DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Masters of war plan for next 100
years By Nick Turse
Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. "The
cities are the problem," he says. A retired marine
infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban
warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s,
he now serves as director of the Joint Urban
Operations Office at US Joint Forces Command. He
sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as
the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. "This is
the next fight," he warns. "The future of warfare
is what we
see
now."
He isn't alone. "We think urban is
the future," says James Lasswell, a retired
colonel who now heads the Office of Science and
Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting
Laboratory. "Everything worth fighting for is in
the urban environment." And Wayne Michael Hall, a
retired army brigadier general and the senior
intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has
a similar assessment, "We will be fighting in
urban terrain for the next hundred years."
Last month, in a hotel nestled behind a
medical complex in Washington, DC, Schattle,
Lasswell, and Hall, along with Pentagon
power-brokers, active-duty and retired US military
personnel, foreign coalition partners,
representatives of big and small defense
contractors, and academics who support their work
gathered for a "Joint Urban Operations, 2007"
conference. Some had served in Iraq or
Afghanistan; others were involved in designing
strategy, tactics, and concepts, or in creating
new weaponry and equipment, for the urban wars in
those countries. And here, in this hotel
conference center, they're talking about military
technologies of a sort you've only seen in James
Cameron's 2000-2002 television series, Dark
Angel.
I'm the oddity in this room of
largely besuited defense contractors, military
retirees, and camouflage-fatigue-clad military men
at a conference focused on strategies for battling
it out in the labyrinthine warrens of what
urbanologist Mike Davis calls "the planet of
slums". The hulking guy who plops down next to me
as the meeting begins is a caricature of just the
attendee you might imagine would be at such a
meeting. "I sell guns," he says right off. Over
the course of the conference, this representative
of one of the world's best known weapons
manufacturers will suggest that members of the
media be shot to avoid bad press and he'll call a
local tour guide he met in Vietnam a "bastard" for
explaining just how his people thwarted US efforts
to kill them. But he's an exception. Almost
everyone else seems to be a master of serene
anodyne-speak. Even the camo-clad guys seem
somehow more academic than warlike.
In his
tour de force book Planet of Slums,
Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have
dared to venture where most United Nations, World
Bank or Department of State types fear to go …
[T]hey now assert that the ‘feral, failed cities'
of the Third World - especially their slum
outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of
the 21st century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine,
he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to
support a low-intensity world war of unlimited
duration against criminalized segments of the
urban poor".
But the mostly male
conference-goers planning for a multi-generational
struggle against the global South's slums aren't a
gang of urban warfare cowboys talking non-stop
death and destruction; and they don't look
particularly bellicose either, as they munch on
chocolate-chip cookies during our afternoon snack
breaks in a room where cold cuts and brochures for
the Rapid Wall Breaching Kit - which allows users
to blast a man-sized hole in the side of any
building - are carefully laid out on the tables.
Instead, these mild-mannered men speak about
combat restraint, "less-than-lethal weaponry",
precision targeting, and (harking back to the
Vietnam War) "winning hearts and minds".
The men of urban warfare Take
Russell W Glenn, a thin, bespectacled Rand Senior
Policy Researcher with a PhD who looks for all the
world like some bookish college professor
Hollywood dreamed up. You'd never guess he went to
the army's airborne, ranger, and pathfinder
schools and is a veteran of Operation Desert
Storm. You'd also never suspect that he might be
the most prolific planner for the Pentagon's
century-long slum fight of tomorrow.
In
Planet of Slums, Davis notes that the Rand
Corporation, a non-profit think-tank established
by the US Air Force in 1948, has been a key player
in pioneering the conceptual framework that has
led to the current generation of what's called, in
the jargon of this meeting, "urban operations", or
UO. Glenn, it so happens, is their main man in the
field. He travels the planet studying
counterinsurgency warfare. Of late, he's been to
the Solomon Islands, where an island rebellion
occurred in the late 1990s, the Philippines, where
an insurgency has been raging for decades (if not
since the US occupation at the dawn of the 20th
century), and, of course, Iraq. He's co-authored
well over 20 UO studies for Rand including, most
recently, "People Make the City: Joint Urban
Operations Observations and Insights from
Afghanistan and Iraq" (publicly available in
86-page executive summary form) and the
still-classified "A Tale of Three Cities:
Analyzing Joint Urban Operations with a Focus on
Fallujah, Al Amara, and Mosul".
On the
technological front, the Pentagon's blue-skies
research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA), sent its
grandfatherly-looking deputy director, Robert F
Leheny, to talk about such UO-oriented technology
as the latest in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)
and sense-through-walls technologies that allow
troops to see people and objects inside buildings.
While Leheny noted that 63% of DARPA's US$3
billion yearly budget ($600 million of it
dedicated to UO technologies in the coming years)
is funneled to industry partners, DARPA is only a
part of the story when it comes to promoting
corporate assistance in this 100-year-war growth
area.
The largest contractors in the
military-corporate complex are already hard at
work helping the Pentagon prepare for future urban
occupations. Raytheon, L-3 Communications, and
Science Applications International Corporation
(SAIC) - the 5th, 7th, and 10th largest Pentagon
contractors last year, taking in a combined
$18.4-plus billion from the Department of Defense
- have all signed Cooperative Research and
Development Agreements with the US Joint Forces
Command, according to Berry "Dan" Fox, the Deputy
Director of Science and Technology at its Joint
Urban Operations Office.
As you might
imagine, smaller contractors are eager to climb
aboard the urban warfare gravy train. At the
conference, Lite Machines Corporation was a good
example of this. It was vigorously marketing a
hand-launched, low-flying UAV (unmanned aerial
vehicle) so light that it resembled nothing more
than a large, plastic toy water rocket with
miniature helicopter rotors. The company envisions
a profitably privacy-free future in which urban
zones are besieged by "swarms" of such small UAVs
that not only peek into city windows, but even
invade homes. According to a company spokesman,
"You could really blanket a ground area with as
many UAVs as you want ... penetrate structures,
see through a window or even break a window," in
order to fly inside a house or apartment and look
around.
DARPA'S Leheny also extolled
hovering UAVs, specifically the positively
green-sounding Organic Micro Air Vehicle which
brings to mind the "spinners" in Blade
Runner or, even earlier in blow-your-mind
futuristic movie history, V.I.N.CENT from Disney's
The Black Hole. This drone, Leheny noted,
has "perch and stare" capabilities that allow it
to lie in wait for hours before fixing on a target
and guiding in extended-line-of-sight or
beyond-line-of-sight weapons. He also described in
detail another DARPA-pioneered unmanned aerial
vehicle, the WASP - a tiny, silent drone that
spies on the sly and can be carried in a soldier's
pack. Leheny noted that there are now "a couple
hundred of these flying in Iraq". In addition
to endless chatter about the devastated "urban
canyons" of Iraq and Afghanistan, the specters of
past battleground cities - some of them, anyway -
were clearly on many minds. There were constant
references to urban battle zones of history like
Stalingrad and Grozny or such American examples as
Manila in 1945 and Panama City in 1989. Curiously
neglected, however, were the flattened cities of
Germany and Japan in World War II, not to speak of
the bombed-out cities of Korea and Vietnam.
Perhaps the Korean and Vietnam Wars weren't on the
agenda because "restraint" and "precision" were
such watchwords of the meeting. No one seemed
particularly eager to discuss the destruction
visited on the Iraqi city of
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
