BAGHDAD 2025

[Joanne98]

Baghdad 2025
The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
by Nick Turse
January 07, 2007
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11805

So you think that American troops, fighting in the urban maze of Baghdad's huge Shiite slum, Sadr City, add up to nothing more than a horrible mistake, an unexpected fiasco? The Pentagon begs to differ. For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future -- not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet.

Take this urban-labyrinth description, for instance. "Indigenous forces deploying mortars transported by local vehicles and ready to rapidly deploy, shoot, and re-cover are common... an infantry company as part of the US rapid reaction forces has been tasked with the... mission to secure several objectives including the command and control cell within a 100 square block urban area of the capital..."

Is it Baghdad? It's certainly possible, since the passage was written in 2004 with urban warfare in Iraq's capital already an increasingly grim reality for Washington's military planners. But the actual report -- by an official from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's blue-skies research outfit -- focused on cities-of-the-future, of 2025 to be exact, as part of "a new DARPA thrust into Urban Combat."

Fear of urban warfare has long been an aspect of American military planning. Planners remember urban killing zones of the past where U.S. forces sometimes suffered grievous casualties, including in Hue, South Vietnam's old imperial capital, where "devastating" losses were incurred by the Marines in 1968; in the Black-Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993, where local militias inflicted 60% casualties on Army Rangers; and, of course, in the still-ongoing catastrophe in Iraq's cities.

In fact, military planners cannot have been shocked to find themselves fighting in the streets and alleyways of Baghdad (as well as Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Najaf, and Tal Afar) these last years. Prior to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq, American newspapers were full of largely military-leaked or inspired fears that, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in the Washington Post in late September 2002, Saddam Hussein "would respond to a U.S. invasion by attempting to... draw U.S. forces into high-risk urban warfare." It was feared that the taking of "fortress Baghdad," as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed it, might prove costly indeed.

On April 8, 2003, however, the Washington Post reported that "U.S. Army troops rolled into Baghdad" and conventional wisdom in and out of the administration held that "victory" -- the very name given to the first major base the U.S. established in Iraq, "Camp Victory" right at the edge of Baghdad International Airport -- was close at hand.

That was then, of course. Last October 8th, exactly 3 years and 6 months later, the Post confirmed that the worst pre-invasion fears of military planners had, in fact, come true -- even if somewhat belatedly and with Saddam Hussein imprisoned somewhere in the confines of Camp Victory. The "number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq," wrote reporter Ann Scott Tyson, "has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad." In fact, aside from the huge Sunni stronghold of Anbar Province, Baghdad had, by then, become the deadliest location for U.S. troops in Iraq and urban warfare in a slum city, involving snipers, IEDs, suicide car bombs, and ambushes of all sorts had, it seemed, become America's military fate.

DARPA's Future War on the Urban Poor

In his tour de force Planet of Slums, Mike Davis observes, "the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or State Department types fear to go... hey now assert that the 'feral, failed cities' of the Third World --especially their slum outskirts -- will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century." Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor."

In fact, this past October the U.S. Army issued its latest "urban operations" manual. "Given the global population trends and the likely strategies and tactics of future threats," it declares, "Army forces will likely conduct operations in, around, and over urban areas -- not as a matter of fate, but as a deliberate choice linked to national security objectives and strategy, and at a time, place, and method of the commander's choosing." Global economic deprivation and poor housing, the hallmarks of the urban slum, are, the manual asserts, what makes "urban areas potential sources of unrest" and thus, "ncreases the likelihood of the Army's involvement in stability operations." And "idle" urban youth (long a target of security forces in the U.S. homeland), loosed in the future slum city from the "traditional social controls" of "village elders and clan leaders" and prey to manipulation by "nonstate actors" draw particular concern from the manual's authors.

Given the assumed need to be in the urban Iraqs of the future, the question for the U.S. military becomes a practical one: How to deal with these uppity children of the third world. That's where DARPA and other Department of Defense (DoD) dreamers come in. According to DARPA's 2004 report, what's needed are "new systems and technologies for prosecution of urban warfare... new operational methods for our soldiers, Marines, and special operations forces."

Today, DARPA, and other Pentagon ventures like the Small Business Innovation Research Program (in which the "DoD funds early-stage R&D projects at small technology companies") and the Small Business Technology Transfer Program (where funding goes to "cooperative R&D projects involving a small business and a research institution") are awash in "urban operations-oriented programs." These go by the acronym of UO and are designed to support tomorrow's interventions and occupations. The Director of DARPA's Information Exploitation Office put it this way:

" conflicts in high density urban areas... against enemies having social and cultural traditions that may be counter-intuitive to us, and whose actions often appear to be irrational because we don't understand their context."

These programs include a wide range of efforts to visualize, map out, and spy on the global mega-favelas that the U.S. has, until now, largely scorned and neglected. A host of unmanned vehicles are also being readied for surveillance and combat in these future "hot-zones," while all sorts of lethal enhancements are in various stages of development to enable American troops to more effectively kick down the doors of the poor in 2025.

Urban Planning, Pentagon-style: Spider-Men and Exploding Frisbees

So let's try to fill out that futuristic combat scenario in the planet's urban jungles with a little futuristic detail. Current UO-oriented systems under development include:

VisiBuilding: This is a program aimed at addressing "a pressing need in urban warfare: seeing inside buildings" by developing technology that will allow U.S. forces to "determine building layouts, find anomalous quantities of materials," and "locate people within the building." According to Edward Baranoski of DARPA's Special Projects Office, Visibuilding will allow "a lot of opportunity to stake out buildings and really see inside." Think of it as a high-tech military Peeping Tom system that lets U.S. troops spy inside foreign homes and make judgments about whatever they might deem "anomalous" inside. While VisiBuilding is in development, troops will have to be content with "Radar Scope" which allows them to "sense through 12 inches of concrete to determine if someone is inside a building."

Camouflaged Long Endurance Nano Sensors: This "real-time ultra-wideband radar network... will detect, classify, localize, and track dismounted combatants... in urban environments." In translation, a system of palm-sized, networked sensors will monitor an area, day in, day out for weeks at a time. This is what DARPA likes to call "persistent surveillance." The U.S. military has headed down this particular surveillance path before via the ill-fated McNamara Line and various people-sniffer devices, all of which proved incapable of differentiating between armed combatants and civilians in Vietnam era. On this score, there's little reason to believe anything will change in future alien urban slums, despite the increasing technological sophistication of such systems.

UrbanScape: This program aims "to make the foreign city as 'familiar as the soldier's backyard'" by providing "the warfighters patrolling an urban environment with an up-to-date, high resolution model of the urban terrain that can be viewed, manipulated and analyzed." Specially-outfitted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and Humvees are to gather data about a target city and then translate it into 3D visuals. These images will then be available to troops for use in navigating through and conducting combat operations in tomorrow's labyrinthine slums.

Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Team: With the apt acronym of HURT, this program will network together a squadron of small, low-altitude UAVs sending video footage to hand-held devices for the immediate use of urban RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition) troops. This high-tech system is designed, according to DARPA's director, Dr. Anthony J. Tether, to provide U.S. forces with "unprecedented awareness that enables them to shape and control conflict as it unfolds." It is meant to improve the odds when American counterinsurgency warriors take on "warfighters in a MOUT environment" or any rag-tag slum militia of tomorrow. If a report by the Pentagon Channel News is to be believed, HURT will be operational by 2008.

The Air Force is, in turn, seeking the "ability to continuously track, tag, and locate (TTL) asymmetric threats in urban environments using sensors across the tiers of airborne assets." What they envision is a slew of UAVs loitering long-term above hostile cities and slums, ready at a moment's notice to spot a target and begin tracking it. Such "targets" might be "commercial vehicles" or individuals identified through a "hyperspectral imaging HSI video camera" that allows for "the frequency spectrum of clothes, hair, and skin be exploited" thus providing "targeting level accuracy to weapon delivery assets." Think of it as the high-tech urban hunter-killer system for the neo-colonial future. While the Air Force sees this as a way to target and kill "anti-occupation forces" in Baghdad 2025, they also envision it doing double duty in the Homeland where, they say, "law enforcement require

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nation, the Village Voice, and regularly for Tomdispatch.

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