Two US M-1 Abrams tanks passing underneath the “Hands of Victory” arch in Baghdad, 13 November 2003. The arch, one of two, consists of two outstretched hands holding swords that form the arch.
23 September 2022
The phrase shock and awe came to the fore during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The phrase was a term of art in the US military for the overwhelming application of military force to suddenly and completely destroy the enemy’s will to fight, achieving the military objectives with comparatively few casualties on the attacking side.
While one can find the co-location of shock and awe in many contexts stretching back a century or more, its use as a lexical item stems from a 1996 book, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance by Harlan Ullman and James Wade and published by the US National Defense University. Ullman and Wade write:
The key objective of Rapid Dominance is to 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. In crude terms, Rapid Dominance would seize control of the environment and paralyze or so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events so that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at tactical and strategic levels. An adversary would be rendered totally impotent and vulnerable to our actions. To the degree that nonlethal weaponry is useful, it would be incorporated into the ability to Shock and Awe and achieve Rapid Dominance.
Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases) is the non-nuclear equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. The Japanese were prepared for suicidal resistance until both nuclear bombs were used. The impact of those weapons was sufficient to transform both the mindset of the average Japanese citizen and the outlook of the leadership through this condition of Shock and Awe. The Japanese simply could not comprehend the destructive power carried by a single airplane. This incomprehension produced a state of awe.
Following the publication of the book, the phrase started appearing in defense journals and reports, indicating widespread adoption within the American armed forces. But it remained restricted to those circles, rarely breaking out into the mainstream press. One of the rare exceptions is an appearance in Newsweek on 1 December 1997 that quotes Ullman:
The only way to achieve a relatively bloodless victory over a well-armed opponent is to deploy so much force, so swiftly, that the enemy is overcome by what military analyst Harlan Ullman calls “a regime of shock and awe.” It’s the technique of the street mugger: sudden, stunning violence that paralyzes the victim’s will to fight back. So if you are a military planner looking out into the 21st century, what you want is an arsenal of new weapons that will produce “shock and awe.” The process of developing such an arsenal is what defense thinkers call “the revolution in military affairs”—a concept so important that, in military speak, it rates an acronym: RMA.
It isn’t until the run-up to US invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 that the phrase begins to appear in the mainstream press with any frequency. Here is an example from the British Daily Telegraph on 27 September 2001:
The US armada will exploit its overwhelming firepower to devastate the Taliban in a policy of "shock and awe", defence analysts said yesterday.
[…]
According to Professor Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason, head of defence studies at Birmingham University, in-flight refuelling tankers would be a key indicator.
"In-flight refuelling will be essential," he said. The US have some KC-10 tankers in the huge base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Analysts agree that when air power is called for, and it will be, it will be on a huge scale—a policy christened "shock and awe".
"One of the lessons of Kosovo was that the gradual build-up of attacks did not have the right effect on the regime [in Belgrade]," said Nigel Vinson, a specialist at the Royal United Services Institute. "You need to deploy `shock and awe' from the very beginning."
And shock and awe became a household term during the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. Here is an example from the Los Angeles Times of 5 May 2002 describing the planning for that invasion:
Launching ground and air attacks simultaneously—instead of leading off with a substantial air assault first to soften up Iraqi defenses—would produce shock and awe in enemy forces, according to early briefing documents. “It was a lead-with-your-chin, ground-only war,” a senior officer not in the Army said. But, he added, “The only shock and awe inspired was the ‘you gotta be [kidding] me’ look” it evoked in critics.
[…]
As planning continued into April, the internal questioning continued too. “How can you have shock and awe and deploy such a massive ground force at the same time?” one officer asked. Though the Army has positioned tanks and armored vehicles in Kuwait and Qatar, deployment of large numbers of troops could not be kept secret and might well provoke an Iraqi response.
The brackets around kidding are in the original. The actual quote was probably something on the order of “you gotta be shitting me.”
Sources:
Arkin, William M. “Planning an Iraqi War but Not an Outcome.” Los Angeles Times, 5 May 2002, M3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Google Books Ngram Viewer, 24 August 2022.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2022, s.v. shock, n.3.
Rooney, Ben. “Bomb Blitz Will ‘Shock and Awe’ the Taliban, the Military.” Daily Telegraph (London), 27 September 2001, 10. Gale Primary Sources: The Telegraph.
Ullman, Harlan K., and James P. Wade. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, DC: National Defense University, 1996, xxv–xxvi.
Watson, Russell and John Barry. “Tomorrow’s New Face of Battle.” Newsweek (special issue), 1 December 1997, 66. ProQuest Magazines.
Photo credit: Technical Sergeant John L. Houghton, Jr., USAF, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.