DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA US
moves above battleship
warfare By Alfred W McCoy
It's 2025 and an American "triple canopy"
of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills
the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere.
A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its
weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering
speed, knock
out an enemy's satellite
communications system, or follow individuals
biometrically for great distances.
Along
with the country's advanced cyberwar capacity,
it's also the most sophisticated militarized
information system ever created and an insurance
policy for US global dominion deep into the 21st
century. It's the future as the Pentagon imagines
it; it is under development; and Americans know
nothing about it.
They are still operating
in another age. "Our navy is smaller now than at
any time since 1917," complained Republican
candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential
debate. With words of withering mockery, President
Barack Obama shot back: "Well, governor, we also
have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature
of our military's changed ... the question is not
a game of Battleship, where we're counting ships.
It's what are our capabilities."
Obama
later offered just a hint of what those
capabilities might be: "What I did was work with
our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are
we going to need in the future to make sure that
we are safe?... We need to be thinking about
cybersecurity. We need to be talking about space."
Amid all the post-debate media chatter,
however, not a single commentator seemed to have a
clue when it came to the profound strategic
changes encoded in the president's sparse words.
Yet for the past four years, working in silence
and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided
over a technological revolution in defense
planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets
and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale
weaponization of space.
In the face of
waning economic influence, this bold new
breakthrough in what's called "information
warfare" may prove significantly responsible
should US global dominion somehow continue far
into the 21st century.
While the
technological changes involved are nothing less
than revolutionary, they have deep historical
roots in a distinctive style of American global
power. It's been evident from the moment this
nation first stepped onto the world stage with its
conquest of the Philippines in 1898.
Over
the span of a century, plunged into three Asian
crucibles of counterinsurgency - in the
Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan - the US
military has repeatedly been pushed to the
breaking point. It has repeatedly responded by
fusing the nation's most advanced technologies
into new information infrastructures of
unprecedented power.
That military first
created a manual information regime for Philippine
pacification, then a computerized apparatus to
fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam. Finally,
during its decade-plus in Afghanistan (and its
years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse
biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future
triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic
information regime that could produce a platform
of unprecedented power for the exercise of global
dominion - or for future military disaster.
America's first information
revolution This distinctive US system of
imperial information gathering (and the
surveillance and war-making practices that go with
it) traces its origins to some brilliant American
innovations in the management of textual,
statistical, and visual data. Their sum was
nothing less than a new information infrastructure
with an unprecedented capacity for mass
surveillance.
During two extraordinary
decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva
Edison's quadruplex telegraph (1874), Philo
Remington's commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil
Dewey's library decimal system (1876), and Herman
Hollerith's patented punch card (1889) created
synergies that led to the militarized application
of America's first information revolution.
To pacify a determined guerrilla
resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a
decade after 1898, the US colonial regime - unlike
European empires with their cultural studies of
"Oriental civilizations" - used these advanced
information technologies to amass detailed
empirical data on Philippine society. In this way,
they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that
played a major role in crushing the Filipino
nationalist movement. The resulting colonial
policing and surveillance system would also leave
a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging
American state.
When the US entered World
War I in 1917, the "father of US military
intelligence" Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon
security methods he had developed years before in
the Philippines to found the Army's Military
Intelligence Division. He recruited a staff that
quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed
some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more
than a million pages of surveillance reports on
American citizens, and laid the foundations for a
permanent domestic surveillance apparatus.
A version of this system rose to
unparalleled success during World War II when
Washington established the Office of Strategic
Services (OSS) as the nation's first worldwide
espionage agency. Among its nine branches,
Research & Analysis recruited a staff of
nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000
photographs, a million maps, and three million
file cards, which they deployed in an information
system via "indexing, cross-indexing, and
counter-indexing" to answer countless tactical
questions.
Yet by early 1944, the OSS
found itself, in the words of historian Robin
Winks, "drowning under the flow of information".
Many of the materials it had so carefully
collected were left to molder in storage, unread
and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global
reach, this first US information regime, absent
technological change, might well have collapsed
under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign
intelligence that would prove so crucial for
America's exercise of global dominion after World
War II.
Computerizing Vietnam
Under the pressures of a never-ending war
in Vietnam, those running the US information
infrastructure turned to computerized data
management, launching a second American
information regime. Powered by the most advanced
IBM mainframe computers, the US military compiled
monthly tabulations of security in all of South
Vietnam's 12,000 villages and filed the three
million enemy documents its soldiers captured
annually on giant reels of bar-coded film.
At the same time, the CIA collated and
computerized diverse data on the communist
civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous
Phoenix Program. This, in turn, became the basis
for its systematic tortures and 41,000
"extra-judicial executions" (which, based on
disinformation from petty local grudges and
communist counterintelligence, killed many but
failed to capture more than a handfull of top
communist cadres).
Most ambitiously, the
US Air Force spent US$800 million a year to lace
southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic,
seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to
pinpoint Hanoi's truck convoys coming down the Ho
Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy. The
information these provided was then gathered on
computerized systems for the targeting of
incessant bombing runs.
After 100,000
North Vietnamese troops passed right through this
electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and
heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive
in 1972, the US Pacific Air Force pronounced this
bold attempt to build an "electronic battlefield"
an unqualified failure.
In this pressure
cooker of what became history's largest air war,
the air force also accelerated the transformation
of a new information system that would rise to
significance three decades later: the Firebee
target drone. By war's end, it had morphed into an
increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would
make 3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over
China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV
drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of
flying 2,400 miles (3,800 kilometers) while
navigating via a low-resolution television image.
On balance, all this computerized data
helped foster the illusion that American
"pacification" programs in the countryside were
winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam's
villages, and the delusion that the air war was
successfully destroying North Vietnam's supply
effort.
Despite a dismal succession of
short-term failures that helped deliver a
soul-searing blow to American power, all this
computerized data-gathering proved a seminal
experiment, even if its advances would not become
evident for another 30 years until the US began
creating a third - robotic - information regime.
The global war on terror As it
found itself at the edge of defeat in the
attempted pacification of two complex societies,
Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part
by adapting new technologies of electronic
surveillance, biometric identification, and drone
warfare - all of which are now melding into what
may become an information regime far more powerful
and destructive than anything that has come
before.
After six years of a failing
counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon
discovered the power of biometric identification
and electronic surveillance to pacify the
country's sprawling cities. It then built a
biometric database with more than a million Iraqi
fingerprints and iris scans that US patrols on the
streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by
satellite link to a computer center in West
Virginia.
When President Obama took office
and launched his "surge", escalating the US war
effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new
frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric
databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in
both that country and the Pakistani tribal
borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar
already loosed by the Bush administration. This
meant accelerating technological developments in
drone warfare that had largely been suspended for
two decades after the Vietnam War.
Launched as an experimental, unarmed
surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone
was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance
under the CIA's "Operation Afghan Eyes". By 2011,
the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with "persistent
hunter killer" capabilities, was heavily armed
with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that
could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track
footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating
the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004
and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned
vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours.
By 2009, the air force and the CIA were
already deploying a drone armada of at least 195
Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq,
and Pakistan - and it's only grown since. These
collected and transmitted 16,000 hours of video
daily, and from 2006-2012 fired hundreds of
Hellfire missiles that killed an estimated 2,600
supposed insurgents inside Pakistan's tribal
areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones
might seem stunningly sophisticated, one defense
analyst has called them "very much Model T Fords".
Beyond the battlefield, there are now some
7,000 drones in the US armada of unmanned
aircraft, including 800 larger missile-firing
drones. By funding its own fleet of 35 drones and
borrowing others from the air force, the CIA has
moved beyond passive intelligence collection to
build a permanent robotic paramilitary capacity.
In the same years, another form of
information warfare came, quite literally, online.
Over two administrations, there has been
continuity in the development of a cyberwarfare
capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002,
president George W Bush illegally authorized the
National Security Agency to scan countless
millions of electronic messages with its
top-secret "Pinwale" database. Similarly, the FBI
started an Investigative Data Warehouse that, by
2009, held a billion individual records.
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