[A-List] Mike Davis on the Pentagon's urban war planning

[Richard Menec <menecraj@xxxxxxx>]

http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1386

Tom Dispatch April 16, 2004

Mike Davis on the Pentagon's urban war planning

In the escalating crisis that is Iraq, American Marines, after days of
battle followed by a tenuous "truce," are deep into but not in control of
Fallujah, a resistant city of 300,000 in the "Sunni Triangle," while the
Army finds itself poised at the edge of Iraq's Shiite holy cities. Our
troops are toeing what the most revered Shiite religious figures have termed
a "red line" across which lies the path to "300 Fallujahs."

This is, in fact, the very nightmare that American military leaders
desperately wanted to -- and initially did -- avoid as the invasion of Iraq
began in March 2003. This is the Iraqi "quagmire" that they most feared in
their still Vietnam-saturated strategic thinking. After all, this is Iraq's
(urban) "jungle," and from Stalingrad to Hue and Mogadishu, urban warfare
against a determined foe, employing the house-to-house equivalent of
guerrilla tactics, was known to cancel out many of the advantages of
overwhelming firepower and advanced war technology. Fallujah has already
demonstrated exactly that.

Mike Davis, our resident expert on cities new and old, points out in his
latest piece that, since the early 1990s, facing an ever more global
imperial mission into the "arc of instability," the energy heartlands of our
planet, the American military has been in preparation mode -- preparation
for a grim future fighting in the sprawling slum cities of the Third World.
Now, it seems, that future is rushing toward us. Tom

The Pentagon as Global Slumlord

By Mike Davis

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.


Mike Davis is author, most recently, of the kids' adventure, Land of the
Lost Mammoths (Perceval Press, 2003) and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun:
the San Diego Tourists Never See (New Press, 2003) among other books.