- The direction of U.S. military training slides to new
lows.
-
- The young American Marine is exultant. "It's a sniper's
dream," he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of
Fallujah. "You can go anywhere and there so many ways to fire at the
enemy without him knowing where you are."
-
- "Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him
scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies. Then I'll use a second
shot."
-
- "To take a bad guy out," he explains, "is
an incomparable 'adrenaline rush.'" He brags of having "24 confirmed
kills" in the initial phase of the brutal U.S. onslaught against the
rebel city of 300,000 people.
-
- Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls
the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed
indiscriminate terror. According to independent journalists and local medical
workers, they have slaughtered at least two hundred women and children
in the first two weeks of fighting.
-
- The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding
in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S.
policy in Iraq, but of Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon planners
consider the "key battlespace of the future" -- the Third World
city.
-
- The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood militias
inflicted 60% casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists
to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: "Militarized Operations
on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately, a National Defense Panel review
in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat
in the near impassable, maze-like streets of the poverty-stricken cities
of the Third World.
-
- As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by
the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master
street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions. "The future
of warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared, "lies
in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that
form the broken cities of the world."
-
- Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to teach Marines,
Rangers, and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics -- especially the
sophisticated coordination of sniper and demolition teams with heavy armor
and overwhelming airpower -- so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces
in Gaza and the West Bank.
-
- Artificial cityscapes (complete with "smoke and
sound systems") were built to simulate combat conditions in densely
populated neighborhoods of cities like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine
Corps Urban Warfighting Laboratory also staged realistic war games ("Urban
Warrior") in Oakland and Chicago, while the Army's Special Operations
Command "invaded" Pittsburgh.
-
- Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are graduates
of these Urban Warrior exercises as well as mock combat at "Yodaville"
(the Urban Training Facility in Yuma, Arizona), while some of the Army
units encircling Najaf and the Baghdad slum neighborhood of Sadr City are
alumni of the new $34 million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
-
- This tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat
doctrine has been accompanied by what might be called a "Sharonization"
of the Pentagon's worldview. Military theorists are now deeply involved
in imagining how the evolving capacity of high-tech warfare can contain,
if not destroy, chronic "terrorist" insurgencies rooted in the
desperation of growing megaslums.
-
- To help develop a geopolitical framework for urban war-fighting,
military planners turned in the 1990s to the RAND Corporation: Dr. Strangelove's
old alma mater. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force
in 1948, was notorious for war-gaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and
for helping plan the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These days RAND does cities
-- big time. Its researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city
public health, and the privatization of public education. They also run
the Army's Arroyo Center which has published a small library of recent
studies on the context and mechanics of urban warfare.
-
- 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.
-
- The RAND researchers reflect on the example of El Salvador
where the local military, despite massive U.S. support, was unable to stop
FMLN guerrillas from opening an urban front. Indeed, "had the Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the
cities earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United
States could have done to help maintain even the stalemate between the
government and the insurgents."
-
- 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.
-
- The occupation of Iraq has, of course, been portrayed
by Bush ideologues as a "laboratory for democracy" in the Middle
East. To MOUT geeks, on the other hand, it is a laboratory of a different
kind, where Marine snipers and Air Force pilots test out new killing techniques
in an emergent world war against the urban poor.
-
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- http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1386
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- http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/04/286289.shtml
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