Published on Monday, February 6, 2012 by TomDispatch.com
Offshore Everywhere: How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the
U.S. Navy Plan to End National Sovereignty As We Know It
by Tom Engelhardt
Make no mistake: we’re entering a new world of military planning.
Admittedly, the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages to preserve
just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the good old days when
MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut 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 delays
or 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 remarkably ineffective
institution we’ve come to know and 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 slated to increase through
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 -- 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 less boots on the ground in the future, and there’s going to be
less ground to have them on. The same is true for the Army (even if a
cut of 100,000 troops will still leave the combined forces of the two
services 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 schedule
for the drawdown of combat boots in Afghanistan might be 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 lordly citadels, aren't going away soon.
After all, in base terms, we’re already hunkered down in the Greater
Middle East in an impressive way. Even in post-withdrawal Iraq, the
Pentagon is 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 signaled in recent years that it’s ready to fight to the
last Japanese prime minister not to lose a 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 “pivot” to face China in southern Asia where
the American military position can be 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
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 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, 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 Shamsi Air Base.
Nonetheless, CIA drone strikes in that country’s tribal borderlands
continue, assumedly from bases in Afghanistan, and recently President
Obama offered a full-throated 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, crash-prone machines.
(Just last week, for instance, an advanced Israeli drone capable of
hitting Iran went down on a test flight, a surveillance drone --
assumedly American -- crashed in a Somali refugee camp, and a report
surfaced that some U.S. drones in Afghanistan 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 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 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 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 working to 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 Yemen. Because of a drone downed in Iran, we
know that they have also been flying surveillance missions in that
country's airspace as -- for 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 “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 slated for further
expansion. 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
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 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 hunter-killer teams and night raiders, as well as
drones, to do the job. Undoubtedly the most highly praised general of
our American moment, General David Petraeus has himself 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 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 commando “mothership” or (depending on which Pentagon
spokesperson you listen to) as a “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 "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 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
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.
----[Mailing List for Eritrea Related News ]----
Received on Tue Feb 07 2012 - 12:24:18 EST
