term consequences. During Desert Storm, General Fred Franks, commander of VII Corps (and no relation to General Tommy Franks), observed that he had virtually no knowledge of what lay beyond the next sand berm, and what he knew, he knew only because he had deployed reconnaissance units. The same lack of intelligence, despite the plethora of high-tech sensors, plagued Iraqi Freedom.

By definition, the shock and awe construct would have forced the administration's focus towards the challenges native to Iraq and taken it far beyond tactical military planning. If properly applied, the concept could have mitigated some of the intractable conditions U.S. forces are now facing. Shock and awe would have emphasized the outcome of establishing a stable Iraq and focused on influencing, affecting and controlling will and perception to that end. From that endpoint, military operations would have been designed to achieve that result.

In particular, the concept could have led to a better understanding of Saddam's strategy and the role of the fedayeen and thereby compelled U.S. forces to deal with them early on rather than merely racing to Baghdad. Such an approach would have required more ground forces, a factor that might also have brought attendant advantages. Whether conditions in Iraq would be measurably different today had shock and awe, as originally envisaged, been applied is impossible to know. What remains clear, though, is that the strategy that was displayed in Operation Iraqi Freedom was not shock and awe.

The Future of Shock and Awe

Although shock and awe have mistakenly been associated with the campaign in Iraq, some of the omissions and deficiencies in the planning for Operation Iraqi Freedom appear to validate shock and awe as frames for strategy.

During the original construction of the concept, there was a consensus that variants of the concept could also be broadly applied to a range of geostrategic challenges. Focusing on how to affect, influence and control will and perception would enrich U.S. policy today in dealing with states at crucial crossroads, such as China, India, Iran and North Korea. The critical question is less whether but how will and perception can be affected in ways that advance our interests. So, too, effects-based planning, expanded beyond military use, can be applied to these challenges. Ideally, a robust series of war games and seminars would test where, how and why the foundations of shock and awe could be applied and, equally important, where they could not. An effects-based approach would entail comprehensive scenario projections and prevent administrations from responding reflexively to complex problems.

The most crucial aspect of shock and awe in this preliminary analysis and evaluation would be the pursuit of "perfect knowledge." Our knowledge of the enemy has proven unsatisfactory, whether in Vietnam or Iraq. There is no doubt that the United States failed to understand either Iraq or its culture. It appears that the same is happening vis-Ã -vis Iran. Regarding our intelligence, writ large, on China, India and other large states, the jury is still out, despite the raft of genuine experts on each. On those and other challenges, the shock and awe construct could serve as a check on policy traps that may seem superficially or politically appealing but when viewed under a more exacting lens are clearly deficient. Given the stakes involved in evolving geopolitical circumstances, such a construct has added currency.

Two examples are prime for future investigation: China and terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. The key organizing questions about China are where we would we like to see China in five, ten and twenty years hence, and what leverage or influence we might have in affecting its direction. From there the administration would work backwards. Such an approach would preclude heavily ideological perspectives--an inclination that can be inherently counterproductive, as evidenced in Iraq.

My argument is that we should like to see China as a friend and even strategic and economic partner with an open economy, subject to the rule of law. Others may disagree. But to get there requires a coordinated strategy dependent on far more than military force. Indeed, dependence on the threat of military force or a strong declaratory policy on containing China almost certainly will induce further intransigence on China's part.

Chinese will and perception must be shaped to the degree that they can be. This means far more transparency as well as exchanges of personnel. The military can be the vanguard. Chinese and American military personnel should be exchanged on a growing basis, in part to build trust and confidence and partly to understand one another better. There is also no reason that treaty relationships on arms control, nuclear weapons and other important issues cannot be negotiated. It would also be wise to downplay China as the future threat. That is too far in the future to serve usefully as the basis for planning.

Dealing with terrorists also begins with knowledge. What motivates Osama bin Laden and others? Why does Iran back Hizballah? What are the grievances and forces motivating each? Are any of them negotiable and is compromise possible? Merely answering those questions is valuable in constructing future strategies.

From those departure points, crafting a series of objectives is the first step. From those objectives, the other three characteristics of shock and awe--control of the environment, rapidity and brilliance in execution--can be brought to bear in the form of questions, namely, can we apply each with or without the use of force, and what outcomes can be obtained? Part of this analysis is to determine situations where shock and awe are neither appropriate nor workable. Space precludes a lengthier discussion of specific examples of applying parts of shock and awe to affecting behavior, an examination that deserves far broader treatment than in a short paper.

The larger intellectual advantage of applying this construct of shock and awe to will and perception is that it forces us to state clearly what our objectives are. Those objectives can be debated. However, in the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the greatest deficiency was in not understanding how the aims of the campaign to overthrow Saddam translated into making Iraq stable and secure. In future situations, the application of shock and awe, interestingly, may have the unique advantage of forcing us to think through second- and third-order issues. We may not have all of the answers to "what next?", but at least we will have some.

Harlan Ullman is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a columnist for the Washington Times. His latest book, America's Promise Restored: Preventing Culture, Crusade and Partisanship from Wrecking our Country, is due out in June.