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Even without a Rapid Dominance capability or when facing a more technologically dependent opponent, it is clear from these examples and many others in recent U.S. experiences that certain improvements in capabilities would provide us with greater flexibility in the future. This is especially true in OOTW situations, which require a multiplicity of effective instruments at our disposal.
This context is almost certainly going to expand into militarily grey areas of OOTW, including those impinging on law enforcement and ensuring political stability. Forces may be called upon to deal with or control situations on the margin rather than to achieve total submission or defeat of an opponent.
Such restrictions are likely to apply to targets affecting control of access to food, water, and clean air, and to destruction of religious and cultural centers, even if there is low collateral damage. In OOTW situations, we are much more vulnerable to criticism of using excessive force, especially if there is civilian or collateral damage.
Political expectations in MRCs are for the effective use of force and for rapid success or at least steady progress. Casualties should be moderate or at least acceptable, with the threshold of American pain dependent on the directness of the threat to U.S. interests and with the degree of compellance appropriate to the political rationale. OOTW present a different set of challenges.
With superior and rapid firepower, the blinded, deafened enemy would be destroyed and defeated as we saw fit. This would maximize Shock and Awe and help break the adversary's will. In OOTW, the Rapid Dominance JTF might function as follows.
Can Rapid Dominance produce a force structure with more effective capacity to deal with grey areas such as OOTW? Second, if achievable, can Rapid Dominance lead to a form of political deterrence in which the capacity to make impotent or "shut down" an adversary can actually control behavior?
Now these troops, as well as others from both sides of the former Iron Curtain, are engaged in OOTW for which special training, rules of engagement, command arrangements, and other support structures have been put in place at short notice, few of which were even envisaged a few years ago.
The next step is to match the four significant characteristics that define Rapid Dominance- knowledge, rapidity, brilliance, and control-with Shock and Awe against achievable military objectives in order to derive suitable strategies and doctrines, configure forces and force packages accordingly, and determine those integrated systems and innovative uses of technologies and capabilities that will provide the necessary means to achieve these objectives in conditions that include both the MRC and OOTW.
In U.S. planning for OOTW, it is a virtual given that risk will be minimized and there will be a discrete and proportional use of force with minimal collateral damage. This means that there must be a belief that a mission can be accomplished and is worth the resources necessary to do so.
To repeat, intimidation and compliance are the outputs we seek to obtain by the threat of use or by the actual application of our alternative force package. Then the mission capability package is examined in conditions of both MRCs and OOTW. For discussion purposes, nine examples representing differing historical types, variants, and characteristics of Shock and Awe have been derived.
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