Page 2 of
2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Masters of war
plan for next 100 years By Nick
Turse
Fallujah either -
three-quarters of its buildings and mosques were
damaged in an American assault in November 2004.
During James Lasswell's presentation, he
was quite specific about the non-Fallujah-like
need to be "very discriminate" in applying
firepower in an urban environment. As an example
of the ability of technology to aid in such
efforts, he displayed a photo of the aftermath of
an Israeli strike on a three-story Lebanese
building. The third floor of
the structure had been obliterated, while the roof
above and the floors below appeared relatively
unscathed. In an aside, Lasswell mentioned that,
while the effort had been a discriminating one,
the floor taken out "turned out to be the wrong
floor". A rumble of knowing chuckles swept the
room.
Fighting in the city of your
choice, 2045 Discrimination, it turned out,
didn't mean legal constraint. Speakers and
conference-goers alike repeatedly lamented the way
international law and similar hindrances stood in
the way of unleashing chemical agents and emerging
technologies. Microwave-like pain rays and other
directed energy weapons - such as the Active
Denial System which inflicts an intense burning
sensation on victims - were reoccurring favorites.
During their PowerPoint presentation, the men from
Lite Machines, for instance, showed a computer
rendering of their micro-UAVs attacking an unarmed
crowd gathered in a town square with a variety of
less-than-lethal weapons like disorienting laser
dazzlers and chemical gases (vomiting and tear-gas
agents), while a company spokesman regretfully
mentioned that international regulations have made
it impossible to employ such gases on the
battlefield. Undoubtedly, this was a reference to
the scorned Chemical Weapons Convention, which has
been binding for the last decade.
Rand's
Glenn similarly brought up the possibility of
reassessing such international conventions and
overcoming fears that chemical weapons might fall
into the "wrong hands". Saddam Hussein was his
example of such "wrong hands," but the hands
responsible for Abu Ghraib, Mahmudiyah, Hamdania,
Haditha, or the invasion of Iraq itself - to find
non-existent banned weapons - seemed to give him
no pause.
While the various speakers at
the conference focused on the burgeoning
inhabitants of the developing world's slum cities
as targets of the Pentagon's 100-year war, it was
clear that those in the "homeland" weren't about
to escape some of its effects either. For example,
back in 2004, marines deploying to Iraq brought
the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) with them. A
futuristic non-lethal weapon alluded to multiple
times at the conference, it emits a powerful tone
which can bring agonizing pain to those within
earshot. Says Woody Norris, chairman of the
American Technology Corporation, which
manufactures the device: "It will knock [some
people] on their knees." That very same year, the
LRAD was deployed to the streets of the Big Apple
(but apparently not used) by the New York Police
Department as a backup for protests against the
Republican National Convention. In 2005, it was
shipped to "areas hit by Hurricane Katrina" for
possible "crowd control" purposes and, by 2006,
was in the hands of US Border Patrol agents. In
that same year, it was also revealed that the Los
Angeles County Sheriff's Department had begun
testing the use of remote-controlled surveillance
UAVs - not unlike those now operating above Iraqi
cities - over their own megalopolis.
When
it came to the "homeland", conference participants
were particularly focused on moving beyond
weaponry aimed at individuals, like rubber
bullets. Needed in the future, they generally
agreed, were technologies that could target whole
crowds at once - not just rioters but even those
simply attending "demonstrations that could go
violent".
Other futuristic UO concepts are
also coming home. According to Fox of the Joint
Urban Operations Office, the Department of
Justice, like the military, is currently working
on sense-through-wall technologies. His associate
Duane Schattle is collaborating with the US
Northern Command (NORTHCOM) - set up by the Bush
administration in 2002 and whose area of
operations is "America's homefront" - on such
subjects as "sharing intelligence, surveillance
and reconnaissance, command and control
capabilities". He also spoke at the conference
about developing synergy between the Departments
of Defense and Homeland Security in regard to
urban-operations technologies. He, too, expressed
his hope that microwave weapon technology would be
made available for police use in this country.
A specific goal of DARPA, as a slide in
deputy chief Leheny's presentation made clear, is
to "make a foreign city as familiar as the
soldier's backyard".This would be done through the
deployment of intrusive sensor, UAV, and mapping
technologies. In fact, there were few imaginable
technologies, even ones that not so long ago
inhabited the wildest frontiers of science
fiction, that weren't being considered for the
100-year battle these men are convinced is ahead
of us in the planet's city streets. The only thing
not evidently open to discussion was the basic
wisdom of planning to occupy foreign cities for a
century to come. Even among the most thoughtful of
these often brainy participants, there wasn't a
nod toward, or a question asked of, the essential
guiding principle of the conference itself.
With their surprisingly bloodless
language, antiseptic PowerPoint presentations, and
calm tones, these men - only one woman spoke - are
still planning Iraq-style wars of tomorrow. What
makes this chilling is not only that they envision
a future of endless urban warfare, but that they
have the power to drive such a war-fighting
doctrine into that future; that they have the
power to mold strategy and advance weaponry that
can, in the end, lock Americans into policies that
are unlikely to make it beyond these
conference-room doors, no less into public debate,
before they are unleashed.
These men may
be mapping out the next hundred years for urban
populations in cities across the planet. At the
conference, at least, which cities, exactly,
seemed beside the point. Who could know, after
all, whether in, say, 2045, the target would be
Mumbai, Lagos, or Karachi - though one speaker did
offhandedly mention Jakarta, Indonesia, a city of
nine million today, as a future possibility.
Along with the lack of even a hint of
skepticism about the basic premise of the
conference went a fundamental belief that being
fought to a standstill by a ragtag insurgency in
Iraq was an issue to be addressed by merely
rewriting familiar tactics, strategy, and doctrine
and throwing multi-billions more in taxpayer
dollars - in the form of endless new technologies
- at the problem. In fact, listening to the
presentations in that conference room, with its
rows of white-shrouded tables in front of a small
stage, it would not have been hard to believe that
the US had defeated North Korea, had won in
Vietnam, had never rushed out of Beirut or fled
Mogadishu, or hadn't spent markedly more time
failing to achieve victory in Afghanistan than it
did fighting the First and Second World Wars
combined.
To the rest of the world, at
least, it's clear enough that the Pentagon knows
how to redden city streets in the developing
world, just not win wars there; but in Washington
- by the evidence of this "Joint Urban Operations,
2007" conference - it matters little. Advised,
outfitted, and educated by these mild-mannered men
who sipped sodas and noshed on burnt egg rolls
between presentations, the Pentagon has evidently
decided to prepare for 100 years more of the same:
war against various outposts of a restless,
oppressed population of slum-dwellers one billion
strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25
million a year. All of these UO experts are
preparing for an endless struggle that history
suggests they can't win, but that is guaranteed to
lead to large-scale destruction, destabilization,
and death. Unsurprisingly, the civilians of the
cities that they plan to occupy, whether living in
Karachi, Jakarta, or Baghdad, have no say in the
matter. No one thought to invite any of them to
the conference.
Nick Turse is
the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los
Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the
Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The
Complex, an exploration of the new
military-corporate complex in America, is due out
in the American Empire Project series by
Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website,
NickTurse.com, (up only in rudimentary form) will
fully launch in the coming months.
Republished with permission from Tomdispatch.com.
Copyright 2007, Nick Turse
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