Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)

[Richard Lowenberg]

Of interest to those on this list posting about 'cities', may be this,
from Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookie, to another list.  Excuse his narrow
formatting.
Also of possible interest is Anthony Townsend's (of the Institute for the
Future) <telecom-cities> list and web site: http://cities.iftf.net
rl

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 21:52:10 -0400
From: Paul D. Miller <[hidden email]>
To: idc at mailman.thing.net
Subject: [iDC] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism

Hey people - this is a rather interesting article
I picked up a little while ago. I'm a big Mike
"City of Quartz" Davis fan, so hey... I just
thought it might provide some food for thought to
several of the threads going on the list. About
half the world's population will be in cities
within the next couple of decades, and the way
this drives alot of issues - immigration,
friction points like water, oil, and of course,
religion - into direct collision, is pretty
intriguing. The original term "ghetto" after all
comes from the venerable Venetian Republic. Look
what that started! The ghetto is a state of mind
I guess...

Paul


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




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.


PT2

     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, Bogot?, 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
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[Carl Tollander]

These guys are so down on scenario planning, they might enjoy
http://www.gbn.com, or Peter Schwartz's "The Art of the Long View" from
1991. Regardless of what you think of the technique, the notion that it
is only used in current military and security circles is not supportable.

Richard Lowenberg wrote:

> Of interest to those on this list posting about 'cities', may be this,
> from Paul Miller, aka DJ Spookie, to another list.  Excuse his narrow
> formatting.
> Also of possible interest is Anthony Townsend's (of the Institute for the
> Future) <telecom-cities> list and web site: http://cities.iftf.net
> rl
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Sun, 5 Aug 2007 21:52:10 -0400
> From: Paul D. Miller <anansi1 at earthlink.net>
> To: idc at mailman.thing.net
> Subject: [iDC] Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism
>
> Hey people - this is a rather interesting article
> I picked up a little while ago. I'm a big Mike
> "City of Quartz" Davis fan, so hey... I just
> thought it might provide some food for thought to
> several of the threads going on the list. About
> half the world's population will be in cities
> within the next couple of decades, and the way
> this drives alot of issues - immigration,
> friction points like water, oil, and of course,
> religion - into direct collision, is pretty
> intriguing. The original term "ghetto" after all
> comes from the venerable Venetian Republic. Look
> what that started! The ghetto is a state of mind
> I guess...
>
> Paul
>
>
> Baghdad 2025
>      The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
>      By Nick Turse
>
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> PT2
>
>      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, Bogot?, 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
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[Richard Lowenberg]

>>These guys are so down on scenario planning, they might enjoy
http://www.gbn.com, or Peter Schwartz's "The Art of the Long View" from
1991. Regardless of what you think of the technique, the notion that it is
only used in current military and security circles is not supportable.<<

Carl,
        Not sure I understand your comment.  I do know that Peter and
others at GBN have long been advising, consulting and referred to by
groups within various branches of military and intelligence planning.
Peter was even the early author (when at SRI) of a screenplay that became
the basis for the feature film "War Games".   The limitations of
individual people, mind-sets, intentions, and vested-interests, among
numerous other factors, tend to affect the outcomes of Scenario Planning
or any other complex decision-making process, as is evident in the article
I forwarded.
Richard

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505-989-9110,  505-603-5200 cell
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