We build on the trends of rapidity and simultaneity and seek to emphasize control and time. Control is necessary to force behavioral change in adversaries to achieve strategic or political ends. Control and then influence come from a range of threats and outcomes, including putting at risk the targets an adversary holds dear, to imposing a hierarchy of Shock and Awe, to affecting will, perception, and understanding. Achieving control may now be theoretically possible in even more compressed or shortened time periods because of the potential superiority of enhanced U.S. military capability and further training and education. To obtain this level of military superiority that can affect the adversary's will and perception, or at least achieve the practical military consequences, a great deal of thought, debate, and experimentation over new concepts will be needed if only to test and validate contemporary doctrine.
If the political objective is to achieve a level of Shock and Awe beyond only temporary paralysis, then further actions must follow. The end point will be to dominate the enemy in such a way as to achieve the desired objectives. From this concept follows the need to shut down either a state or an organized enemy through the rapid and simultaneous application (or threat of application) of land, sea, air, space, and special operating forces against the broadest spectrum of the adversary's power base and center or centers of gravity and against the adversary's will and perception at tactical and strategic levels.
In Desert Storm, the objectives were first to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait and then to restore the legitimate government. From these objectives, more limited strategic and political objectives followed, some for purposes of maintaining coalition solidarity and UN-imposed sanctions. Not occupying Baghdad was one such political limitation. These strategic objectives led to identification of the enemy's centers of gravity as the basis for the application of force to destroy these centers. This planning led to the repeated, rapid, and simultaneous use of massive force with great effect.
One obvious tactical objective was to eliminate Saddam Hussein's command and control. This was accomplished by simultaneous and massive attacks. Once command and control was destroyed, Iraqi forces in the Kuwait Theater of Operations (KTO) would be destroyed as quickly as possible with overwhelming force and with minimum casualties. As General Colin Powell simply stated, "My plan is to cut off Saddam's army and then kill it."
There was no sanctuary for Iraqi forces in the KTO. They were completely vulnerable to unrelenting and devastating attack. Outside the KTO, targeting was more selective, not because the means were unavailable for imposing sufficient damage but because our military objectives were purposely limited. Given the effectiveness of the air campaign and the overwhelming superiority on the ground, coalition land forces required only 4 of the 41 days of the war to defeat and to eject Iraq's forces from Kuwait.
Suppose a Desert Storm-type campaign were fought 20 years from now based on a plan that exploited the concept of Rapid Dominance. Further assume that Iraq has improved (and rebuilt) its military and that, in a series of simultaneous and nearly instantaneous actions, our primary objective was still to shut Iraq down, threaten or destroy its leadership, and isolate and destroy its military forces as we did in 1991. However, two decades hence, Rapid Dominance might conceivably achieve this objective in a matter of days (or perhaps hours) and not after the 6 months or the 500,000 troops that were required in 1990 to 1991. Rapid Dominance may even offer the prospect of stopping an invasion in its tracks.
Shutting the country down would entail both the physical destruction of appropriate infrastructure and the shutdown and control of the flow of all vital information and associated commerce so rapidly as to achieve a level of national shock akin to the effect that dropping nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on the Japanese. Simultaneously, Iraq's armed forces would be paralyzed with the neutralization or destruction of its capabilities. Deception, disinformation, and misinformation would be applied massively.
This level of simultaneity and Rapid Dominance must also demonstrate to the adversary our endurance and staying power, that is, the capability to dominate over as much time as is necessary less an enemy mistakenly try to wait it out and use time between attacks to recover sufficiently. If the enemy still resisted, then conventional forms of attack would follow resulting in the physical occupation of territory. Control is thus best gained by the demonstrated ability to sustain the stun effects of the initial rapid series of blows long enough to affect the enemy's will and his means to continue. There must be staying power effect on the enemy or they merely absorb the blows, gain in confidence and their ability to resist, and change tactics much as occurred during the WWII bombing campaigns and the air war over North Vietnam.
Achieving these levels of Shock and Awe requires a wide versatility and competence in employing land, sea, air, space, and special operating forces and in investment in technology to produce Rapid Dominance. Different methods for commanding the battle using both hierarchical and non-hierarchical command to control and direct our forces are likely to be required especially given the simultaneous application of capabilities throughout the given battle space by the full spectrum of our forces. To use these combinations of forces will require adjustment of current service doctrine and prescribed roles and functions. Rapid Dominance also means looking to invest in technologies perhaps not fully or currently captured by the Cold War paradigm.
To develop the proper combination of forces and future technology investment for Rapid Dominance, extensive experimentation with this core concept will be required. This exper-imentation must apply to all levels of military educational institutions; it must be joint; it can be accelerated by availability of recent advances in simulation technology; and it must have operational trials in the field.