The US Air Force used stealth technology and precision guided munitions to paralyze the Iraqi state during the first Gulf war and for the first part of the second. The planning technique they used was called effects based operations (EBO) -- a method of warfare where the effects caused by the attack are more important than the level of destruction of the target.
An important technique of EBO is massively parallel operations. Normally, air campaigns are fought sequentially. Layers of an enemy's air defense system are pealed off one layer of a time (like an onion) until the real target is made defenseless. Only then is the target destroyed. Massively parallel operations approach things in a different way.
Stealth and precision guided munitions make it possible to radically reduce the size of the force packages (the number of aircraft) sent to destroy a target. Computer enhanced command and control make it possible to manage a very large number of simultaneous attacks. The result is a killer combo. Small packages can be sent against a wide variety of targets simultaneously (for example: 150 targets were engaged in the first 24 hours of operations in the first Gulf War) -- aptly called massively parallel operations. The result, given that the attacks are focused on effects and not the destruction of enemy targets, is complete paralysis.
Unfortunately, Iraq's guerrillas are using effects based operations against the current Iraqi state. Guerrilla entrepreneurs, operating autonomously in niches (NOTE: should I call this Niche Warfare?) of expertise/locality/loyalty, are attacking critical systems of the Iraqi state in a massively parallel way. How? The guerrillas use stealth (an ability to blend into the population), precision guided munitions (ie. car bombs, where the terminal guidance system isn't a computer but a person), and extremely decentralized command and control (hundreds of different autonomous groups/gangs/tribes) to attack targets over 70 times a day. Further, they have adopted a method of systems disruption that enables them to bypass hard targets (heavily defended) in favor of weak and undefended targets that achieve the same effect (ie. methods of disrupting scale free networks like electrical systems).
Both the US Air Force and Iraq's global guerrillas have achieved the same thing: the Iraqi state is paralyzed.