Shock and Awe Has Failed

Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense, 18 January 2013:

China's unprovoked attack against Taiwan on 10 October 2011 drastically shifted the balance of power in the Pacific. Chinese tanks still patrol the streets of Taipei, enforcing a state of martial law . . .

The People's Republic of China unleashed its coordinated military, economic, and Cyberspace assault with devastating affect. Our coordinated "shock and awe" response failed and China refuses to end its occupation of Taiwan. Worse yet, China's attacks against our space-based communications and surveillance platforms have paralyzed our technocentric warfighting systems. Insidious biological attacks triggered SARS-like epidemics throughout major West Coast cities, and the Rapier computer virus stunned Wall Street on a scale not seen since 11 September 2001. Based on these events, the President formed the Office of the secretary of Defense's "Dragon Slayer" working group on 21 October 2012. This distinguished group of scholars, government officials, and general and flag officers conducted a comprehensive analysis of shock and awe. Their examination of the concept that shapes our current military doctrine, structure, and organization is critical to understanding why we have lost Taiwan.

The National Defense University published Shock and Awe in 1996. Though written under the auspices of a senior working group, the principal authors were Harlan L. Ullman and James P. Wade. The authors' education and experiences with the conventional conflicts of the late 20th century shaped the intellectual terrain of shock and awe. Though this landscape bore operational fruit in Kuwait in 1991, it failed against China in 2011. In retrospect, the conceptual landscape of shock and awe contained the seeds of future misfortune. The concept was founded on the assumption that "there is no external adversary in the world that can successfully challenge the extraordinary power of the American military ... in regional or conventional war."¹ This certainly was the case with wars as we envisioned them and against enemies who played by our rules. The authors recognized "potential adversaries may try to change the terms of future conflict and make as irrelevant as possible . . . current U.S. advantages."² The concept winked at this and other asymmetric threats, but consistently returned to its central theme: absolute mastery of the battle space through advanced technological means.

Shock and awe also envisioned total control of the operational environment. This was accomplished through rapid dominance, maximizing knowledge of the environment, the adversary, and our own forces, and reaching new levels of operational competence or "institutionalized brilliance."³ By 2011, it seemed these characteristics had become operational realities. The shock of 11 September 2001 energized muchneeded reform of the defense acquisition system. More important, Congress increased funding for military training and education. Given these steps forward, what went wrong?

Files in the Ointment

Proponents of shock and awe believed absolute and perfect knowledge of the battlefield was an achievable and most desirable goal, an objective ultimately contradicted by the realities of war. As Carl von Clausewitz said, "Knowing is something different from doing."⁴ War is a clash of wills, conducted in a medium of chaos, death, and destruction. Though technology since Desert Storm provided relative order and precise lethality on the modern battlefield, the nature of war did not change. As the Marine Corps stated in its timeless doctrinal publication, Warfighting, war is a place where "all actions take place in an atmosphere of uncertainty, or the fog of war. Uncertainty pervades battle in the form of unknowns about the enemy, about the environment, and even about the friendly situation. . . . The very nature of war makes certainty impossible."⁵

Achieving certainty in the battle space required technological, procedural, and human advances. Robotics, space-based platforms, unmanned vehicles, nanotechnology, enhanced human-performance drugs, and cutting-edge information-management methods brought U.S. forces to the brink of operational omnipresence. The human mind remained, however, the long pole in the warfare certainty tent. Ironically, technology made the war fighter the weak link in the warfighting chain. Human fragility was exacerbated by the quest for battle space certainty. Technology flooded the battle space with data and information, not actionable knowledge. The military was caught on the horns of an information dilemma. In the past, too little information caused operational missteps, but then too much information created a Gordian knot of data fusion, processing, dissemination, and understanding.

During World War II, the Germans used Blitzkrieg and maneuver warfare to conquer space and time. Commander's intent and mission-type orders instilled in subordinates a bias for action in the absence of direct orders. Uncertainty and confusion were mitigated by boldness, daring, and speed. A leader's intuition, experience, and training provided the mental tools to craft situational awareness, while technology provided the mechanical means to exploit operational opportunities. Shock and awe embraced these themes, but the construct was weakened by an overreliance on technology. In the recent conflict with China, the loss of critical communication and intelligence systems blinded U.S. forces. Operational tempo and precision lethality suffered as U.S. forces fought to regain situational awareness manually.

We became the victims of our own success. The lessons of Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan were ignored because they did not support our preconceived conceptual desires. Our failures can be traced to cultural arrogance, an underappreciation for the enemy's ingenuity and willpower, and failure to prepare for asymmetric threats. Shock and awe gave little treatment to the unpredictable actions of a cunning enemy. Instead, it assumed "perception attacks" would force unwitting foes to see, sense, and act on information provided by all-controlling, all-knowing U.S. forces.⁶ The shocked and awed enemy then would be dutifully coerced, deceived, dominated, or destroyed. The technological advances and organizational reforms of the past two decades made these conceptual boasts operational possibilities, but proved illusory when confronting nation-states such as China that chose to fight unconventionally.

The Answer to Shock and Awe

In 1999, two colonels from the People's Liberation Army Air Force published Unrestricted Warfare. Their conceptual, intellectual, and thought-provoking work captured the political, military, and technological trends of the time. They argued that globalism, the decline of nation-states, and unbeatable U.S. military power created the requirement for waging unrestricted war, where the "first rule is there are no rules."⁷ Unrestricted war went beyond traditional military conflict and applied violence against a nation's political, economic, and technological domains. The Chinese authors viewed conflict through a holistic lens, and exposed the asymmetric vulnerabilities of the technologically dependent United States. Americans assumed technology provided the ways and means to wage war perfectly, but the Chinese predicted the asymmetric symptoms of technological brilliance.

The Chinese and U.S. views on war reflected different cultural perspectives. These contrasting views were captured by Professor Richard Nisbett in his book, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently. he writes that "Asians approach the world with a holistic, field oriented sensibility, paying careful mind to an object or act's web of relations and context; Westerners are more object oriented, training their eye on that object or act's prominence and often slighting the surrounding field."⁸ The professor's insights strike at the heart of the divergent intellectual pathways of shock and awe and unrestricted warfare. Each concept acknowledged the supremacy of U.S. operational proficiency and technical dominance. The Chinese and U.S. authors, however, derived distinct and separate conclusions from U.S. capabilities. From a Western perspective, shock and awe provided the operational ways and technological means to dominate an enemy completely. From a Chinese perspective, this overwhelming superiority forced foes to find new ways to avoid U.S. strengths.

Unrestricted warfare enlarged the boundaries and built a new toolbox for war. Technology-fueled globalism increased the interdependency and fragility of world markets, communications networks, and banking systems. The new and improved tools of war made trade embargoes, hostile capitalist takeovers, currency devaluation, and computer hackers effective, if not lethal, force projection methods. In terms of nonarmed force, the anthrax contamination conducted after 11 September 2001 was disruptive and created severe psychological trauma. In terms of potential lethality, weapons of mass destruction made terrorists into new and exceptionally deadly threats. All of these foreboding actions and threats blurred the line between combatants and noncombatants and exposed weaknesses in the nationstate's shield over its citizenry. At the operational level of war, it presented challenges that transcended conventional warfighting principles.

The threats cited in Unrestricted Warfare created unique challenges for the U.S. military. First, shock-and-awe principles proved ill suited for elimination of the asymmetric threat. In the face of terrorists and troublesome nonstate actors, "professional armies are like gigantic dinosaurs which lack strength commensurate to their size."⁹ The U.S. military dinosaur neglected the mixed asymmetric lessons of the Banana Wars, Somalia, and Iraq. This institutional amnesia was compounded by U.S. military reluctance to engage in consequence management, homeland security, and operations other than war. The specter of posse comitatus constrained cross-pollination between domestic law enforcement and military organizations. The messy postconflict stabilization mission in Iraq created long-standing bureaucratic feuds between the State Department, national intelligence agencies, and combatant commanders.

The Chinese attacks against Taiwan and the United States were skillfully orchestrated to provide maximum strategic and operational effect. At the strategic level, manmade viruses, anthrax contaminants, and computer attacks overwhelmed or paralyzed the Departments of Homeland security and Defense. On the theater level, Chinese-sponsored terrorists used nonlethal agents to incapacitate key members of the Pacific Combatant Command staff and Seventh Fleet leaders. At the operational level, the regional carrier strike group was infected with the same SARS virus that struck the West Coast of the United States. Concurrently, the Chinese cut off food supplies to North Korea, instigating a massive seaborne exodus of North Korean civilians to Japan. The resultant human assistance crisis weakened Japanese resolve against China. These measures, weaved into a strategy of unrestricted warfare, isolated the theater of operations. The Chinese then applied conventional might to defeat their longtime nemesis, Taiwan. The disruptive, but not cataclysmic, attacks against the United States prevented immediate escalation of the conflict, and gave the Chinese time to petition the United Nations for diplomatic resolution of the crisis.

Future Lessons

Based on the Chinese victory in Taiwan, the working group has provided the following recommendations:

* Rework shock and awe to cast a wider conceptual net. Shock and awe espoused operational brilliance, but since 2001 the United States has focused on conventional brilliance, instead of brilliance across the range of war. In high-intensity conflict, the specter of a clear and present danger focused planning efforts and provided realworld impetus for joint and multinational operations. As the perceived threat decreased (or in reality became less familiar) joint operations and planning efforts suffered. It took generations of experience, education, and training to provide high fidelity to conventional joint military operations. The same fidelity, if not more, is required for the new threats of the 21st century. The mirror-imaging lens that previously guided U.S. doctrine, equipment, and training must be reshaped for unrestricted warfare.

* Expand and refine the U.S. approach to operational art. An unintended consequence of shock and awe was the erosion of operational art. The concept imposed a tactical template on the operational level of war by focusing on the informational, targeting, and scientific aspects of conflict. As a result, the fog of unrestricted warfare blinds shock and awe's technocentric, tactical vision. Strengthening shock and awe's conceptual vision requires expansion and refinement of the U.S. conduct of operational art. In the past, key activities at all levels of war had a force-on-force, battlefield focus. In the future, these activities will include all elements of national power.

* Increase integration and jointness between military and nonmilitary centers of power. Unrestricted warfare exploits the seams between civilian, government, and military centers of power. The joint interagency task forces of the late 20th century provided many of the operational lessons and organizational templates for the integration of these organizations. Placing talented senior governmental officials in key positions within combatant commands would have been one means to achieve this organizational goal. A future combatant command would benefit from a civilian deputy commander and logical insertion of nonmilitary duty experts in the intelligence, operations, and plans directorates. Senior field-grade and enlisted personnel should receive exchange tours with private enterprise and governmental and nongovernmental organizations.

* Treat war as both an art and a science. The United States must stop viewing war as a Newtonian physics problem. Shedding this scientific predisposition for gadgets, gizmos, and gears has proved most difficult. This country's way of war has always mirrored the design of the U.S. economy and society. The invention of the railroad, telegraph, telephone, automobile, and airplane provided the movement, mobility, and connectivity for 19th-and 20th-century warfare.¹⁰ As the United States shifted from an industrial to a high-tech economy, so did it shift its way of war. Unrestricted warfare has exposed the asymmetric vulnerabilities of this paradigm. To make matters even more difficult, unrestricted war will have criminal, cultural, economic, and military dimensions. To quote Unrestricted Warfare, when the planner of tomorrow asks for the location of the battlefield, the answer will be "everywhere."¹¹ Developing a coherent strategy and effective operational plan for beating unrestricted warfare requires a balanced and comprehensive approach.

* Make ends, ways, and means mutually supporting. Despite technological advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, and precision weapon systems, human beings remain at the center of the warfighting stage. Unrestricted warfare has exposed the seams and weaknesses of mechanized war. Worse yet, it has used the biological and Cyberspace advances of the 21st century to turn technology on itself, and in so doing has turned shock and awe on its conceptual head. The unpredictable and ingenious enemy of unrestricted warfare has slipped the technological shackles of shock and awe. The United States must coordinate, deconflict, and integrate all elements of national power under the auspices of humancentric warfare to defeat the Chinese threat.

After France's defeat in World War II, a French officer said his nation was defeated because "our leaders, or those who acted for them, were incapable of thinking in terms of a new war. In other words, the German triumph was, essentially, a triumph of intellect—and it is that which makes it so peculiarly serious."¹² Shock and awe reflected great intellectual energy, but, like the French Maginot Line, it created the perfect response for the threats of the last war. Although shock and awe proved to be a recipe for defeat, Paris has not been lost. Accepting unrestricted warfare for what it is, instead of what we want it to be, will be the first step toward reversing Chinese gains. Further integration of civilian, government, and military centers of power will provide the operational wherewithal to combat this new way of war.