Page 4 of
4 Spidermen
and exploding frisbees By Nick
Turse
which will,
according to an army spokesman, be available to
"all friendly nations that support the war on
terror".
American terminators vs
drug-dealing guerillas As both the
high-tech programs and the proliferating training
facilities suggest, the Pentagon views the foreign
slum city of tomorrow as a dystopian nightmare and
the bloody battle space to be feared and
controlled in the coming decades. Beyond this, the
Pentagon exhibits a palpable fear of urban
disorder of any
sort. In response, it is
creating its own Hollywood-style solutions to its
Hollywood-esque Escape From New
York-meets-Bladerunner-meets-Zulu-meets-Robocop
vision of the Third World city to come.
For example, the navy/marines recently
launched a program seeking to develop algorithms
to predict the criminality of a given building or
neighborhood. The project, titled "Finding
Repetitive Crime Supporting Structures", defines
cities as nothing more than a collection of "urban
clutter [that] affords considerable concealment
for the actors that we must capture". The "hostile
behavior bad actors", as the program terms them,
are defined not just as "terrorists", today's
favorite catch-all bogiemen, but as a panoply of
nightmare archetypes: "insurgents, serial killers,
drug dealers, etc". (For its part, the army's
recently revised "urban operations" manual offers
an even more extensive list of "persistent and
evolving urban threats", including regional
conventional military forces, paramilitary forces,
guerrillas and insurgents as well as terrorists,
criminal groups and angry crowds. In fact, even
the threat of computer "hackers" is mentioned.
To do battle in dystopian mega-cities
where serial killers, druglords, hackers and urban
guerillas may have joined forces, DARPA is intent
on developing a program worthy of a
direct-to-video sci-fi thriller. In a recent
solicitation, it offered a vision of a human-robot
military SWAT team busting down doors in a
favela of the future. It reads:
The challenge is to create a system
demonstrating the use of multiple robots with
one or more humans on a highly constrained
tactical maneuver ... One example of such a
maneuver is the through-the-door procedure often
used by police and soldiers to enter an urban
dwelling ... [where] one kicks in the door then
pulls back so another can enter low and move
left, followed by another who enters high and
moves right, etc. In this project the teams will
consist of robot platforms working with one or
more human teammates as a cohesive unit. The
robots should be under autonomous control rather
than remote/teleoperated.
This
scenario of tomorrow already seems well launched.
The military has, in fact, been obsessed with the
idea of sending to war heavily-armed, teleoperated
robots - such as the Special Weapons Observation
Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS Talon,
a small, all-terrain tracked vehicle, used by the
US military since 2000, that can be outfitted with
M240 or M249 machine guns, Barrett 50-caliber
rifles, 40mm grenade launchers and anti-tank
rocket launchers.
Pentagon to global
cities: Drop dead This past autumn, the
Pentagon's US Joint Forces Command engaged in a
$25 million, 35-day, computer-based simulation
exercise involving more than 1,400 soldiers,
marines, airmen and sailors. A year in the making,
"Urban Resolve 2015" had one simple goal - to test
concepts for future "combat in cities" - and, not
surprisingly, it was set in Baghdad 2015.
An article put out by the Pentagon's
American Forces Press Service was quick to say,
however, that the virtual exercise really could be
taking place in "any urban environment". And the
reason why was clear in the words of Dave Ozolek,
the executive director of the Joint Futures Lab at
the Joint Forces Command. Urban zones, he said,
were "where the fight is, that's where the enemy
is, that['s] where the center of gravity for the
whole operation is".
While the Joint
Forces Command may already be war-gaming the 2015
Battle for Baghdad, right now it looks like the US
military will have trouble hanging on there for
even a couple of more years. Still, if present
plans become reality, odds are US military
planners will be attempting to occupy some city,
in some fashion, come 2015 and 2025. In the
future, as the army's new Urban Operations Manual
puts it, "every soldier - regardless of branch or
military occupational specialty - must be
committed and prepared to close with and kill or
capture threat forces in an urban environment".
The way the Pentagon seems to envision the
future, its human-robot expeditionary forces will
spend increasing amounts of time dropping in on
Third World super-slums armed not only with heavy
weaponry, but also with gadgets galore. They will
be able to read instant three-dimensional maps of
the buildings they're approaching and watch
real-time video of the most intimate activities in
the urban zone they've been tasked to subdue.
As tiny flying UAVs blanket an
impoverished neighborhood, a squad of special-ops
Spidermen and geko warriors will crawl and slither
up apartment-building walls, while teams of robots
are simultaneously hopping through first-floor
windows and terminator-human teams are kicking
down front doors to capture an enemy drug kingpin.
Nearby "angry crowds" of politically-minded youth
will be engaged by heavily-armed teleoperated
SWORDS Talon robots, while a few up-armored cyborg
troops, at a safe distance, fire their loitering
smart grenades at a gathering crowd of armed
slum-dwellers who believe themselves well hidden
and protected in nearby alleyways.
Of
course, no matter the fantasies of Pentagon
scientists and planners, such futuristic solutions
will not replace US reliance on massive firepower,
even in labyrinthine cities, as was true with
Tokyo during World War II, Pyongyang during the
Korean War, Ben Tre in Vietnam and the Sunni city
of Fallujah during the current war in Iraq.
As Major Tim Karcher, the operations
officer for the army's Task Force 2-7 Cavalry,
recalled of the American assault on Fallujah in
November 2004, "We sat there for a good six or
seven hours ... watching ... this death and
destruction rain down on the city, from AC-130
[gunships] to any kind of fast-moving aircraft,
155 [millimeter] howitzers. You name it, everybody
was getting in the mix."
Given the
military's fear of sending large numbers of
American troops into the enemy-friendly landscape
of the urban mega-slum, where significant
casualties are almost unavoidable, this form of
Pentagon-preferred urban renewal is unlikely to be
replaced, no matter what technologies come down
the pike.
The military and the
metropolis Cities are obviously on the
Pentagon's hit list –today, it's Baghdad; tomorrow
2015 or 2025, if military planners are right, it
could be Accra, Bogota, Dhaka, Karachi, Kinshasa,
Lagos, Mogadishu or even a perennial favorite,
Port au Prince. Regardless of the exact locale,
Pentagon strategists looking into the DARPA
crystal ball of the future have determined that
urban slums will be a crucial battleground, and
slum-dwellers a crucial enemy.
Yet the
outlook for the US military is not upbeat - even
with high-tech exploding frisbees, Spiderman
suits, terminator-like robots and urban training
facilities galore coming on line. In the wars
begun since the US high command moved into its own
self-described virtual "city" - the Pentagon - a
distinct inability to decisively defeat any but
its weakest foes has been in evidence.
Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the
1960s and 1970s, Lebanon in the early 1980s and
Somalia in the early 1990s were all failures. More
recently, victory in Afghanistan has proved worse
than elusive and a ragtag insurgency in Iraq has
fought the Pentagon's technological dominance and
superior firepower to a standstill. While able to
cause massive casualties and tremendous
destruction, the Pentagon war machine has proven
remarkably ineffectual when it comes to achieving
actual victory.
Now, the Pentagon has
decided to prepare for a fight with a restless,
oppressed population of slum-dwellers 1 billion
strong and growing at an estimated rate of 25
million people per year. To take on even lone
outposts in this multitude - like any of the 400
cities of over 1 million people that exist today
or the 150 more estimated to be in existence by
2015 - is a fool's errand, a recipe for both
carnage and quagmire.
Nick Turse
is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com.
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