No shock, no awe:
It never happened

WASHINGTON – When U.S. bombs first pounded Baghdad, Fox News and other TV media breathlessly declared that the Pentagon's promised "shock and awe" campaign was "under way." In fact, it never took place, nor will it, U.S. officials say.

The Pentagon at the last minute pulled its telegraphed super-punch, which was intended to quickly knock out Saddam Hussein's regime, officials say. And it still doesn't plan on delivering it as "Operation Iraqi Freedom" moves forward.

F-14A Tomcat ignites afterburners just prior to launching off flight deck aboard USS Kitty Hawk

Shock and awe, as planned, was supposed to be a short but ferocious and nonstop bombing campaign simultaneously directed across a broad number of targets – from command-and-control centers in Baghdad to the Baath Party headquarters there to the Republican Guard divisions in the field. More firepower was to be unleashed on Iraq in just the first few days of the operation than in the entire 38-day air campaign of the 1991 Gulf war – with the goal being to stun Saddam's regime into surrendering.

But there was no shock, and the Baghdad Butcher apparently has not been awed.

"What we are doing now is not the plan I was reading up to February," said a U.S. official closely involved in the operation from its inception last year. "It was supposed to be four days of intense bombing followed by ground fighting."

Instead, the air campaign has progressed in fits and starts, centering mostly on Baghdad, and has only in recent days targeted Republican Guard columns outside Baghdad – well after U.S. ground troops began marching toward the main front. And securing the oil fields in southern Iraq was their first order.

A member of 40th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron runs weapons-targeting check on B-52 during Iraqi bombing mission

"There was also supposed to be an attack into the center of Baghdad, taking it over, followed by successive takeovers expanding from the center of the city," said the official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. "Now they are talking about a siege."

Harlan Ullman, the military adviser who created the shock-and-awe doctrine, says he doesn't recognize it in action in Iraq.

"The current campaign does not appear to correspond to what we envisioned," said Ullman, principal author of the 1996 book, "Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance."

"This bombing campaign did not immediately go after Iraqi military forces in the field, particularly the Republican Guard divisions and political levers of power, such as the Baath Party headquarters," explained Ullman, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He says that if the air campaign had destroyed a big chunk of Iraq's ground forces, it's possible that Iraqi resistance might have been softened, and U.S. troops might already be in Baghdad by now.

Is it too late for shock and awe now? "We have not seen it; it is not coming," Ullman said flatly.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Pentagon brass now deny giving the impression they planned to shock Saddam into submission with an overwhelming display of force, thereby ending the war quickly. Rumsfeld blamed the TV media and their stables of hired defense experts for raising expectations of a massive and relentless bombing blitz and a short, decisive war.

But Ullman says that Army Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of all U.S. forces in the war, told President Bush's war cabinet in briefings before the war that "shock and awe would combine to offset the numerical superiority of Iraqi forces and stun their leadership into submission."

And just two weeks before the war, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested to a select group of reporters gathered here at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that a "shock" to the Iraqi regime might result in a "short, short conflict," as WorldNetDaily reported March 26.

On March 4, Myers said: "If asked to go into conflict in Iraq, what you'd like to do is have it be a short, short conflict. The best way to do that is have such a shock on the system, the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on the end is inevitable."

Then on March 20, the day before the scheduled shock-and-awe air campaign, Rumsfeld vowed to deliver a crushing first blow to Iraq, unlike any other in military history. He warned Saddam and his henchmen one final time to give up.

"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before," he said at the Pentagon. "The Iraqi soldiers and officers must ask themselves whether they want to die fighting for a doomed regime, or do they want to survive."

Fox News announced 'shock and awe' at war's outset

However, the bombing that lit up the Baghdad night skies the next day, and in the following days, did not match the force, scope and scale of the broad-based shock-and-awe plan, Ullman and U.S. officials say.

So why did the Bush administration throttle back on the Iraqi bombing?

Reasons are not immediately clear, but some Pentagon officials say that political concerns over civilian casualties factored into the decision.