"Shock and Awe"

[pynchonoid]

CBS reports a US strategy for attacking Baghdad that
sounds a lot like the V2 attack on London, only worse
(quite naturally I suppose, fiction always lagging):

"If the Pentagon sticks to its current war plan, one
day in March the Air Force and Navy will launch
between 300 and 400 cruise missiles at targets in
Iraq. As CBS News Correspondent David Martin reports,
this is more than number that were launched during the
entire 40 days of the first Gulf War. 

On the second day, the plan calls for launching
another 300 to 400 cruise missiles. 

"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," said one
Pentagon official who has been briefed on the plan. 

"The sheer size of this has never been seen before,
never been contemplated before," the official said. 

The battle plan is based on a concept developed at the
National Defense University. It's called "Shock and
Awe" and it focuses on the psychological destruction
of the enemy's will to fight rather than the physical
destruction of his military forces. 

"We want them to quit. We want them not to fight,"
says Harlan Ullman, one of the authors of the Shock
and Awe concept which relies on large numbers of
precision guided weapons. 

"So that you have this simultaneous effect, rather
like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days
or weeks but in minutes," says Ullman. 

In the first Gulf War, 10 percent of the weapons were
precision guided. In this war 80 percent will be
precision guided. 

The Air Force has stockpiled 6,000 of these guidance
kits in the Persian Gulf to convert ordinary dumb
bombs into satellite-guided bombs, a weapon that
didn't exist in the first war. 

"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're
the general and 30 of your division headquarters have
been wiped out. You also take the city down. By that I
mean you get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5
days they are physically, emotionally and
psychologically exhausted," Ullman tells Martin. [...]



<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/01/24/eveningnews/printable537928.shtml>


-Doug

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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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