- Pentagon transformation is well underway. The U.S. military
is increasingly being converted into a global oil protection service. Secretary
of War Donald Rumsfeld has a "strategy guy" whose job is to teach
this new way of warfare to high-level military officers from all branches
of services and to top level CIA operatives. Thomas Barnett is a professor
at the Navy War College in Rhode Island. He is author of the controversial
book The Pentagon's New Map that identifies a "non-integrating gap"
in the world that is resisting corporate globalization. Barnett defines
the gap as parts of Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Central Asia
all of which are key oil-producing regions of the world.
-
- In what Barnett calls a "Grand March of History"
he claims that the U.S. military must be transformed in order to preemptively
take control of the gap, so the U.S. can "manage" the global
distribution of resources, people, energy, and money. (It has long predicted
that the gap between rich and poor around the world will continue to widen
and that the Pentagon will be used to keep the boot on the necks of the
people of the third world to the benefit of corporate globalization.)
-
- Barnett predicts that U.S. unilateralism will lead to
the "inevitability
- of war." Referring to Hitler in a recent presentation,
Barnett reminded his military audience that the Nazi leader never asked
for permission before invading other countries. Thus, the end to multi-lateralism.
-
- Barnett argues that the days of arms talks and international
treaties are over. "There is no secret where we are going," he
says as he calls for a "new ordering principle" at the Department
of Defense (DoD). Barnett maintains that as jobs move out of the U.S. the
primary export product of the nation will be "security." Global
energy demand will necessitate U.S. control of the oil producing regions.
"We will be fighting in Central Africa in 20 years," Barnett
predicts.
-
- In order to implement this new military vision,"
Barnett maintains that the U.S. military must move away from its often-competing
mix of Air Force-Navy-Army-Marines toward two basic military services.
One he names Leviathan, which he defines as the kick ass, wage war, special
ops, and not under the purview of the international criminal court. Give
us your angry, video game-playing 18-19 year olds, for the Leviathan force,
Barnett says. Once a country is conquered by Leviathan, Barnett says the
U.S. will have to have a second military force that he calls Systems Administration.
This force he describes as the "proconsul" of the empire, boots
on the ground, the police force to control the local populations. This
group, Barnett says, "will never come home."
-
- Barnett1s plan is essentially underway today. New fast,
flexible, and efficient projection forces with "lily pad" bases
are now being developed for control of the gap. Over the next decade, the
military will abandon 35% of the Cold War-era bases it uses abroad as it
seeks to expand the network of bare-bones sites in the gap. The planned
changes, once completed, will result in the most profound "reordering"
of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements
were set 50 years ago.
-
- According to Michael Klare, professor of Peace Studies
at Hampshire College, "American troops are now risking their lives
on a daily basis to protect the flow of petroleum. In Colombia, Saudi Arabia,
and the Republic of Georgia, U.S. personnel are spending their days and
nights protecting pipelines and refineries, or supervising the local forces
assigned to this mission."
-
- Klare continues, "The DoD has stepped up its arms
deliveries to military forces in Angola and Nigeria, and is helping to
train their officers and enlisted personnel; meanwhile, Pentagon officials
have begun to look for permanent bases in the area, focusing on Senegal,
Ghana, Mali, Uganda and Kenya." The Wall Street Journal has reported
that "a key mission for U.S. forces (in Africa) would be to ensure
that Nigeria1s oil fields, which in the future could account for as much
as 25% of all U.S. oil imports, are secure."
-
- National Guard units across the U.S. are now being assigned
the task of developing on-going basing relationships with each nation on
the African continent.
-
- Role of Space Technology
-
- The Bush administration is also exploring the possibility
of expanding the emerging missile defense system into Eastern Europe as
an element in the strategic containment of Russia, China and the Middle
East. The Pentagon has been negotiating with Hungary, Romania, Poland and
the Czech Republic about one or more of them hosting new missile defense
bases. Oil-rich Iran is to be encircled by missile defense posts in Azerbaijan,
Turkmenistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
-
- In order to pull all of this together the Pentagon claims
it will need "a God's-eye view" of the world. A new "internet
in the sky" is now being built for the wars of the future. Costing
well over $200 billion, the new web would give war machines and military
forces a common language, instantly emitting an encyclopedia of lethal
information about all enemies.
-
- According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's
Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about
is a new theory of war." The military wants to know "everything
of interest to us, all the time," says one Pentagon insider. Military
intelligence including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the
Earth will be posted on the war net and shared with troops. "The essence
of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere,
anytime. Information technology is the key to that."
-
- Thus U.S. military and economic control of the gap will
be dependent on a system of networked computers. Fusing weapons, secret
intelligence and soldiers in a global network what the military calls net-centric
warfare will, they say, change the military in a way the Internet changed
business and culture.
-
- Bruce K. Gagnon
- GN Coordinator
- Brunswick, MaineBruce K. Gagnon
- GN Coordinator
- Brunswick, Maine
-
- http://www.uruknet.info/?p=8721&hd=0&size=1&l=x
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