| Imperial Washington,
like Berlin in the late 1930s, has become a psychodelic capital
where one meglomanical hallucination succeeds another. Thus,
in addition to creating a new geopolitical order in the Middle
East, we are now told by the Pentagon's deepest thinkers that
the invasion of Iraq will also inaugurate "the most important
'revolution in military affairs' (or RMA) in two hundred years.'
According to Admiral William Owen, a chief theorist of the
revolution, the first Gulf War was "not a new kind of war, but
the last of the old ones." Likewise, the air wars in Kosovo
and Afghanistan were only pale
previews of the postmodern blitzkrieg that will
be unleashed against the Baathist regime. Instead of
old-fashioned sequential battles, we are promised nonlinear
"shock and awe."
Although the news media will undoubtedly focus on the sci-fi
gadgetry involved - thermobaric bombs, microwave weapons, unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs), PackBot robots, Stryker fighting vehicles,
and so on - the truly radical innovations (or so the war wonks
claim) will be in the organization and, indeed, the very concept
of the war.
In the bizarre argot of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation
(the nerve center of the revolution), a new kind of 'warfighting
ecosystem' known as 'network centric warfare' (or NCW) is slouching
toward Baghdad to be born. Promoted by military futurists as
a 'minimalist' form of warfare that spares lives by replacing
attrition with precision, NCW may in fact be the inevitable
road to nuclear war.
FROM DESERT STORM TO WAL-MART
Military 'revolutions' based on new technology, of course,
have come and gone since air-power fanatics like Giulio Douhet,
Billy Mitchell, and Hugh Trenchard first proclaimed the obsolescence
of traditional armies and battleship navies in the early 1920s.
This time, however, the superweapon isn't a long-distance bomber
or nightmare H-bomb but the ordinary PC and its ability, via
the Internet, to generate virtual organization in the 'battlespace'
as well as the marketplace. Like all good revolutionaries, the
Pentagon advocates of RMA/ NCW are responding to the rot and
crisis of an ancien regime. Although Gulf War I was publically
celebrated as a flawless victory of technology and alliance
politics, the real story was vicious infighting amongst American
commanders and potentially disastrous breakdowns in decision-making.
Proponents of high-tech warfare, like the 'smart
bomb' attacks on Baghdad's infrastructre, clashed bitterly with
heavy-metal traditionalists, while frustrated battlefield CEO
Norman Schwarzkopf threw stupefying
tantrums.
The battles continued back in the Pentagon where the revolutionaries
- mostly geekish colonels bunkered in a series of black-box
thinktanks- found a powerful protector in Andrew Marshall, the
venerable head of research and technology assessment. In 1993,
Marshall - a guru to both Dick Cheney and leading Democrats
- provided the incoming Clinton administration with a working
paper that warned that Cold War weapons 'platforms' like Nimitz-class
aircraft carriers and heavy tank battle groups were becoming
obsolete in face of precision weapons and cruise missiles. Marshall
instead prosletysed for cheaper, quicker, smarter weapons that
took full advantage of American leadership in information technology.
He warned, however, that "by perfecting these
precision weapons, America is forcing its enemies to rely on
terrorist activities
that are difficult to target.' He cast doubt on the ability
of the Pentagon's fossilized command hierarchies to adapt to
the challenges of so-called 'asymmetric warfare.'
The revolutionaries went even further: preaching that the
potentials of 21st century warmaking technology were being squandered
within 19th century military bureaucracies. The new military
forces of production were straining to break out of their archaic
realtions of production. They viciously compared the Pentagon
to one of the 'old economy' corporations - 'hardwired, dumb
and top-heavy' - that were being driven into extinction in the
contemporary 'new economy' marketplace. Their alternative? Wal-Mart,
the Arkansas-based retail leviathan. It may seem odd, to say
the least, to nominate a chainstore that peddles cornflakes,
jeans and motor oil as the model for a leaner, meaner Pentagon,
but Marshall's think tankers were only following
in the footsteps of management theorists who had already beatified
Wal-Mart as the essence of a "self-synchronized distributed
network with realtime
transactional awareness." Translated, this means
that the stores' cash registers automatically transmit sales
data to Wal-Mart's suppliers and that inventory is managed through
'horizontal' networks rather than through a traditional
headoffice hierarchy.
"We're trying to do the equivalent in the military," wrote
the authors of Network Centric Warfare: developing and leveraging
information superiority, the 1998 manifesto of the RMA/NCW camp
that footnotes Wal-Mart annual reports in its bibliography.
In 'battlespace,' mobile military actors (ranging from computer
hackers to stealth bomber pilots) would be the counterparts
of Wal-Marts intelligent salespoints. Instead of depending on
hardcopy orders and ponderous chains of commands, they would
establish 'virtual collaborations' (regardless of service branch)
to concentrate overpowering violence on precisely delineated
targets. Command structures would be 'flattened' to a handful
of generals, assisted by computerized decision-making aides,
in egalitarian dialogue with their 'shooters.'
The iconic image, of course, is the Special Forces op in Pathan
drag using his laptop to summon airstrikes on a Taliban position
that another op is highlighting with his laser designator. To
NCW gurus, however, this is still fairly primitive Gunga Din
stuff. They would prefer to
'swarm' the enemy terrain with locust-like myriads
of miniaturized robot sensors and tiny flying videocams whose
information would be fused together in a single panoptican picture
shared by ordinary grunts in their fighting vehicles as well
as by four-star generals in their Qatar or Florida command posts.
Inversely, as American 'battlespace awareness' is exponentially
increased by networked sensors, it becomes ever more important
to blind opponents by precision airstrikes on their equivalent
(but outdated) 'command and control' infrastructures. This necessarily
means a ruthless takeout of civilian telecommunications, power
grids, and highway nodes: all the better, in the Pentagon view,
to allow American psy-op units to propagandize, or, if necessary,
terrorize the population.
THE PENTAGON'S WHIRLING DERVISHES
Critics of RMA/NCW have compared it to a millennial cult,
analogous to bible-thumping fundamentalism or, for that matter,
to Al Queda. Indeed, reading ectastic descriptions of how 'Metcalfe's
Law' guarantees increases of 'network power proportional to
the square of the number of nodes,' one wonders
what the wonks are smoking in their Pentagon basement offices.
(Marshall, incidentally, advocates using behavior-modifying
drugs to create Terminator-like 'bioengineered
soldiers.')
Their most outrageous claim is that Clausewitz's famous 'fog
of war' - the chaos and contingency of the battlefield - can
be dispelled by enough sensors, networks and smart weapons.
Thus vice-admiral Arthur Cebrowski, the Pentagon director for
'force transformation,' hallucinates that "in only a few years,
if the the technological capabilities of America's enemies remain
only what they are today, the US military could effectively
achieve total battlespace
knowledge.' Donald Rumsfeld, like Dick Cheney
(but unlike Colin Powell), is a notorious addict of RNA/NCW
fantasies (already enshrined as official doctrine by the Clinton
administration in 1998). By opening the floodgates
to a huge military budget (almost equal to the rest of the world's
military spending combined), 9.11 allowed Rumsfeld to go ahead
with the revolution while buying off the reactionaries
with funding for their baroque weapons systems, including
three competing versions of a new tactical fighter. The cost
of the compromise - which most Democrats have also endorsed
- will be paid for by slashing federal spending on education,
healthcare and local government. A second Iraq war, in the eyes
of the RNA/NCW zealots, is the inevitable theater for demonstrating
to the rest of the world that America's military superiority
is now unprecedented and unduplicable. Haunted by the 1993 catastrophe
in Mogadishu, when poorly armed Somali
militia defeated the Pentagon's most elite troops, the war wonks
have to show that networked technology can now prevail in labyrinthine
street warfare. To this end, they are counting
on the combination of battlefield ominiscence, smart bombs,
and new weapons like microwave pulses and nausea
gases to drive Baghdadis out of their homes
and bunkers. The use of 'non-lethal' (sic) weapons against
the civilian populations, especially in light of the horror
of what happened during the Moscow hostage crisis last October,
is a war crime waiting to happen.
But what if the RNA/NCW's Second Coming of Warfare doesn't
arrive as punctually promised? What happens if the Iraqis or
future enemies find ways to foil the swarming sensors, the night-
visioned Special Forces, the little stair-climbing robots, the
missile-armed drones? Indeed, what if some North Korean cyberwar
squad (or, for that matter, a fifteen-year-old hacker in Des
Moines) manages to crash the Pentagon's 'system of systems'
behind its battlespace panoptican?
If the American warfighting networks begin to unravel (as
partially occurred in February 1991), the new paradigm - with
its 'just in time' logistics and its small 'battlefield footprint'
- leaves little backup in terms of traditional military reserves.
This is one reason why the Rumsfeld Pentagon takes every opportunity
to rattle its nuclear sabre.
Just as precision munitions have resurrected all the mad omnipotent
visions of yesterday's strategic bombers, RNA/NCW is giving
new life to monstrous
fantasies of functionally integrating tactical
nukes into the electronic battlespace. The United States,
it should never be forgotten, fought the Cold War with the permanent
threat of 'first use' of nuclear weapons against a Soviet conventional
attack. Now the threshold has been lowered to Iraqi gas attacks,
North Korean missile launches, or, even, retaliation for future
terrorist attacks on American city.
For all the geekspeak about networks and ecosystems, and millennarian
boasting about minimal, robotic warfare, the
United States is becoming a terror
state pure and simple: a 21st century
Assyria with laptops and modems.
Who can spot the apocalypse from farther off or
make more provocative connections -- here between the newest
geekspeak in the Pentagon, the Wal-Mart revolution, and long
dead Assyrians -- than Mike Davis, author of City of
Quartz, Ecology of Fear and most recently Dead Cities?
He's a national treasure and below he reminds us that no one
in America is dreaming harder, wilder, in more vivid color,
or over-the-top scifi imagery than the men whose job it is to
turn us into a hyperpower of terror. They put Steven Speilberg
to shame. And shame is what we may all feel if their "mad,
omnipotent visions" come to pass. |
