The Pentagon Makes Plans To Become the Global Slumlord

[Jcrowley]

<snip>

One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early 1990s, has been a major study of "how demographic changes will affect future conflict." The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization of world poverty has produced "the urbanization of insurgency" (the title, in fact, of their report).
"Insurgents are following their followers into the cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine, nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban counterinsurgency." As a result, the slum has become the weakest link in the American empire.

<snip>

More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal. "Rapid urbanization in developing countries," writes Captain Troy Thomas in the spring 2002 issue, "results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned."

Thomas contrasts modern, "hierarchical" urban cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by "informal, decentralized subsystems, "where no blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the system are not readily discernable." Using the "sea of urban squalor" that surrounds Pakistan's Karachi as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering challenge of "asymmetric combat" within "non-nodal, non-hierarchical" urban terrains against "clan-based" militias propelled by "desperation and anger." He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other potential nightmare battlefields.

However Captain Thomas (whose article is provocatively entitled "Slumlords: Aerospace Power in Urban Fights"), like RAND, is brazenly confident that the Pentagon's massive new investments in MOUT technology and training will surmount all the fractal complexities of slum warfare. One of the RAND cookbooks ("Aerospace Operations in Urban Environments") even provides a helpful table to calculate the acceptable threshold of "collateral damage" (aka dead babies) under different operational and political constraints.


http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5363

[sweetheart]

1. RAND == "Research And No Development"

It all comes down to their deconstruction of sadr city and the myth that
everyone wants to become an american. The urban super-poor have no motivation
to play ball, and every motivation to be exactly what they're afraid of.

But beneath it all, the rich have screwed the poor really badly for centuries,
and its no suprise they're taking their stupid war to the poor once again.
Rand is tall talk and no fighting... let the talkers go live in a poor urban
life and wish they could live and work in cush government talk-shit jobs on
how to murder poor people in concentration ghettos.

[Jcrowley]

2. So true

Energy Haves and Have-nots


With global demand for energy constantly rising and supplies contracting (or at least failing to keep pace), the world is being ever more sharply divided into two classes of nations: the energy haves and have-nots. The haves are the nations with sufficient domestic reserves (some combination of oil, gas, coal, hydro-power, uranium, and alternative sources of energy) to satisfy their own requirements and be able to export to other countries; the have-nots lack such reserves and must make up the deficit with expensive imports or suffer the consequences.


From 1950 to 2000, when energy was plentiful and cheap, the distinction did not seem so obvious as long as the have-nots possessed other forms of power: immense wealth (like Japan); nuclear weapons (like Britain and France); or powerful friends (like the NATO and Warsaw Pact countries). Needless to say, for poor countries possessing none of these assets, being a have-not state was a burden even then, contributing mightily to the debt crisis that still afflicts many of them. Today, these other measures of power have come to seem less important and the distinction between energy haves and have-nots correspondingly more significant -- even for wealthy and powerful countries like the United States and Japan.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=157744