Tomgram: Nick Turse, Pentagon to Global Cities - Drop Dead

By Tom Engelhardt
Created Jan 8 2007 - 8:58am

- from TomDispatch [1]

In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have
largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange [2] in 2002,
journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser to President Bush telling
him:

"that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,'
which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your
judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something
about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not
the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality. We're history's actors . . . and
you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Slowly, step by step, the present White House has found itself forced back
into at least the vicinity of the reality-based community. This week we may,
in fact, get to hear one of the last [3] of this President's great Iraqi
fictions.

The same cannot be said of the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community [4]
(IC). They have settled into the future and taken it in hand in a
business-like, if somewhat lurid, way. It's the Pentagon that, in 2004, was
already producing futuristic studies [5] about a globally warmed world from
Hell; it's the Pentagon's blue-skies research agency, DARPA [6], that
regularly lets scientists and other thinkers loose to dream wildly about
future possibilities (and then, of course, to create war-fighting weaponry
and other equipment from those dreams). It's the National Nuclear Security
Administration that is hard at work dreaming up the nature of our nuclear
arsenal in 2030 [7].

Typical is the National Intelligence Council [8], a "center of strategic
thinking within the U.S. Government, reporting to the Director of Central
Intelligence." In 2005, it was already expending much effort to create
fictional scenarios [9] for 2010, 2015, and 2020. Someone I know recently
attended workshops the Council's long-range assessment unit organized,
trying to look at the "threats after next" -- and this time they were deep
into the 2020s.

The future -- whether imagined as utopian or dystopian -- was, not so long
ago, the province of dreamers, or actual writers of fiction, or madmen and
cranks, or reformers and journalists, or even wanna-be war-fighters, but not
so regularly of actual war-fighters, or secretaries of defense, or
presidents. In our time, the Pentagon and the IC have quite literally become
the fantasy-based community. And yet, strangely enough, the urge of our top
policy-makers (and allied academics and scientists) to spend their time in
relatively distant futures has been little explored [10] or considered by
others.

A couple of things can be said about this near compulsion. First, it's
largely confined to the arts of war. There is no equivalent in our
government when it comes to health care or education, retirement or housing.
No well-funded government think-tanks and lousy-with-loot research
organizations are ready to let anyone loose dreaming about our planet's
endangered environment, for instance. The future -- the only one our
government seems truly to care about -- is most distinctly not good for you.
It's a totally weaponized, grimly dystopian health hazard for the planet.

Of course, future fictions are notorious for their wrong-headedness. All you
have to do is check out old utopian or dystopian fiction, if you don't
believe me. The scandal here is not that, like most human beings, our
soldiers and spies are sure to be desperately wrong on most aspects of their
future fictions. The scandal is that we're mortgaging our wealth and our
futures, whatever they may be, to their bloodcurdling, self-interested, and
often absurd fantasies.

After all, they're running a giant, massively profitable business operation
off fictional futures, while creating their own armed reality at our
expense. Tomdispatch this month is focused on the imperial path [11], the
Pentagon, and militarization. This week two splendid researchers and
writers, Nick Turse and Frida Berrigan, are considering the futures the
Pentagon has in mind for us. Today, Turse explores the dreams Pentagon
planners are propounding about future war-fighting in the burgeoning slums
of our planetary mega-cities and the high-tech gear and weaponry that is
being produced for those dreams. Tuesday, Berrigan will focus on major
American weapons systems being prepared for a planet that will never exist.
Tom

* * *

Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
By Nick Turse

So you think that American troops, fighting in the urban maze of Baghdad's
huge Shiite slum, Sadr City, add up to nothing more than a horrible mistake,
an unexpected fiasco? The Pentagon begs to differ. For years now, U.S. war
planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future -- not against
Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich
land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that
increasingly dot the planet.

Take this urban-labyrinth description, for instance. "Indigenous forces
deploying mortars transported by local vehicles and ready to rapidly deploy,
shoot, and re-cover are common. [Meanwhile,] an infantry company as part of
the US rapid reaction forces has been tasked with the. mission to secure
several objectives including the command and control cell within a 100
square block urban area of the capital."

Is it Baghdad? It's certainly possible, since the passage was written in
2004 with urban warfare in Iraq's capital already an increasingly grim
reality for Washington's military planners. But the actual report -- by an
official from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the
Pentagon's blue-skies research outfit -- focused on cities-of-the-future, of
2025 to be exact, as part of "a new DARPA thrust into Urban Combat."

Fear of urban warfare has long been an aspect of American military planning.
Planners remember urban killing zones of the past where U.S. forces
sometimes suffered grievous casualties, including in Hue, South Vietnam's
old imperial capital, where "devastating" losses [12] were incurred by the
Marines in 1968; in the Black-Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia in
1993, where local militias inflicted 60%% casualties on Army Rangers; and, of
course, in the still-ongoing catastrophe in Iraq's cities.

In fact, military planners cannot have been shocked to find themselves
fighting in the streets and alleyways of Baghdad (as well as Fallujah,
Ramadi, Mosul, Najaf, and Tal Afar) these last years. Prior to the Bush
administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq, American newspapers were full of
largely military-leaked or inspired fears that, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran
wrote in the Washington Post [13] in late September 2002, Saddam Hussein
"would respond to a U.S. invasion by attempting to. draw U.S. forces into
high-risk urban warfare." It was feared that the taking of "fortress
Baghdad," as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld [14] termed it, might
prove costly indeed.

On April 8, 2003, however, the Washington Post [15] reported that "U.S. Army
troops rolled into Baghdad" and conventional wisdom in and out of the
administration held that "victory" -- the very name given to the first major
base the U.S. established in Iraq, "Camp Victory" right at the edge of
Baghdad International Airport -- was close at hand.

That was then, of course. Last October 8th, exactly 3 years and 6 months
later, the Post [16] confirmed that the worst pre-invasion fears of military
planners had, in fact, come true - even if somewhat belatedly and with
Saddam Hussein imprisoned somewhere in the confines of Camp Victory. The
"number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq," wrote reporter Ann Scott Tyson, "has
surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs
fight block-by-block in Baghdad." In fact, aside from the huge Sunni
stronghold of Anbar Province, Baghdad [17] had, by then, become the
deadliest location for U.S. troops in Iraq and urban warfare in a slum city,
involving snipers, IEDs, suicide car bombs, and ambushes of all sorts had,
it seemed, become America's military fate.

DARPA's Future War on the Urban Poor

In his tour de force Planet of Slums [18], Mike Davis [19] observes, "the
Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World
Bank or State Department 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 twenty-first
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."

In fact, this past October the U.S. Army issued its latest "urban
operations" manual. "Given the global population trends and the likely
strategies and tactics of future threats," it declares, "Army forces will
likely conduct operations in, around, and over urban areas -- not as a
matter of fate, but as a deliberate choice linked to national security
objectives and strategy, and at a time, place, and method of the commander's
choosing." Global economic deprivation and poor housing, the hallmarks of
the urban slum, are, the manual asserts, what makes "urban areas potential
sources of unrest" and thus, "[i]ncreases the likelihood of the Army's
involvement in stability operations." And "idle" urban youth (long a target
of security forces in the U.S. homeland), loosed in the future slum city
from the "traditional social controls" of "village elders and clan leaders"
and prey to manipulation by "nonstate actors" draw particular concern from
the manual's authors.

Given the assumed need to be in the urban Iraqs of the future, the question
for the U.S. military becomes a practical one: How to deal with these uppity
children of the third world. That's where DARPA and other Department of
Defense (DoD) dreamers come in. According to DARPA's 2004 report, what's
needed are "new systems and technologies for prosecution of urban warfare.
[and] new operational methods for our soldiers, Marines, and special
operations forces."

Today, DARPA, and other Pentagon ventures like the Small Business Innovation
Research Program (in which the "DoD funds early-stage R&D projects at small
technology companies") and the Small Business Technology Transfer Program
(where funding goes to "cooperative R&D projects involving a small business
and a research institution") are awash in "urban operations-oriented
programs." These go by the acronym of UO and are designed to support
tomorrow's interventions and occupations.
The Director of DARPA's Information Exploitation Office put it [20] this
way:

"[They are aimed at] conflicts in high density urban areas. against
enemies having social and cultural traditions that may be counter-intuitive
to us, and whose actions often appear to be irrational because we don't
understand their context."

These programs include a wide range of efforts to visualize, map out, and
spy on the global mega-favelas that the U.S. has, until now, largely scorned
and neglected. A host of unmanned vehicles are also being readied for
surveillance and combat in these future "hot-zones," while all sorts of
lethal enhancements are in various stages of development to enable American
troops to more effectively kick down the doors of the poor in 2025.

Urban Planning, Pentagon-style: Spider-Men and Exploding Frisbees

So let's try to fill out that futuristic combat scenario in the planet's
urban jungles with a little futuristic detail. Current UO-oriented systems
under development include:

VisiBuilding: This is a program aimed at addressing "a pressing need in
urban warfare: seeing inside buildings" by developing technology that will
allow U.S. forces to "determine building layouts, find anomalous quantities
of materials," and "locate people within the building." According to Edward
Baranoski of DARPA's Special Projects Office, Visibuilding will allow "a lot
of opportunity to stake out buildings and really see inside." Think of it as
a high-tech military Peeping Tom system that lets U.S. troops spy inside
foreign homes and make judgments about whatever they might deem "anomalous"
inside. While VisiBuilding is in development, troops will have to be content
with "Radar Scope" [21] which allows them to "sense through 12 inches of
concrete to determine if someone is inside a building."

Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano Sensors: This "real-time ultra-wideband
radar network [22]. will detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted
combatants. in urban environments." In translation, a system of palm-sized,
networked sensors will monitor an area, day in, day out for weeks at a time.
This is what DARPA likes to call "persistent surveillance." The U.S.
military has headed down this particular surveillance path before via the
ill-fated McNamara Line [23] and various people-sniffer devices, all of
which proved incapable of differentiating between armed combatants and
civilians in Vietnam era. On this score, there's little reason to believe
anything will change in future alien urban slums, despite the increasing
technological sophistication of such systems.

UrbanScape: This program aims "to make the foreign city as 'familiar as the
soldier's backyard'" by providing "the warfighters patrolling an urban
environment with an up-to-date, high resolution model of the urban terrain
that can be viewed, manipulated and analyzed." Specially-outfitted unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Humvees are to gather data about a target city
and then translate it into 3D visuals. These images will then be available
to troops for use in navigating through and conducting combat operations in
tomorrow's labyrinthine slums.

Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team: With the apt acronym of HURT, this program
will network together a squadron of small, low-altitude UAVs sending video
footage to hand-held devices for the immediate use of urban RSTA
(reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition) troops. This
high-tech system is designed, according to DARPA's director, Dr. Anthony J.
Tether, to provide U.S. forces with "unprecedented awareness that enables
them to shape and control [a] conflict as it unfolds." It is meant to
improve the odds when American counterinsurgency warriors take on
"warfighters [24] in a MOUT [Military Operations on Urban Terrain]
environment" or any rag-tag slum militia of tomorrow. If a report by the
Pentagon Channel News [25] is to be believed, HURT will be operational by
2008.

The Air Force is, in turn, seeking the "ability to continuously track, tag,
and locate (TTL) asymmetric threats in urban environments using sensors
across the tiers of airborne assets." What they envision is a slew of UAVs
loitering long-term above hostile cities and slums, ready at a moment's
notice to spot a target and begin tracking it. Such "targets" might be
"commercial vehicles" or individuals identified through a "hyperspectral
imaging HSI video camera" that allows for "the frequency spectrum of
clothes, hair, and skin [to] be exploited" thus providing "targeting level
accuracy to weapon delivery assets." Think of it as the high-tech urban
hunter-killer system for the neo-colonial future. While the Air Force sees
this as a way to target and kill "anti-occupation forces" in Baghdad 2025,
they also envision it doing double duty in the Homeland [26] where, they
say, "law enforcement require[s] urban target tracking."

Nano Air Vehicle: Imagine a world in which mechanical gnats infest a city,
buzzing through people's homes, intruding on their lives, filming whatever
they choose with tiny cameras and transmitting the data back to U.S. troops.
This program aims [27] to "develop and demonstrate an extremely small (less
than 7.5 cm), ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle system. to
provide the warfighter with unprecedented capability for urban mission
operations."

Additionally, there's the Multi Dimensional Mobility Robot (MDMR), which
"will traverse complex urban terrain"; the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) a small,
vertical take-off and landing UAV that will be "employable in a variety of
warfighting environments" including "urban areas"; and the intriguing but
shadowy Urban Hopping Robots program whose project manager, Dr. Michael
Obal, declined to answer Tomdispatch's inquiries about the project. Jan R.
Walker of DARPA's External Relations office told Tomdispatch in an email
that there is "very limited information available on the Urban Hopping
Robots program," but suggested that the "program is developing a
semi-autonomous hybrid hopping/articulated wheeled robotic platform that
could adapt to the urban environment in real-time and provide the delivery
of small payloads to any point of the urban jungle while remaining
lightweight, small to minimize the burden on the soldier." The proposed
hopping robot, she noted, "would be truly multi-functional in that it will
negotiate all aspects of the urban battlefield to deliver payloads to
non-line-of-sight areas with precision."

Z-Man: Copyright infringement was probably the only thing that stopped this
DARPA program from being called the "Spiderman Project." Basically, Z-Man
seeks to "develop climbing aids that will enable an individual soldier to
scale vertical walls constructed of typical building materials without the
need for ropes or ladders." The Pentagon is aiming to find methods [28]
similar to those employed by "geckos, spiders, and small animals [to] scale
vertical surfaces, that is, by using unique biological material systems that
enable controllable adhesion." This weaponized wall-crawler, assumedly
capable of creeping into some 2025 apartment window in Baghdad, Beruit, or
Kerachi "carrying a combat load," definitely is not meant to be your
friendly neighborhood Spiderman.

Modular Disc-Wing (Frisbee) Urban Cruise Munition: Yes, you read it right,
the Air Force has green-lighted Triton Systems, Inc. to create [29] "a MEFP
[Multiple Explosively Formed Penetrator]-armed Lethal Frisbee UAV." That is,
a flying disk that will "locate defiladed combatants in complex urban
terrain" and annihilate them using a bunker-buster warhead. Unlike your
run-of-the mill Wham-O [30], however, this "frisbee" will probably be thrown
using a device resembling a skeet launcher.

Close Combat Lethal Recon This deadly, loitering explosive expressively for
use in urban landscapes will expand a soldier's killing zone by reaching
"over and around buildings, onto rooftops, and into open building portals."
Think of it as a smart grenade or, according to DARPA Director Tether [31],
"a tube-launched cruise munition that can be used by a dismounted
infantryman in an urban area to attack a target, perhaps spotted by a UAV,
which is beyond his line of sight. It's like a small mortar round with a
grenade-size explosive in it. A fiber-optic line unreels from its back end
and provides the data link that allows the soldier to see the video from the
munition's camera and to fly it into the target."

Training for Tomorrow's Urban Occupations

Just a cursory glance at last year's Pentagon expenditures makes clear the
heavy emphasis on training the men and women who are slated to use DARPA's
high-tech urban weapons against slum-dwellers in the coming years. In March
2006, the Army signed a nearly $25 million contract "for construction of a
combined arms collective training facility/urban assault complex" at Fort
Carson, Colorado. In August, the Navy inked an $18.5 million deal for the
"design and construction of a combined arms military operations in urban
terrain facility" at Twenty-nine Palms, California. In September, the Army
approved a contract for the construction of an Urban Assault Course at Fort
Jackson, South Carolina. In November, the Navy awarded a $12,500,000
contract for construction of a "Special Operations Force Military Operations
on Urban Terrain Training Complex" at San Clemente Island, California. And
in December 2006, the Army agreed to pay $11,838,998 for a new "Military
Operations Urban Terrain Facility" for Fort Irwin, California.

The Pentagon has even exported its urban warfare training centers to sites
closer to tomorrow's prospective targets, such as the Army's custom-made
MOUT facilities at Bagram Air Base [32], Afghanistan and at Camp Buehring
[33], Kuwait. In November 2006, the Army awarded General Dynamics a $17
million contract [34] to construct an urban combat training site as part of
the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center in Jordan -- a
facility which will, according to an Army spokesman, be available to "all
friendly nations that support the War on Terror [35]."

American Terminators vs. Drug-Dealing Serial-Killer 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 battlespace 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/Marine Corps 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 [36] 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 boogiemen, 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" are
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 [37],
tele-operated robots - such as the Special Weapons Observation
Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS Talon [38], a small, all-terrain
tracked vehicle, used by the U.S. military since 2000, that can be outfitted
with M240 or M249 machine guns, Barrett 50-caliber rifles, 40 mm grenade
launchers, and anti-tank rocket launchers.

Pentagon to Global Cities: Drop Dead

This past fall, the Pentagon's U.S. 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 [39] 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, are "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 U.S. military will have trouble hanging
on there for even a couple of more years. Still, if present plans become
reality, odds are U.S. 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 3D 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 tele-operated
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 U.S. 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 [gunship]s 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,
Bogot