What strategy caused the Iraqi regime to collapse? What must the United States and Britain do to consolidate the fleeting gains of a historic military victory? PISRR: penetrate-isolate-subvert-reorient-reharmonize.
In the final years of his life, retired Air Force Colonel John Boyd (1927-1997) invented PISRR as a complement to his now famous OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop. Some PISRR elements describe what has happened so far in Operation Iraqi Freedom; others suggest what must come next.
From the outset of the 2003 Iraq war, Coalition armor, infantry, and special forces and constant pressure from the air quickly penetrated and isolated major portions of the country. Ground forces operated along thrust lines that quickly pierced the brain and heart of the Iraqi regime: Baghdad and oil. From the war's first minute, Iraq was left staggering like a heart-attack victim struggling in vain to regain balance. Iraq's organs of war had been cut off by a more nimble brain—a Coalition force capable of a quicker decision cycle and able to sustain multiple penetrations.
Coalition forces used the same penetration and isolation strategies that had worked so well on the national battle space on the cities of Baghdad and Basra. Instead of forming a noose around the cities in an attempt to strangle everyone, they effectively subverted the Iraqi regime by cutting the bonds of authority and fear that shackled the people to it.
Operation Desert Storm provided a template for a plodding and sequential approach to war: weeks of an "air war" were followed by days of a "ground war" that was mechanically linked to phase lines that repeatedly halted the tempo of potentially fast-moving ground units. In contrast, Operation Iraqi Freedom hit the Iraqi regime from the outset with a combined-arms force focused on cutting the moral-mental-physical links of the Iraqi regime to the rest of the world, starting with senior command elements in Baghdad as well as among command and military/paramilitary units dispersed across Iraq.
In his "Patterns of Conflict" briefing dated December 1986, Boyd wrote about the "essence of Blitzkrieg," which reads like a screenplay for what the world witnessed on 9 April 2003 with the fall of Baghdad and the collapse of Saddam's regime:
Create grand tactical success then exploit and expand it into strategic success for a decisive victory. . . . Blitzers, by being able to infiltrate or penetrate or get inside adversary's system, generate moral-mental-physical non-cooperative (or isolated) centers of gravity, as well as undermine or seize those centers of gravity adversary depends upon, in order to magnify friction, produce paralysis, and bring about adversary collapse, (p. 87, emphasis in original)
Having penetrated, isolated, and subverted the Iraqi regime, the United States and Britain must consolidate the war's fleeting gains by borrowing a page from the Boyd PISRR playbook—reorient and reharmonize. This would be wise, as the historic military victory has conveyed brief advantage to the Coalition partners. Yet the United States and Britain must now also use their power to help the Shia, Sunni, and Kurd build an Iraq without Saddam.
It is easy to picture Saddam scuttling from bunker to bunker, increasingly disoriented with each passing hour of penetration, isolation, and subversion at a national, city, and personal level, while power relentlessly slips through his fingers until he is left as a dead man walking. Now that's a real PISRR.
Captain Moore was designated a naval aviator in 1979. He serves in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as the military assistant for the Operational Test and Evaluation of Naval Aviation Systems: the future aircraft carrier (CVN-21); the FA-18E/F Super Hornet; and the Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle-Navy. He commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 81.