ref:
http://mail.architexturez.net/+/In-Enaction/archive/msg01725.shtml
ref:
http://mail.architexturez.net/+/In-Enaction/archive/msg01841.shtml
=======================================================================
Earth Future: Planet of the Slums
Posted by: lex on
http://PEJ.org Sunday, January 07, 2007 - 05:04 PM
188 Reads
Earth News
Earth Future: Planet of the Slums
Tom Dispatch - 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.
www.tomdispatch.com
=============================
Tomgram: Nick Turse, Pentagon to Global Cities -- Drop Dead
Tom Engelhardt, Nick Turse
Tom Dispatch
Jan. 7, 2007
[for complete article links, please original at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/index.mhtml?pid=155031]
In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have
largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange 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 of this President's
great Iraqi fictions.
The same cannot be said of the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community
(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 about a globally warmed world
from Hell; it's the Pentagon's blue-skies research agency, DARPA, 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.
Typical is the National Intelligence Council, 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 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 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,
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 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 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 termed it,
might prove costly indeed.
On April 8, 2003, however, the Washington Post 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 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 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, Mike Davis 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 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" 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… 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 "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, 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, "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, Afghanistan and at Camp
Buehring, Kuwait. In November 2006, the Army awarded General Dynamics a
$17 million contract 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."
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 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,
tele-operated robots – such as the Special Weapons Observation
Reconnaissance Detection System, or SWORDS Talon, 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 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, Bogotá, Dhaka, Karachi, Kinshasa, Lagos, Mogadishu or even a
perenial 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 U.S. military is not upbeat -- even with
high-tech exploding frisbees, spider-man suits, terminator-like robots,
and urban training facilities galore coming on line. In the wars begun
since the U.S. 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 70s, Lebanon in the
early 1980s, 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 one 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. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for
Tomdispatch.
Copyright 2007 Nick Turse
source:
http://www.tomdispatch.com:80/index.mhtml?pid=155031
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