[News] How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Feb 6 17:17:50 EST 2012
Kicking Down the World's Door
Posted by <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom/>Tom Engelhardt at
5:26pm, February 5, 2012.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175498/
Offshore Everywhere
How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End
National Sovereignty As We Know It
By <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom>Tom Engelhardt
Make no mistake: we're entering a new world of military
planning. Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget
<http://hamptonroads.com/2012/01/us-weapons-future-defense-include-relics>manages
to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good
old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut
<http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2012/01/budget.php>nuclear
arsenal. Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional
representatives, aren't leaving the scene any time soon, though
<http://marietta.patch.com/articles/pentagon-proposes-f-35-delays>delays
or
<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-02/boeing-textron-v-22-said-to-be-cut-1-75-billion-by-pentagon.html>cuts
in purchase orders are planned. All this should reassure us that,
despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue to
be the profligate, inefficient, and
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175484/tom_engelhardt_debacle>remarkably
ineffective institution we've come to know and
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175361/christopher_hellman_the_real_us_national_security_budget>squander
our treasure on.
Still, the cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that
will change the American way of war. They may mean little in
monetary terms -- the Pentagon budget is actually
<http://www.thenation.com/blog/165910/nibbling-pentagons-fat>slated
to increase through
<http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/01/27/413122/pentagon-budget-flattening-long-way/>2017
-- but in imperial terms they will make a difference. A new way of
preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming into
focus and one thing is clear: in the name of Washington's needs, it
will offer a direct challenge to national sovereignty.
Heading Offshore
The Marines began huge amphibious exercises --
<http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=67001>dubbed Bold
Alligator 2012 -- off the East coast of the U.S. last week, but
someone should IM them: it won't help. No matter what they do, they
are going to have
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/national-security/in-a-presidential-election-year-pentagon-stressing-positive-side-of-defense-cuts/2012/01/26/gIQABVV9RQ_story.html>less
boots on the ground in the future, and there's going to be less
ground to have them on. The
<http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/26/panetta-to-outline-new-defense-spending-cuts-at-pentagon/>same
is true for the Army (even if a cut of 100,000 troops will still
leave the combined forces of the two services
<http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/26/137056/defense-budget-plan-doesnt-cut.html>larger
than they were on September 11, 2001). Less troops, less
full-frontal missions, no full-scale invasions, no more
counterinsurgency: that's the order of the day. Just this week, in
fact, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta suggested that the
<http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4967>schedule
for the drawdown of combat boots in Afghanistan might be
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/panetta-us-nato-will-seek-to-end-afghan-combat-mission-next-year/2010/07/28/gIQAriZJiQ_story.html?hpid=z2>speeded
up by more than a year. Consider it a sign of the times.
Like the F-35, American mega-bases, essentially well-fortified
American towns plunked down in a strange land, like our latest
"embassies" the size of
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175401/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_how_not_to_withdraw_from_iraq/>lordly
citadels, aren't going away soon. After all, in base terms, we're
already
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175321/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_off-base_america__>hunkered
down in the Greater Middle East in an impressive way. Even in
post-withdrawal Iraq, the Pentagon is
<http://news.antiwar.com/2012/01/30/pentagon-to-begin-talks-with-iraq-on-new-defense-agreement/>negotiating
for a new long-term defense agreement that might include getting a
little of its former base space back, and it continues to build in
Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Washington has typically
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175214/tomgram:_john_feffer,_can_japan_say_no_to_washington/>signaled
in recent years that it's ready to fight to
the<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127356895>
last Japanese prime minister not to lose a
<http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120204a8.html>single base among
the three dozen it has on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
But here's the thing: even if the U.S. military is dragging its old
habits, weaponry, and global-basing ideas behind it, it's still
heading offshore. There will be no more land wars on the Eurasian
continent. Instead, greater emphasis will be placed on the Navy, the
Air Force, and a policy
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175476/tomgram%3A_michael_klare,_a_new_cold_war_in_asia/>"pivot"
to face China in southern Asia where the American military position
can be
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/philippines-may-allow-greater-us-presence-in-latest-reaction-to-chinas-rise/2012/01/24/gIQAhFIyQQ_story.html>strengthened
without more giant bases or monster embassies.
For Washington, "offshore" means the world's boundary-less waters and
skies, but also, more metaphorically, it means being repositioned off
the coast of national sovereignty and all its knotty problems. This
change, on its way for years, will officially rebrand the planet as
an
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175416/tom_engelhardt_making_earth_a_global_free_fire_zone>American
free-fire zone, unchaining Washington from the limits that national
borders once imposed. New ways to cross borders and new technology
for doing it without permission are clearly in the planning stages,
and U.S. forces are being reconfigured accordingly.
Think of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a harbinger of and
model for what's to come. It was an operation enveloped in a cloak
of secrecy. There was no consultation with the "ally" on whose
territory the raid was to occur. It involved combat by an elite
special operations unit backed by drones and other high-tech weaponry
and supported by the CIA. A national boundary was crossed without
either permission or any declaration of hostilities. The object was
that elusive creature "terrorism," the perfect global
will-o'-the-wisp around which to plan an offshore future.
All the elements of this emerging formula for retaining planetary
dominance have received plenty of publicity, but the degree to which
they combine to assault traditional concepts of national sovereignty
has been given little attention.
Since November 2002, when a Hellfire missile from a CIA-operated
Predator drone
<http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-11-04-yemen-explosion_x.htm>turned
a car with six alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen into ash, robotic
aircraft have led the way in this border-crossing, air-space
penetrating assault. The U.S. now has drone bases across the planet,
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175454/nick_turse_america%27s_secret_empire_of_drone_bases>60
at last count. Increasingly, the long-range reach of its drone
program means that those robotic planes can penetrate just about any
nation's air space. It matters little whether that country houses
them itself. Take Pakistan, which just forced the CIA to remove its
drones from
<http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/15/cia-drones-quit-pakistan-site-but-us-keeps-access-to-other-airbases/>Shamsi
Air Base. Nonetheless, CIA drone strikes in that country's tribal
borderlands
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/asia/us-says-qaeda-operative-killed-in-drone-strike.html>continue,
assumedly from bases in Afghanistan, and recently President Obama
offered a full-throated
<http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/nation/la-na-obama-drones-20120131>public
defense of them. (That there have been fewer of them lately has been
a political decision of the Obama administration, not of the Pakistanis.)
Drones themselves are distinctly fallible,
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/nick_turse_drone_disasters>crash-prone
machines. (Just last week, for instance, an advanced Israeli drone
capable of hitting Iran
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094181/Iran-busting-Israeli-drone-wing-span-Boeing-737-crashes-test-flight.html?ito=feeds-newsxml>went
down on a test flight, a surveillance drone -- assumedly American --
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/surveillance-drone-crashes-in-refugee-camp-in-somali-capital-african-union-soldiers-remove/2012/02/03/gIQAnZiWmQ_story.html>crashed
in a Somali refugee camp, and a report surfaced that some U.S. drones
in Afghanistan
<http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/01/marine-shadow-afghanistan-unmanned-extreme-heat-013012w/>can't
fly in that country's summer heat.) Still, they are, relatively
speaking, cheap to produce. They can fly long distances across
almost any border with no danger whatsoever to their human pilots and
are capable of staying aloft for extended periods of time. They
allow for surveillance and strikes anywhere. By their nature, they
are border-busting creatures. It's no mistake then that they are
winners in the latest Pentagon budgeting battles or, as a
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/humans-robots-budget/all/1>headline
at Wired's Danger Room blog summed matters up, "Humans Lose, Robots
Win in New Defense Budget."
And keep in mind that when drones are capable of
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/navy-wants-mouse-click-flying-for-its-carrier-based-drone/>taking
off from and landing on aircraft carrier decks, they will quite
literally be offshore with respect to all borders, but capable of
crossing any. (The Navy's
<http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-auto-drone-20120126,0,740306.story>latest
plans include a future drone that will land itself on those decks
without a human pilot at any controls.)
War has always been the most human and inhuman of activities. Now,
it seems, its inhuman aspect is quite literally on the rise. With
the U.S. military
<http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/November/Pages/10TechnologiestheUSMilitaryWillNeedFortheNextWar.aspx>working
to
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/1-in-50-troops-robots/>roboticize
the future battlefield, the American way of war is destined to be
imbued with Terminator-style terror.
Already American drones regularly cross borders with mayhem in mind
in Pakistan, Somalia, and
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16806006>Yemen. Because
of a drone
<http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/05/us-military-sources-iran-has-missing-us-drone/>downed
in Iran, we know that they have also been flying surveillance
missions in that country's airspace as -- for
<http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2012/01/30/started-they-have-the-state-department-drone-wars/>the
State Department -- they are in Iraq. Washington is undoubtedly
planning for far more of the same.
American War Enters the Shadows
Along with those skies filled with increasing numbers of drones goes
a rise in U.S. special operations forces. They, too, are almost by
definition boundary-busting outfits. Once upon a time, an American
president had his own
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174824/chalmers_johnson_agency_of_rogues>"private
army" -- the CIA. Now, in a sense, he has his own private
military. Formerly modest-sized units of elite special operations
forces have grown into a force of 60,000, a secret military cocooned
in the military, which is
<http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/05/pentagons-new-strategy-is-about-much-more-than-cuts/>slated
for further
expansion.
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175426/nick_turse_a_secret_war_in_120_countries>According
to Nick Turse, in 2011 special operations units were in 120 nations,
almost two-thirds of the countries on Earth.
By their nature, special operations forces work in the shadows: as
hunter-killer teams, night raiders, and border-crossers. They
function in close conjunction with drones and, as the regular Army
<http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/army/204015-army-withdrawing-two-brigades-from-europe>slowly
withdraws from its giant garrisons in places like Europe, they are
preparing to operate in a new world of stripped-down bases called
"lily pads" -- think frogs jumping across a pond to their prey. No
longer will the Pentagon be building American towns with all the
amenities of home, but forward-deployed, minimalist outposts near
likely global hotspots, like
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/africa/camp-lemonier-in-djibouti-played-crucial-role-in-somalia-rescue.html>Camp
Lemonnier in the North African nation of Djibouti.
Increasingly, American war itself will enter those shadows, where
crossings of every sort of border, domestic as well as foreign, are
likely to take place with little accountability to anyone, except the
president and the national security complex.
In those shadows, our secret forces are already melding into one
another. A striking sign of this was the appointment as CIA director
of a general who, in Iraq and Afghanistan, had relied heavily on
special forces <http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074>hunter-killer
teams and
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/commando-killed-taliban-so/>night
raiders, as well as
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/petraeus-campaign-plan/>drones,
to do the job. Undoubtedly the most highly praised general of our
American moment, General David Petraeus has himself
<http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/petraeus-general-spymaster-comfortable-in-casual-wear/>slipped
into the shadows where he is presiding over covert civilian forces
working ever more regularly in tandem with special operations teams
and sharing drone assignments with the military.
And don't forget the Navy, which couldn't be more offshore to begin
with. It already operates 11 aircraft carrier task forces (none of
which are to be cut -- thanks to a decision
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/opinion/new-strategy-old-pentagon-budget.html>reportedly
made by the president). These are, effectively, major American bases
-- massively armed small American towns -- at sea. To these, the
Navy is adding smaller "bases." Right now, for instance, it's
retrofitting an old amphibious transport docking ship bound for the
Persian Gulf either as a Navy Seal
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_print.html>commando
"mothership" or (depending on which Pentagon spokesperson you listen
to) as a
<http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/uss-ponce-isn-t-persian-gulf-seal-mothership-admiral-says.html>"lily
pad" for counter-mine Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and patrol
craft. Whichever it may be, it will just be a stopgap until the Navy
can build new
"<http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/afsb.htm>Afloat
Forward Staging Bases" from scratch.
Futuristic weaponry now in the planning stages could add to the
miliary's border-crossing capabilities. Take the Army's Advanced
Hypersonic Weapon or DARPA's Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2,
both of which are intended, someday, to
<http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/2400-miles-in-minutes-hypersonic-weapon-passes-easy-test/>hit
targets anywhere on Earth with massive conventional explosives in
less than an hour.
From lily pads to aircraft carriers, advanced drones to special
operations teams, it's offshore and into the shadows for U.S.
military policy. While the United States is economically in decline,
it remains the sole military superpower on the planet. No other
country pours anywhere near as much money into its military and its
national security establishment or is likely to do so in the
foreseeable future. It's clear enough that Washington is hoping to
offset any economic decline with newly reconfigured military
might. As in the <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050025/>old TV show,
the U.S. has gun, will travel.
Onshore, American power in the twenty-first century proved a
disaster. Offshore, with Washington in control of the global seas
and skies, with its ability to kick down the world's doors and strike
just about anywhere without a by-your-leave or thank-you-ma'am, it
hopes for better. As the early attempts to put this program into
operation from Pakistan to Yemen have indicated, however, be careful
what you wish for: it sometimes comes home to bite you.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The
American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's as well as
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The
End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com.
His latest book,
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>The
United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), has just been published.
[Note: I couldn't have written this piece without the superb
reportage of TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse on
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175338/nick_turse_the_pentagon%27s_planet_of_bases>bases,
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/nick_turse_drone_disasters>drones,
and
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175426/nick_turse_a_secret_war_in_120_countries>special
operations forces. I offer him a deep bow of thanks. Tom]
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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt
Freedom Archives
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