Shock and Awe: Read the original
Monday, March 10th, 2003Most of the online news and comments about the Pentagon’s planned strategy for Iraq are based on second and third-hand retellings of what “shock and awe” means and where it comes from. Which is odd, since you can find the entirety of Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance online. It was published in 1996 by the National Defense University in Washington, where selected officers and civilians from Defense, Justice, and elsewhere go for training.
Trivia question: One of the book’s examples is named after “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whose unofficial motto was ‘never send a man where you can send a bullet.’” It’s possible the Mountie who said that was the fictional Colonel Johns, in Ian Fleming’s 007 novel For Your Eyes Only. One document I found on Google attributes the saying to Samuel Colt. Anyone from the RCMP out there?
