German and Allied Second World War strategies of terror bombing depended on
and institutionalized the production of fear in the belief that fear makes others
capitulate. Fear did not work as the planners hoped in this case. More recently, the
US Pentagon’s 2003 ‘shock and awe’ strategy for Operation Iraqi Freedom was as
much about creating fear and paralysis among the Iraqi military as it was about using
the US military’s advantages in information, speed, and manoeuvre to destroy Iraqi
military forces or kill their soldiers.
Fear was institutionalized in US deterrence doctrine during the Cold War – the
US sought to prevent attack by threatening adversaries with a devastating response.
Only the threat of ‘mutual assured destruction’, in this view, could assure US
survival. Similarly, when Waltz argues that nuclear proliferation should not be
feared, but rather ‘welcomed’ because it would help to ‘maintain peace’, he was
assuming that the deliberate production of fear works and that fear ought to be
institutionalized: ‘Where nuclear weapons threaten to make the costs of wars
immense, who will dare to start them? Nuclear weapons make it possible to
approach the deterrent ideal.’^44
Second, fear and other emotions may become perceptual filters and analogical
triggers. Fear may be taken by institutional actors as information and become a filter
bywhich organizations develop information about self and other. Just as individuals
who are frightened tend to search for confirmation of their view of the threat and
discount disconfirming evidence, organizations operating in a climate of fear may
do so. Standard operating procedures may in fact put threatening information on
the fast track. The biological and psychological tendency to recall previous fearful
situations, and reason analogously, may magnify the effect of fear. Emotions may be
translated into attributions of the other’s hostile intentions. Fear thus affects the
development and organization of institutional knowledge. Emotional relationships
between groups and the emotional climate may be concretized in expectations and
ways of creating knowledge.
United States threat-assessment practices during the post-9/11 era illustrate the
institutionalization of fear in both perception and planning. The US shifted from
basing military planning on a potential adversary’s intentions and likely threats to
the ‘capabilities-based approach’ where the US attempts to, ‘anticipate the
capabilities that an adversary might employ’ and ‘focuses more on how an adversary
might fight than who the adversary might be and where war might occur’.^45 The
2001 United States Quadrennial Defense Review(QDR) suggests that the rationale for
capabilities-based planning is uncertainty or ‘unpredictability’.^46 The ‘concept
reflects the fact that the United States cannot know with confidence what nation,
combination of nations, or non-state actor will pose threats to vital U.S. interests or
those of allies and friends decades from now’.^47 Indeed, if one focuses on what might
happen, the scenarios for threats proliferate. As General Ralph Eberhart, who was
in charge of the military’s role in homeland security in 2002 said of the possible
threats: ‘the list goes on and on. We can all envision the terrible things that might
happen.’^48 Thus, according to the QDR, ‘the United States will not be able to
develop its military forces and plans solely to confront a specific adversary in a
168 Rethinking ‘man’