Militarizing the Homeland

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Militarizing the Homeland
Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola

August 7, 2009

My very first recruiting officer was G.I. Joe," says Iraq war veteran Michael Prysner, an Iraq war veteran who was an aerial intelligence specialist in the US Army Reserve.

Award-winning journalist and Associate Editor of the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com Nick Turse writes in his book "The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives": "As a product of the 1980s G.I. Joe generation, I can attest to the seductive power of those three inch action figures in selling the military to young boys."

In an interview with Truthout, Turse observed, "Only later would I learn just how enmeshed G.I. Joe's manufacturer, Hasbro, was with the military. One instance of this close association came to me in 2003 when the Department of Defense shared the specifications for their Future Force Warrior concept with the toy company, even before awarding the contract to General Dynamics. More important to the military these days are its ties to video game manufacturers. The latter turn tax-payer-funded combat simulators into first-person shooters that, in effect, pre-train youngsters in small-unit military tactics and irregular warfare."

Turse also talks of the Microsoft Xbox game "Close Combat: First to Fight," which was originally a training tool developed for the US Marine Corps by civilian contractor Destineer Studios. His book reveals that the game "was created under the direction of more than 40 active-duty Marines, fresh from the frontlines of combat in the Middle East worked side-by-side with the development team to put the exact tactics they used in combat into "First Fight."

...

http://www.truthout.org/080609A

[HamdenRice]

1. But you haven't yet demonstrated how GI Joe is all Obama's fault!!1!

Let's see, GI Joe was invented as a toy in the 60s. Did the young Kenyan immigrant stealthily submit his idea to a toy company? Did he secretly produce the recent movie?

[ThomWV]

7. Comment

Your replies and your original posts are generally insightful, in fact I might go so far as to say frequently - but as this one shows, not always.

I have discovered its not a good idea for me to post much in the mornings - my meanness factor is high until the fog lifts, maybe I'm not the only one.

[HamdenRice]

10. Reply

The insight level of my comments is calibrated to the person I'm responding to. The OPer has a solid record of posting that virtually everything bad in the world is the fault of Obama -- even things that happened before Obama was president -- so I think it's fair to ask for an explanation of Obama's direct responsibility for GI Joe's promotion of militarism. He's been predicting that Obama would be a failure since at least January 2008, 10 months before the election. If the OPer seems to think that Obama started the Iraq and Afghan wars, wrote the TARP bailout bill and tortured prisoners in the wake of 9/11, I think it's a fair question.

[TexasObserver]

2. Yes, they market to the fantasies boys have of being heroes.

Killing foreigners in their homeland without adequate basis can never be heroic.

[HamdenRice]

5. That fantasy has changed dramatically over time. My favorite GI Joe toy was the space shuttle.

It's true that GI Joe, just like other military toys, indoctrinate boys. But what they are indoctrinating has changed drastically over time. (Remember the way Oliver Stone made this point at the beginning of Born on the Fourth of July?)

When GI Joe first came out, he was just that -- a regular GI, and a "regular Joe." This was before the Vietnam war escalation. It was marketed to baby boom kids, like me, and one thing most of us had in common was that our fathers were WW II vets.

I remember my first GI Joe kit was basically a very extremely realistic depiction of the outfit of a WWII private. My father would go through it and explain what the stuff was for and how he had used it during the war.

When the Vietnam war became more and more unpopular, GI Joe morphed into quasi military roles. He became in the late 60s/early 70s more of an astronaut than an Army private. I remember my favorite toy was a giant glider shaped like the space shuttle (which hadn't actually flown yet, and was still on the drawing board) -- that actually glided long distances with GI Joe inside it!

Now GI Joe is some sort of superhero -- muscle bound, barely human, cyborg -- but he reflects the soldier in the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, loaded with high tech equipment, body armor and dark glasses that make them seem not quite human. So I would agree that the current GI Joe represents hyper militarism.

[RaleighNCDUer]

12. Kind of mirrored, about the same time, the tranforming of Sgt Nick Fury,

the infantryman with his perennial 4-day stubble and cigar stub, into Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Went from being a common GI to SUPER SOLDIER!

[el_bryanto]

3. I played with G.I. Joe back in the day; the new movie looks crummy though

Meyers: I did a little research and I discovered a startling thing... There was violence in the past, long before cartoons were invented.
Kent: I see. Fascinating.
Meyers: The Crusades, for instance. Tremendous violence, many people killed, the darned thing went on for thirty years.
Kent: And this was before cartoons were invented?
Meyers: That's right, Kent.

Bryant

[ixion]

4. the militarization of civil society has been a creeping problem for decades

if you look back at films made in the prior to the hyper-militarism of the 80's, you see just how far we've fallen.

We've given up so many civil and constitutional rights over the years, it'll be a hard turn to get back to being human, er, civilian, again.

[bertman]

6. As long as there's the perception that "others" are trying to forcefully overthrow "ours"--

a perception built upon thousands of years of actual military invasions by cultures all over the world--there will be GI Joe toys and glorification of the military. It's a national, tribal, religious, etc. survival method that is used to make young males ready to fight for their nation, tribe, religious group, etc.

[SIMPLYB1980]

8. OH NOES!!!!!!!11!

[Dogmudgeon]

9. Has anyone considered an alternate explanation?

GI Joe allows boys to play with dolls ("action figures") without being on the receiveng end of ridicule, social opprobrium, and homophobia.

--d!

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. I think it's more like, it became uncool to have your kids play with guns

so they got the kids playing with dolls that carried guns.

[blindpig]

11. k&r n/t

[ipaint]

14. Gamers To Redesign Real-Life Drones

Mr. SALETAN: The old system for operating drones, the one that we presently use before we go to this technology is, you know you're looking through a feed from a camera that's in the drone and you have some other information about the vicinity that's related to you but you have to put it together and it's awkward. You're using a regular old computer keyboard. This new system is designed to solve that problem by making just sort of easier to feel as though you are really there.

These pilots sit in Nevada, that's where they sit in an Air Force Base, but the drones they're operating are over Iraq, over Afghanistan, and so help you feel as though you are there although you really are not. What Raytheon has done is to set this up like a video game because that's what video games now do so well. They make you feel as though you are in this virtual world when in reality you're sitting you know, in your chair at home.

...CHADWICK: You write about watching this demonstration video with your seven year old kind of standing behind you watching this screen, and he gets it right away and he kind of likes it.

Mr. SALETAN: Yeah, you know, he saw it with me, and you know he tells my wife, oh, it was really cool, Mom, you know the thing went down on this car and there was a big explosion. Because, you know, he is from this age of kids who are growing up playing these video games. The disturbing thing is that this is not just my son, the entire strategy of Raytheon is that this technology, because it is designed around video games that today's kids know so well, is going to be intuitive to them. They're going to be able to migrate over from playing video games to operating drones, because the systems are so similar.

One of the big selling points for this technology is how much money it's going to save the military in training. Because the kids are going to come into the military already knowing how to operate systems like this. And of course the problem is you go into operating one of these things, perhaps never having been in a real war, where you feel it in your bones that what you are doing when you press that little red button on the throttle is actually killing somebody.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=93029446

[DefenseLawyer]

15. I don't buy it.

While I'm a little too old for those G.I. Joes from the 80's I wasn't too old for Vietnam era GI Joe with the kung-fu grip and a two week beard. I played war and cowboys with all manner of guns, violence and mayhem and I am about the least militarized, non-gun owning person I know. I think we don't give normal, well adjusted kids enough credit for being able to separate make believe from reality. But that's just me, I know others disagree.

[Echo In Light]

16. Good points, bro. I suspect the real long term, deeply seated impressions...

... rest with one, the individual's psychological make up, coupled with two, the degree to which orthodox, mainstream, "traditional" views and beliefs are routinely questioned and challenged within one's social environment, versus how those views/beliefs are imposed top-down, the underlying prompt being sacred adherence-to w/o critical questioning of validity or intention.

[pleah]

18. I agree with you. I, too, grew up playing with toy guns, and

had two older brothers that like to tie us girls to trees in the woods and leave us. None of us are violent people now that we are "all grown up".

[Echo In Light]

19. Conversely I think the OP's subject matter has some valid points, too

I mean, it's no secret that there are vested interests who DO wish to help transform the social landscape into such that its people aren't so quick to connect dots between a specific mindset and how it behooves certain groups/organizations that have their own agenda and aims.

[walldude]

17. Why is everything a plot on DU?

This isn't the "militarizing" of the "homeland". It's a movie company who saw a toy from the 80's (Transformers) turned into a hugely profitable franchise film and is trying anything to match those numbers. In case you haven't noticed there are a number of toy movies in development, including, and this is not a joke, Slinky The Movie.

This G.I. Joe movie has nothing to do with anything except a hollywood movie system that is bankrupt of original ideas. The military may cooperate with the movie company if they like what they see but if you think the MIlitary has any kind of say in what movies are made by huge international corporations you have no idea how hollywood works.

[HamdenRice]

20. You're obviously part of the military industrial complex or a paid shill for Goldman Sachs

dontcha know! Everything really, really is a PLOT!!1! And if you disagree with the paranoid view of the OP, then there's really only one explanation -- or maybe 2 -- namely, you support the military industrial complex or you're a paid shill for Goldman Sachs! I know, I've been told that I am!!!

Sometimes paranoids really are being persecuted, dontcha know?!?!?

:sarcasm:

[ipaint]

21. Operation Hollywood

How the Pentagon bullies movie producers into showing the U.S. military in the best possible light.

"...The first thing you have to do is send in a request for assistance, telling them what you want pretty specifically -- ships, tanks, planes, bases, forts, submarines, troops -- and when you want this material available. Then you have to send five copies of the script to the Pentagon, and they give it to the affected service branches -- Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard. Then you wait and see if they like your script or not. If they like it, they’ll help you; if they don’t, they won’t. Almost always, they’ll make you make changes to the military depictions. And you have to make the changes that they ask for, or negotiate some kind of compromise, or you don’t get the stuff.

So then you finally get the approval, after you change your script to mollify the military, put some stuff in about how great it is to be in the military. Then when you go to shoot the film, you have to have what I call a “military minder” -- but what they call a “technical advisor” -- someone from the military on the set to make sure you shoot the film the way you agreed to. Normally in the filmmaking process, script changes are made all the time; if something isn’t working, they look at the rushes, and say, “let’s change this.” Well, if you want to change something that has to do with the military depictions, you’ve got to negotiate with them again. And they can say, “No, you can’t change it, this is the deal you agreed to.” As one of the technical advisors, Maj. David Georgi of the Army, said to me, “If they don’t do what I say, I take my toys and go away.”

After the film is completed, you have to prescreen the film for the Pentagon brass. So before it’s shown to the public, you have to show your movie to the generals and admirals, which I think any American should find objectionable -- that their movies are being prescreened by the military."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/operation-hollywood

[nadinbrzezinski]

22. You know I will be the first to tell you that boys and girls are soclalized differently

but boys have played with the tools of war of their era from time immemorial. Boys once played with wooden swords and shields.

These days they play with toy soldiers and toy rifles. I MIGHT have a problem with that, but boys play with these kinds of toys and have played with them for evah.

I recommend people educate themselves and watch video of ethnographic research of boys playing with bows and honest to goodness arrows in the Amazon, or the Kalahari. It is up to parents to also do their job. At home nobody glorifies war in front of the nephews, none of us does, and lord knows they are growing up with essentially three combat vets in their lives.

I suspect the authors have never actually served and are looking for a facile solution to this problem of why boys grow up to be soldiers... and trust me, it is far more complex than a GI Joe.