Victory is rarely defined by killing everyone on the other side but rather by breaking the enemy’s will to resist:
Therefore, our object in applying firepower must be to exploit its substantial paralytic effects to gain advantage.
Unfortunately, recent experiments in the laboratory of real war substantiates the view that the paralytic effects of firepower erode quickly over time. Soldiers become inured to hardships and danger. Firepower that might break an enemy formation early in a conflict eventually becomes merely a nuisance once soldiers accustom themselves to firepower’s pyrotechnic drama and devise effective means to deflect, deceive, dissipate, and protect themselves from firepower’s killing effects.
To win quickly and decisively at low cost in the future, we must have the means to conduct the battle quickly and to end it cleanly, preferably at the moment when the paralytic effect of firepower is greatest. To delay beyond that moment only increases the killing and makes the enemy more effective by stiffening his will to resist and by allowing him to reconstitute. Decision is best guaranteed through maneuver of forces on the ground. Psychological collapse — the breaking of an enemy’s will to resist — comes when an opponent finds himself challenged and blocked wherever he turns. He admits defeat when further pursuit of his political objective is not worth the cost or when his centers of gravity are threatened, controlled, or occupied and he has no remaining options for restoring them.
So, within the Army War College, in the year 2000, it was well understood that Shock and Awe was an extremely temporary effect.
“recent experiments in the laboratory of real war substantiates the view that the paralytic effects of firepower erode quickly over time”
WWI would seem to confirm this. Soldiers at Verdun, the Somme and the Argonne came to treat as “normal” a level of shelling and danger that would have stunned their civilian selves. C.S. Lewis mentioned that he was “awed” when he first heard the sound of the guns in WWI, but he soon got used to it.
Unconditional surrender types of victory as was the case in WW2 are not the norm. Most conflicts are settled by negotiation.
So, it appears that Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statement, “Firstest with the mostest” was correct.