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<font size=4><b>Kicking Down the World's Door <br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>Posted by
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom/">Tom Engelhardt</a> at
5:26pm, February 5, 2012. <br>
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175498/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175498/<br><br>
</a></font><font size=4><b>Offshore Everywhere <br>
How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to End
National Sovereignty As We Know It <br>
</b></font><font size=3>By
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/tom">Tom
Engelhardt</a><br><br>
Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.
Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget
<a href="http://hamptonroads.com/2012/01/us-weapons-future-defense-include-relics">
manages</a> to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from
the good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut
<a href="http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2012/01/budget.php">nuclear
arsenal</a>. 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
<a href="http://marietta.patch.com/articles/pentagon-proposes-f-35-delays">
delays</a> or
<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-02-02/boeing-textron-v-22-said-to-be-cut-1-75-billion-by-pentagon.html">
cuts</a> 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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175484/tom_engelhardt_debacle">
remarkably ineffective</a> institution we’ve come to know and
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175361/christopher_hellman_the_real_us_national_security_budget">
squander</a> our treasure on.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/165910/nibbling-pentagons-fat">
slated</a> to increase through
<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/01/27/413122/pentagon-budget-flattening-long-way/">
2017</a> -- 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.<br><br>
<b>Heading Offshore<br><br>
</b>The Marines began huge amphibious exercises --
<a href="http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=67001">dubbed</a>
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
<a href="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</a> on the ground in the future, and there’s going to be less
ground to have them on. The
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/26/panetta-to-outline-new-defense-spending-cuts-at-pentagon/">
same is true</a> for the Army (even if a cut of 100,000 troops will still
leave the combined forces of the two services
<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/01/26/137056/defense-budget-plan-doesnt-cut.html">
larger</a> 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
<a href="http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4967">
schedule</a> for the drawdown of combat boots in Afghanistan might be
<a href="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</a> by more than a year. Consider it a sign of the
times.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175401/tomgram%3A_peter_van_buren,_how_not_to_withdraw_from_iraq/">
lordly citadels</a>, aren't going away soon. After all, in base
terms, we’re already
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175321/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_off-base_america__">
hunkered down</a> in the Greater Middle East in an impressive way.
Even in post-withdrawal Iraq, the Pentagon is
<a href="http://news.antiwar.com/2012/01/30/pentagon-to-begin-talks-with-iraq-on-new-defense-agreement/">
negotiating</a> 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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175214/tomgram:_john_feffer,_can_japan_say_no_to_washington/">
signaled</a> in recent years that it’s ready to fight to
the<a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127356895">
last Japanese prime minister</a> not to lose a
<a href="http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20120204a8.html">single
base</a> among the three dozen it has on the Japanese island of
Okinawa.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175476/tomgram%3A_michael_klare,_a_new_cold_war_in_asia/">
“pivot”</a> to face China in southern Asia where the American military
position can be
<a href="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</a> without more giant bases or monster embassies.<br>
<a name="more"></a><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175416/tom_engelhardt_making_earth_a_global_free_fire_zone">
American free-fire zone</a><b>, </b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Since November 2002, when a Hellfire missile from a CIA-operated Predator
drone
<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-11-04-yemen-explosion_x.htm">
turned a car</a> 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,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175454/nick_turse_america%27s_secret_empire_of_drone_bases">
60</a> 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
<a href="http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/15/cia-drones-quit-pakistan-site-but-us-keeps-access-to-other-airbases/">
Shamsi Air Base</a>. Nonetheless, CIA drone strikes in that
country’s tribal borderlands
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/world/asia/us-says-qaeda-operative-killed-in-drone-strike.html">
continue</a>, assumedly from bases in Afghanistan, and recently President
Obama offered a full-throated
<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/31/nation/la-na-obama-drones-20120131">
public defense</a> of them. (That there have been fewer of them
lately has been a political decision of the Obama administration, not of
the Pakistanis.)<br><br>
Drones themselves are distinctly fallible,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/nick_turse_drone_disasters">
crash-prone</a> machines. (Just last week, for instance, an
advanced Israeli drone capable of hitting Iran
<a href="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</a> on a test flight, a surveillance drone -- assumedly
American --
<a href="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</a> in a Somali refugee camp, and a report surfaced that some
U.S. drones in Afghanistan
<a href="http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2012/01/marine-shadow-afghanistan-unmanned-extreme-heat-013012w/">
can’t fly</a> 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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/humans-robots-budget/all/1">
headline</a> at <i>Wired’s</i> Danger Room blog summed matters up,
“Humans Lose, Robots Win in New Defense Budget.”<br><br>
And keep in mind that when drones are capable of
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/04/navy-wants-mouse-click-flying-for-its-carrier-based-drone/">
taking off</a> 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
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-auto-drone-20120126,0,740306.story">
latest plans</a> include a future drone that will land itself on those
decks without a human pilot at any controls.)<br><br>
War has always been the most human <i>and </i>inhuman of
activities. Now, it seems, its inhuman aspect is quite literally on
the rise. With the U.S. military
<a href="http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2011/November/Pages/10TechnologiestheUSMilitaryWillNeedFortheNextWar.aspx">
working</a> to
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/02/1-in-50-troops-robots/">
roboticize</a> the future battlefield, the American way of war is
destined to be imbued with Terminator-style terror.<br><br>
Already American drones regularly cross borders with mayhem in mind in
Pakistan, Somalia, and
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16806006">Yemen</a>
. Because of a drone
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/12/05/us-military-sources-iran-has-missing-us-drone/">
downed</a> in Iran, we know that they have also been flying surveillance
missions in that country's airspace as -- for
<a href="http://wemeantwell.com/blog/2012/01/30/started-they-have-the-state-department-drone-wars/">
the State Department</a> -- they are in Iraq. Washington is
undoubtedly planning for far more of the same.<br><br>
<b>American War Enters the Shadows<br><br>
</b>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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174824/chalmers_johnson_agency_of_rogues">
“private army”</a> -- 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
<a href="http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/05/pentagons-new-strategy-is-about-much-more-than-cuts/">
slated</a> for further expansion.
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175426/nick_turse_a_secret_war_in_120_countries">
According to</a> Nick Turse, in 2011 special operations units were in 120
nations, almost two-thirds of the countries on Earth.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/army/204015-army-withdrawing-two-brigades-from-europe">
slowly withdraws</a> 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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/africa/camp-lemonier-in-djibouti-played-crucial-role-in-somalia-rescue.html">
Camp Lemonnier</a> in the North African nation of Djibouti.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175074">hunter-killer teams</a>
and
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/commando-killed-taliban-so/">
night raiders</a>, as well as
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/petraeus-campaign-plan/">
drones</a>, to do the job. Undoubtedly the most highly praised
general of our American moment, General David Petraeus has himself
<a href="http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/petraeus-general-spymaster-comfortable-in-casual-wear/">
slipped</a> 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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/opinion/new-strategy-old-pentagon-budget.html">
reportedly made</a> 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
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-wants-commando-mother-ship/2012/01/27/gIQA66rGWQ_print.html">
commando “mothership”</a> or (depending on which Pentagon spokesperson
you listen to) as a
<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-31/uss-ponce-isn-t-persian-gulf-seal-mothership-admiral-says.html">
“lily pad”</a> 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
"<a href="http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/afsb.htm">
Afloat Forward Staging Bases</a>" from scratch.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/2400-miles-in-minutes-hypersonic-weapon-passes-easy-test/">
hit targets</a> anywhere on Earth with massive conventional explosives in
less than an hour.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050025/">old TV show</a>, the U.S.
has gun, will travel.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<i>Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608460711/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s</a> <i>as well
as</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The End of Victory Culture</a><i>, runs the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com. His latest book,</i>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608461548/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20">
The United States of Fear</a> <i>(Haymarket Books), has just been
published.<br><br>
</i>[<b>Note:</b> I couldn’t have written this piece without the superb
reportage of TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse on
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175338/nick_turse_the_pentagon%27s_planet_of_bases">
bases</a>,
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175489/nick_turse_drone_disasters">
drones</a>, and
<a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175426/nick_turse_a_secret_war_in_120_countries">
special operations forces</a>. I offer him a deep bow of thanks.
Tom]<br>
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Copyright 2012 Tom Engelhardt<br><br>
<br><br>
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