Pentagon to global cities -- drop dead

[donsu]

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=21850

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.'"

-snip-

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.

-long snip-

Baghdad 2025
The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums

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.

-long snip-

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… 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."

-snip-

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, "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.

-snip-

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

VisiBuilding: -snip-
Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano Sensors: -snip-
UrbanScape: -snip-
Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team: -snip-
Nano Air Vehicle: -snip-
Multi Dimensional Mobility Robot, Micro Air Vehicle, Urban Hopping Robots: -snip-
Z-Man: -snip-
Modular Disc-Wing (Frisbee) Urban Cruise Munition: -snip-
Close Combat Lethal Recon: -snip-

(you want to bet the secret Disney labs didn't help develope the above)

-snip-

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

-snip-

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."

-snip-

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.

-snip-

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.
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and the american people have nothing to say about this?

the neo cons plan on being in power forever?

our elections don't count?

our slums are fair game?

no matter who is elected prez the Pentagon will continue to do what it wants?

is this where the missing Pentagon trillions have gone?

why do we keep on giving the Pentagon money?

[donsu]

1. kicking back to pg.1 so more DUers can read it

nt

[Sinistrous]

2. K&R