"Shock and Awe" was an extreme failure. Nobody ran towards our troops with their arms in the air. Nobody surrendered without a fight. It did nothing but create a sky show for Iraqis. The ground troops were constantly calling in fire missions for equipment no where near the "Shock and Awe" targets and Marines fought their way all the way to Baghdad.
"Shock and Awe" was a hold over retardation from Rumsfeld's idea of our rediculous Gulf War imagined future.
The Army spent the entire decade of the 90s preparing for big box wars while the Marine Corps spent the decade preparing for Somalia type scenarios. The Air Force looked towards China as the future enemy (F/A-22) and the Navy relied upon their support towards the Marines as their means to mattering in any scenario.
This is fact and I can offer you some outstanding readings from Ralph Peters if your like. He is a former Lt.Col. in the Army who spent the majority of his career in Europe in the intel world and now spends an enormous amount of time going on analyzing missions for the White House (Bush and Obama) and as a military voice on popular news.
The “shock and awe” air war destroyed Iraq's command and control and that meant the Iraqi leadership could not really respond to the US military's rapid advances on the ground, while the US-led aircraft also softened up the Iraqi forces for the US army and marines.
Do you really think this didn’t help us topple the government and most of the military in 21 days?:
…20,753 combat sorties and used 18,467 smart bombs and missiles and 9,251 dumb bombs. Most of the smart bombs were JDAM (6,542) and laser guided (8,618). U.S. Navy ships also fired 802 cruise missiles. There were 153 air launched cruise missiles used, 98 EGBU-27 GPS/Laser Guided bombs and 408 anti-radar missiles. There were 908 guided cluster bombs dropped. Other missiles used include Hellfire (562), Maverick (918), AGM-130 (4), AGM-84 SLAM ER (3) and AGM-54 JSOW (253).
Fewer bombs were needed in 2003 than in 1991 because of better sensors (UAVs and more JSTARS) and communications (faster and more people connected to the "battlefield Internet"). What didn't work in 1991 (lots of massive dumb bomb attacks) was not used in 2003. The Iraq campaign used a different approach to finding and destroying targets. Everything was done with more accuracy and speed.
About half the combat sorties were used against the six Iraqi Republican Guard divisions, which was the only military force they had that showed any willingness to fight. The Iraqis made the mistake of trying to move these divisions, and discovered that U.S. UAVs and surveillance aircraft (mainly JSTARS) could track their movements 24/7, even during sandstorms. While those storms gave the Iraqis some protection from missiles and laser guided bombs, they were no help against GPS guided high explosive and cluster bombs. The Iraqis quickly realized what was going on, and all but a few dozen of the Republican Guards 3,000 armored vehicles were destroyed (mostly from the air) or abandoned.
There were 15,592 sorties against Iraqi ground forces. In comparison, only 1,799 sorties were flown against command and control targets (headquarters and communications) and only 832 against missile and NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) targets.
Ground and air commanders made 30,542 requests for targets to be hit, and 25,240 of these requests were approved and 19,898 of the targets were actually hit. Many of the "target requests" were for bombers to patrol certain areas ("kill boxes") and hit any enemy forces found there…