Will 'Shock and Awe' Be Sufficient?
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. — "Analysts write about war as if it's a ballet," Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf said after Operation Desert Storm, "like it's choreographed ahead of time, and when the orchestra strikes up and starts playing, everyone goes out there and plays a set piece."
"It is choreographed," he continued, but "what happens is, the orchestra starts playing and some son of a bitch climbs out of the orchestra pit with a bayonet and starts chasing you around the stage. And the choreography goes right out the window."
Senior leaders of the U.S. military believe they have planned for the unexpected problems they're certain to face. "What you do is you go down through all the worst-case scenarios," Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters March 4. "We worry about many, many worst-case scenarios."
A week earlier, Myers told the Economic Club of New York that Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has worked with the uniformed leadership to compile a list of "what can go wrong." It is now "quite a long list," Myers said.
Yet as the eleventh hour approaches, Myers seems torn.
His military conservatism and the inherent duty of professional soldiers lead him, like Schwarzkopf, to consider the worst case, to expect that man with a bayonet. But an equally strong impulse urges Myers to believe in the beautiful choreography made possible by American military and technological supremacy.
Let's call that beautiful choreography Plan A. What happens if the war gods turn against us? That, we'll call Plan B.
And, though senior leaders have not ignored Plan B, they have lost their hearts to Plan A.
Myers may warn about all the things that could go wrong, but the chairman -- like others in the Defense Department's inner circle these days -- has become captivated by the latest packaging of an ancient concept known as "shock and awe." He embodies a fundamental tension between hope and memory: between hope of a postindustrial form of combat in which one side wins without carnage, and memory of war's almost-unbroken record of destruction.
"Shock and awe" is the latest Pentagon buzzword for an American blitz against Iraq that, if war comes, will seek to defeat Saddam Hussein with "effects" rather than the physical destruction of enemy troops or their resources.
