THE RETURN OF SHOCK AND AWE
Image by Getty Images for Unsplash+
BY Sean Rafferty
August 2025
The Return of Shock and Awe
After Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, Trump’s proxies in the Make America Great Again (MAGA)-sphere hastened to describe their regime’s return to power in military terms. In a blitz of media appearances, Republican party members began to use the infamous phrase “shock and awe” to project expectations for Trump 2.0. An incomplete list of the phrase’s recent public invocations include “Border Czar” Tom Homan on Triggered with Don Jr., Senator John Barrasso on Face the Nation, former Trump Communications Director Mike Dubke on Meet the Press, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Fox and Friends, and FCC chairman Brenden Carr, who, in a particularly divisive analogy, described the atmosphere in D.C. amid a flurry of executive actions following Trump’s inauguration as “a tale of two reactions”: on the one hand, “patriotic Americans” celebrated the end of a supposed American decline, while “the swamp”—a MAGA code word for political opponents—experienced “shock and awe.”
“Shock and Awe”: The Troubled History of a Phrase
As it pertains to U.S. politics, the phrase “shock and awe” originated in a 1996 book published by National Defense University Press, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, in which the book’s authors, a small group of military elites—principal among them Harlan K. Ullman—propose a military doctrine for the Information Age. According to Ullman, the U.S. was failing to take full advantage of its uncontested power following the fall of the Soviet Union.
David S. Alberts, then acting Director of Research in a subset of the Defense Department specializing in networks and information technology, intimated his agreement in the forward to Shock and Awe: “We as a nation,” he writes, “can ill afford to follow in the footsteps of those who have rested on their laurels and failed to stretch their imaginations.”[1] By failure of imagination, Alberts means failure to keep pace with “the Silicon Valley revolution”[2] in which cutting-edge information technology was getting “smaller, smarter, and cheaper.”[3] Failure of imagination, for Ullman and Alberts, meant continuing to rely on a costly doctrine of overwhelming force with an outmoded emphasis on heavy industry and ground capabilities.
The ideas of Shock and Awe influenced U.S. foreign policy for years before its eponymous phrase began to be widely cited in relation to a United States-led invasion of Iraq. In January 2003, weeks before the actual invasion began, Ullman describes the destructive potential of “shock and awe” in The Christian Science Monitor: “You'll see simultaneous attacks of hundreds of warheads, maybe thousands,” he’s quoted saying, “so that very suddenly the Iraqi senior leadership, or much of it, will be eviscerated.” Days after the invasion began, a dismayed Ullman spoke with The Guardian about the uses, misuses, and misunderstandings of the phrase “shock and awe,” which by then were flooding newswires.
Ullman would later attribute the phrase’s infamy to a March 23, 2003 Daily Telegraph headline—Blitz sets Baghdad ablaze—which, he argues in a military trade publication, “doomed” reception of the doctrine by associating it with “World War II and the Nazi bombing of Britain.” According to Ullman, the initial press coverage of “shock and awe” was so negative that military officials thenceforth avoided using the phrase in their public speech. A week into the Iraq War, Frank Rich of the New York Times reported on the emerging “quagmire narrative,” referring to “shock and awe” as a “discarded celebratory cakewalk” and deriding the phrase as failed propaganda which tricked the country—and briefly the stock market—into believing Iraq would be “a quick and tidy war.”
There nonetheless remained an eager market of consumers who embraced imperialist shows of force; mere weeks after the 2003 invasion of Iraq began, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office fielded a flood of trademark applications from “Sony's computer-games unit, a fireworks company, a pesticide maker and a boxing-glove marketer … seeking to sell their products under a ‘Shock and Awe’ label.”
The phrase was a brief phenomenon promptly hollowed and ironized by what it came to represent. Architects of the Iraq War promised “shock and awe”—a “blitz.” Proponents of the invasion were undergirded by lingering confidence from the so-called “hundred-hour war” of Desert Storm. But the Iraq War went on for eight years, and the provocative phrase “shock and awe” faded into relative obscurity, remembered, when it was, as the arrogant slogan of a war whose legacy of pain and catastrophe rivals American involvement in Vietnam.
Image by Jose Moreno
The Phrase’s Resurrection for Domestic Politics Thirty Years Later
It is insufficient to simply ask why the Trump regime would revive this particular phrase to describe its own rollout of domestic policy in 2025. While it is possible that some MAGA figures mentioning “shock and awe” in their public speeches may lack awareness of or fail to adequately consider the historical resonances of the phrase, this explanation seems unlikely. In general, it would be fair to expect political figures to command the recent history of the country they presume to govern. In particular, Carr, Dubke, and Homan belong to a generation of politicians who made their careers in Washington in the 1990s and early 2000s, when “shock and awe” had its debut first in military policy, and later in mass media; there is little chance, with their level of involvement in U.S. politics during the Iraq War, that these figures are ignorant of the evocative power of the phrase.
Based on Trump’s authoritarian patterns in non-consecutive terms in office, the return of “shock and awe” to U.S. airwaves is likely an intentional evocation of war, a projection of rapid dominance, and as such, a deliberate use of Shock and Awe as military doctrine for a domestic political agenda. If it reads as alarmist to suggest the Trump regime is using military doctrine to guide domestic policy, consider that Trump’s authoritarian slide has been ongoing for almost a decade.
In 2019, historian Marci Shore, a specialist in 20th Century Eastern Europe, compared Trump’s leadership to the corruption of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and warned Americans that Trump was ushering in a “culture of crookedness” better expressed by the Russian words proizvol—meaning “abuse of power. … suggest[ing] an absence of all legal boundaries”—and prodazhnost’—“akin to an existential state … in which everything—more particularly, anyone—can be bought or sold.” In 2020, proizvol and prodazhnost’ pervaded U.S. elections; refusing to accept his loss, Trump pressured officials to falsify election results, and when that failed, on January 6, 2021, Trump incited his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of election results. The consequences of these efforts would further inflame and divide national tempers.
In 2022, just months prior to Donald J. Trump’s announcement of his most recent presidential campaign, a Marist poll found 50% percent of Americans believed Trump should be criminally charged as an insurrectionist, which would disqualify him from holding office. In the years leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Americans were inundated with evidence that Trump was guilty of a number of crimes: sexual abuse and defamation of journalist E. Jean Carroll; felony falsification of business records; efforts to interfere in the lawful transfer of power, including conspiracy to defraud the United States. Many of these adjudications made highly rated live television and dominated headlines for years.
These were the circumstances under which Donald Trump returned to office this year. For perhaps as many as half of Americans, Trump’s very candidacy posed an existential threat to the U.S., and yet, after the election, instead of attempting to assuage fears of authoritarianism, Trump and his loyalists embraced the “shock” effect of their return.
When a head of state describes his critics as “sick people,” “scum,” “radical left lunatics,” and—a more recent addition to Trump’s arsenal of epithets—“the enemy from within,” it is natural to ascribe a martial character to his words, which increasingly promote a politics of persecution. In July, White House correspondent Peter Baker noted the president’s and his proxies’ increasing tendency to describe journalists and political opponents as “evil,” and the provocations continue to intensify as rhetoric escalates to force. In early June, Trump flimsily cited 10 U.S. Code § 12406 to deploy 2,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to Los Angeles without consent of the State of California, whose governor has filed a lawsuit.
Soldiers were deployed in response to civilian protests of violent ICE raids, often carried out by masked agents in unmarked cars, which have earned the agency comparisons to secret police and fascist shock troops. All the while, the regime’s legally dubious actions have triggered a record number (largely in its favor) of emergency Supreme Court rulings, which have shifted significant powers of Congress to the President with minimal transparency, often with no written explanation.
With these developments, Trump, to borrow Shore’s description of Viktor Yanukovych, “embod[ies] the free reign of proizvol and the culture of prodazhnost’.” Such flagrant abuse of power and corruption can have a paralytic effect on society, which happens to be the primary objective of Shock and Awe: to “destroy the will, perception, and understanding”[4] of the enemy, thereby extinguishing paths to resistance.
Image by Joel Rivera-Camacho
Shock, Awe, and Utter Failure
Taking the long view, we have reason to believe scorched earth applications of “shock and awe” are destined eventually to fail. Ullman, reflecting on the disaster of U.S. occupation of Iraq, doubts “shock and awe” had actually been applied there based on what evidently little consideration was given to how Iraqi society and government would function after toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime. A major difference between Operations “Desert Storm” and “Iraqi Freedom” is the presence of a functioning government at their respective conclusions. When a coalition of 42 nations drove the Iraqi military out of Kuwait in 1991, the Kuwaiti monarchy was waiting in the wings, prepared to resume governing.
On the other hand, when the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein and initiated regime change in Iraq in 2003, no functioning government remained to fill the vacancy; the first U.S.-installed provisional regime, led by retired general Jay Garner, lasted only three weeks, after which American Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III was appointed by George W. Bush to govern the country. Bremer’s appointment amounted to a yearlong dismantling of remaining Iraqi institutions.[5]
Phebe Marr, researcher at the same National Defense University that published Shock and Awe, writes in The Modern History of Iraq that the United States’ effort at nation-building there was “ideologically driven, ill-considered, and woefully understaffed,”[6] and that, ultimately, the occupation “dismantled the entire institutional structure of the old regime but had too few resources, staff, or time—and too little understanding of the country—to construct the new Iraq it wished to create.”[7] With eerie resonance, one could make the same statement about Trump 2.0’s effort to dismantle and rebuild the United States in the regime’s idealized image.
Over a hundred dead in a Texas flood, and a gutted FEMA fails to answer thousands of survivors’ calls. In the aftershocks of a historic pandemic and amid a historic spike in cases of measles—a disease previously considered eradicated in the U.S. as a result of vaccination— the President with support of Republicans in Congress appoints vaccine conspiracist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. These are just two tragic absurdities of many which forecast the shortcomings of Trump 2.0’s “ideologically driven, ill-considered” domestic campaign of “shock and awe.”
According to Ullman, the strategic focus of Shock and Awe is “the Clausewitzian principle of affecting the adversary’s will to resist.”[8] By affect, of course, Ullman means destroy. As the Trump regime dismantles institutions faster than it can replace them, the regime’s ability to destroy its population’s will to resist “quickly if not nearly instantaneously”[9] becomes an existential threat. What Ullman and his fellow architects may have failed to imagine unfolds before our eyes: the domestic application of Shock and Awe by an authoritarian regime.
[1] Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, vi.
[2] Ibid., 15.
[3] Ibid., 16.
[4] Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, xiii; xxv; xxvii; 2; 11; 19; 53; 92.
[5] Marr and Al-Marashi, The Modern History of Iraq, 210-216.
[6] Ibid., 211.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ullman and Wade, Shock and Awe, 8.
[9] Ibid.
REFERENCES:
Marr, Phebe, and Ibrahim Al-Marashi. The Modern History of Iraq. Fourth edition. Westview Press, 2017.
Reid, Julian. “Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between War and Power.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 1 (2003): 1–28.
Ullman, Harlan, and James P. Wade. Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology, 1996. Accessed at https://archive.org/details/shockaweachievin0000ullm.
Sean Rafferty studies media history and political theory at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
