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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Obama's six-point plan for Global
War By Nick Turse
It
looked like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. In
the inky darkness, men in full combat gear, armed
with automatic weapons and wearing night-vision
goggles, grabbed hold of a thick, woven cable
hanging from a MH-47 Chinook helicopter. Then, in
a flash, each "fast-roped" down onto a ship below.
Afterwards, "Mike," a Navy SEAL who would not give
his last name, bragged to an army public affairs
sergeant that when they were on their game, the
SEALs could put 15 men on a ship this way in 30
seconds or less.
Once on the aft deck, the
special ops troops broke into squads and
methodically searched the ship as it bobbed in
Jinhae Harbor, South Korea. Below deck and on the
bridge, the commandos located several men and
trained their weapons on them, but
nobody fired a shot. It
was, after all, a training exercise.
All
of those ship-searchers were SEALs - the United
States Navy's Sea, Air, and Land teams, part of
the Naval Special Warfare community - but not all
of them were American. Some were from Naval
Special Warfare Group 1 out of Coronado,
California; others hailed from South Korea's Naval
Special Brigade. The drill was part of Foal Eagle
2012, a multinational, joint-service exercise. It
was also a model for - and one small part of - a
much publicized US military "pivot" from the
Greater Middle East to Asia, a move that includes
sending an initial contingent of 250 Marines to
Darwin, Australia, basing littoral combat ships in
Singapore, strengthening military ties with
Vietnam and India, staging war games in the
Philippines (as well as a drone strike there), and
shifting the majority of the navy's ships to the
Pacific by the end of the decade.
That
modest training exercise also reflected another
kind of pivot. The face of American-style
war-fighting is once again changing. Forget
full-scale invasions and large-footprint
occupations on the Eurasian mainland; instead,
think special operations forces working on their
own but also training or fighting beside allied
militaries (if not outright proxy armies) in hot
spots around the world. And along with those
special ops advisors, trainers, and commandos
expect ever more funds and efforts to flow into
the militarization of spying and intelligence, the
use of drone aircraft, the launching of
cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with
increasingly militarized "civilian" government
agencies.
Much of this has been noted in
the media, but how it all fits together into what
could be called the new global face of empire has
escaped attention. And yet this represents nothing
short of a new President Barack Obama doctrine, a
six-point program for 21st-century war,
American-style, that the administration is now
carefully developing and honing.
Its
global scope is already breathtaking, if little
recognized, and like former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld's military lite and David
Petraeus's counterinsurgency operations, it is
evidently going to have its day in the sun - and
like them, it will undoubtedly disappoint in ways
that will surprise its creators.
The
Blur-ness For many years, the US military
has been talking up and promoting the concept of
"jointness". An army helicopter landing navy SEALs
on a Korean ship catches some of this ethos at the
tactical level. But the future, it seems, has
something else in store. Think of it as
"blur-ness", a kind of organizational version of
war-fighting in which a dominant Pentagon fuses
its forces with other government agencies -
especially the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency),
the State Department, and the Drug Enforcement
Administration - in complex, overlapping missions
around the globe.
In 2001, Rumsfeld began
his "revolution in military affairs", steering the
Pentagon toward a military-lite model of
high-tech, agile forces. The concept came to a
grim end in Iraq's embattled cities. A decade
later, the last vestiges of its many failures
continue to play out in a stalemated war in
Afghanistan against a rag-tag minority insurgency
that can't be beaten. In the years since, two
secretaries of defense and a new president have
presided over another transformation - this one
geared toward avoiding ruinous, large-scale land
wars which the US has consistently proven unable
to win.
Under Obama, the US has expanded
or launched numerous military campaigns - most of
them utilizing a mix of the six elements of
21st-century American war. Take the American war
in Pakistan - a poster-child for what might now be
called the Obama formula, if not doctrine.
Beginning as a highly circumscribed drone
assassination campaign backed by limited
cross-border commando raids under the Bush
administration, US operations in Pakistan have
expanded into something close to a full-scale
robotic air war, complemented by cross-border
helicopter attacks, CIA-funded "kill teams" of
Afghan proxy forces, as well as
boots-on-the-ground missions by elite special
operations forces, including the SEAL raid that
killed Osama bin Laden.
The CIA has
conducted clandestine intelligence and
surveillance missions in Pakistan, too, though its
role may, in the future, be less important, thanks
to Pentagon mission creep. In April, in fact,
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the
creation of a new CIA-like espionage agency within
the Pentagon called the Defense Clandestine
Service. According to the Washington Post, its aim
is to expand "the military's espionage efforts
beyond war zones".
Over the last decade,
the very notion of war zones has become remarkably
muddled, mirroring the blurring of the missions
and activities of the CIA and Pentagon. Analyzing
the new agency and the "broader convergence trend"
between Department of Defense and CIA missions,
the Post noted that the "blurring is also evident
in the organizations' upper ranks. Panetta
previously served as CIA director, and that post
is currently held by retired four-star Army
General David H Petraeus."
Not to be
outdone, last year the State Department, once the
seat of diplomacy, continued on its long march to
militarization (and marginalization) when it
agreed to pool some of its resources with the
Pentagon to create the Global Security Contingency
Fund. That program will allow the Defense
Department even greater say in how aid from
Washington will flow to proxy forces in places
like Yemen and the Horn of Africa.
One
thing is certain: American war-making (along with
its spies and its diplomats) is heading ever
deeper into "the shadows". Expect yet more
clandestine operations in ever more places with,
of course, ever more potential for blowback in the
years ahead.
Shedding light on 'the
Dark Continent' One locale likely to see an
influx of Pentagon spies in the coming years is
Africa. Under President Obama, operations on the
continent have accelerated far beyond the more
limited interventions of the Bush years:
last year's war in Libya; a regional drone
campaign with missions run out of airports and
bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean
archipelago nation of Seychelles;
a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean
supporting regional operations;
a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign
against militants in Somalia, including
intelligence operations, training for Somali
agents, secret prisons, helicopter attacks, and US
commando raids;
a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism
operations across East Africa;
a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out
on the sly in the region using manned aircraft;
tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied
mercenaries and African troops; and
a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered
by State Department experts) dispatched to help
capture or kill Lord's Resistance Army leader
Joseph Kony and his senior commanders, operating
in Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, and the Central African Republic (where
US Special Forces now have a new base) - it only
begins to scratch the surface of Washington's
fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.
Even less well known are other US military
efforts designed to train African forces for
operations now considered integral to American
interests on the continent. These include, for
example, a mission by elite Force Recon Marines
from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task
Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12) to train soldiers from the
Uganda People's Defense Force, which supplies the
majority of troops to the African Union Mission in
Somalia.
Earlier this year, Marines from
SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi
National Defense Force, the second-largest
contingent in Somalia; sent trainers into Djibouti
(where the US already maintains a major Horn of
Africa base at Camp Lemonier); and traveled to
Liberia where they focused on teaching
riot-control techniques to Liberia's military as
part of an otherwise State Department spearheaded
effort to rebuild that force.
The US is
also conducting counterterrorism training and
equipping militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso,
Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia. In addition,
US Africa Command (Africom) has 14 major
joint-training exercises planned for 2012,
including operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon,
Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and what
may become the Pakistan of Africa, Nigeria.
Even this, however, doesn't encompass the
full breadth of US training and advising missions
in Africa. To take an example not on Africom's
list, this spring the US brought together 11
nations, including Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia,
Liberia, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone to take part
in a maritime training exercise code-named Saharan
Express 2012.
Back in the
backyard Since its founding, the United
States has often meddled close to home, treating
the Caribbean as its private lake and intervening
at will throughout Latin America. During the
George W Bush years, with some notable exceptions,
Washington's interest in America's "backyard" took
a backseat to wars farther from home.
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