When most people hear the terms “shock and awe” and “full spectrum dominance” they probably think—if they think about them at all—of the early moments of the premeditated US destruction of Iraq and the ever-smug grin of Donald Rumsfeld. 

It was Rumsfeld, you will recall, who supposedly spent the first months of his mandate as Secretary of Defense totally rethinking the mechanics of the US way of making war. 

At the center of the new defense doctrine were the two approaches mentioned above. 

The first refers to the practice of hitting the enemy so hard, so quickly, and from so many angles that he will immediately recognize the futility of mounting a defense and rapidly give up the struggle. 

The second tactic, which is subsumed by the first, refers, among other things, to the practice of inundating the informational environments of the enemy, the domestic US audience, and potential US allies with pro-American narratives that leave absolutely no space or time for formulating skeptical questions or coherent discourses of dissent. 

In short, the overarching goal of Rumsfeld’s new defense doctrine was—to use a term near and dear to the hearts of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen who earned millions from the US Defense department after September 11th for designing the torture programs used at Guantanamo Bay and other US black sites around the world—to induce “learned helplessness” in as many segments of the world population as was technically possible. 

For many, I think, the idea that governments might have the capacity and the desire to assault their own populations with well-organized and persistent campaigns of information warfare seems rather far-fetched. And for others, I suspect, speaking of the widespread........

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