ABSTRACT

Amongst the many controversies associated with the 2003 Iraq War, perhaps the most widely discredited element was the military strategy adopted by the Pentagon under the guidance of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ was portrayed by the Bush administration itself as a bold experiment in the pioneering of a ‘new American way of war’. Of course, this phrase presupposed the existence of an older, more traditional American style of war which it was held to have rejected. For most of the twentieth century, the hallmark of the American approach to warfare was associated with its reliance on the mustering of an overwhelming margin of superiority through which opponents of the republic were utterly annihilated. In contrast, the hallmark of the new style was held to lie in the radical improvements in precision and efficiency afforded by the new military technologies of the information revolution. For a brief period – now unimaginably distant in the light of the chaos which now attends an Iraq on the verge or in the midst of a civil war (depending on one’s point of view) – this new style of war appeared to permit the US to decapitate hostile regimes while leaving their surrounding societies almost untouched. The surgeon’s scalpel appeared to have been substituted for the sledgehammer. Yet this simplistic contrast between an old and new American way of war only scratches at the surface of the more fundamental transition in the US military community’s basic assumptions about war and the way in which it should ideally be fought.