1. That I was 31 once…for an entire year supposedly.

2. That there was a beginning to this war.

3. That shock and awe didn’t work the way they were hoping it would.

AWE, SHOCKS

I was just on the phone with my pal Jennifer Myszkowski. I called her at 10am on a Sunday. I guess my 31 years are showing as I don’t think that’s terribly early anymore, having gone to bed at 11:30pm the night before. It’s not that I don’t get wild – oh, I can shake it. I was at the Peking Garden in Hadley last night drinking watered down Heineken with a bunch of under-age UMass kids until 11pm! Yep, you read that right – eleven o’clock! HELL YEAH! Wait a minute, I just realized how that probably looks. No – I wasn’t portraying Prof. Humbert Humbert to any promising Lolitas. We just all happened to be in the same place at the same time.

My point is! that I woke up Jennifer this morning at 10am. We got to talking and sharing our feelings about all this war as is the only way to get through it and of course, we stumbled upon the words Shock and Awe immediately.

“You had me at Shock and Awe. You had me at Shock and Awe!” I guess we are hoping for a Renee Zellweger response from Iraq, aren’t we?

Jennifer asked who is responsible for this concept of Shock and Awe. Good question. It’s not the media. They’re responsible for doing their own Shock and Awe of the Shock and Awe concept on us, the audience, but not for initiating it. No, this concept of S&A (similar to S&M, but the spanking’s not as fun) smacks of a decidedly think tank flavor. So, I did some armchair research. And wouldn’t you know the Command and Control Research Project is behind it. It seems Harlan Ullman and James Wade are the responsible Drs. Strangelove.

They wrote the book! Literally – Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. It’s not in print on Amazon anymore, but a reader does give a very cogent review [ed. note: who needs print when you can get this title on the Amazon Kindle!]. Luckily, our S&A cronies at the Command and Control Research Project have it available in PDF form still.

In their 1996 racy hit, Harlan and Jimmy wrote about a “very selective, utterly brutal, and ruthless and rapid application of force to intimidate.” They figured the idea is to get the opposing force to quit before they die. Question is – how can you hear them surrender with all the Shock and Awe going on?

It’s one of those good bad things – in think tank parlance.