[Mb-civic] Tomgram: Nick Turse, If You Build It, They Will Kill

[Michael Butler]

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, If You Build It, They Will Kill

This post can be found at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=2298

There's that classic line of career advice to the confused young hero of the
1967 film The Graduate: "I want to say one word to you. Just one wordŠ
plastics." With the perspective of a few extra decades under our belts (or
beltways), that word probably should have been "arms." After all, what a
couple of weeks it's been for Washington's war industries: The Pentagon
announced the resumption of military aid to Guatemala after fifteen years
(can weapons be far behind?) as well as, after another fifteen year hiatus,
the prospective sale of a first batch of F-16s -- the latest version of the
plane and a lovely big-ticket item evidently capable of carrying nuclear
weapons India-wards -- to the Pakistanis in appreciation for their help in
the borderlands (thanks, thanks, for the memoriesŠ). It also released a
major document, the National Defense Strategy, pledging us to war, war, war
till hell freezes over and, both in the document and elsewhere, signaling a
new push for the militarization of space, guaranteed to enable "us to
project power anywhere in the world from secure bases of operation." (If you
launch it, can the biggest ticket weapons be far behind?)

The week's cautionary note: Donald Rumsfeld's urge to create the highest
tech military in anyone's history may have a few bugs, according to the
superb Tim Weiner in a front-page piece for the New York Times (An Army
Program to Build a High-Tech Force Hits Costly Snags). The vast program,
called Future Combat Systems and overseen by Boeing (which is being paid $21
billion for the honor), is supposed to be "a seamless web of 18 different
sets of networked weapons and military robots," including tanks so stripped
down in terms of armoring that they can be flown instantly onto the
battlefield. The program, initially only meant to arm 15 brigades or about
3,000 soldiers is, Army officials told Weiner, "a technological challenge as
complicated as putting an astronaut on the moon." And as Paul L. Francis,
the acquisition and sourcing management director for the Government
Accountability Office commented, it is "a network of 53 crucial
technologiesŠ and 52 are unproven."

Think our Star Wars missile-defense system that, endless billions of dollars
later, in test after test against mock-enemy missiles turns out to be
incapable of hitting the broad side of a barn. Already the crucial Joint
Tactical Radio Systems, known as JTRS (or "jitters"), which is slated to
link the robots and humans of Future Combat Systems into one battlefield
Megatron-like beast, doesn't work and production on the first set of radios
has been halted.

Speaking of "jitters," Congressional supporters of just about any Pentagon
weapons system that comes down the pike, are getting edgy indeed when it
comes to Future Combat Systems, which, at an estimated $145 billion or more,
threatens to burst the congressional piggybank -- something of a Bush
administration specialty in so many different areas. (Best line in the
Weiner piece: "They said this month that they did not know if they could
build a tank light enough to fly." I thought the line was, "Š if pigs could
fly," but I stand corrected.)

And, the money thing aside, here's the rub -­ one of them anyway: Sometimes
the only effective defense against the highest tech levels of warfare turns
out to be the lowest levels of the same. Remember the salutary tale of the
wonderfully named Marine General Paul Van Riper (okay, it's not Ripper, but
close), who commanded the enemy "red army" in the military's Millennium
Challenge 02 war games in 2002? These maneuvers involved a war in a
fictitiously named Persian Gulf country that resembled Iraq." The games were
carefully scripted to prove the efficacy of a Rumsfeld-style high-tech army.
Unfortunately, Gen. Van Riper stepped outside the script and using such
simple devices -- the sort now undoubtedly being employed by the Iraqi
insurgency -- as "motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops,
thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology," he
trumped the techies. "At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered
the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed
boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, Œrefloated' the Blue
fleet, and resumed play.)" He was reprimanded and finally quit in protest.
But someone -- with the last couple of years in Iraq in mind -- should have
paid the man some mind.

Perhaps that's why our Secretary of Defense, responsible for sending those
F-16s to Pakistan, has been in a panic over the fact that Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez's government recently bought 100,000 AK-47 assault
rifles. Little Venezuela's purchase of 1940's-era-design rifles has Rummy in
a tizzy; and, for all the high-tech goodies at his command, not without
reason. The insurgency in Iraq has demonstrated that a relatively small
force of lightly armed insurgents in an area roughly the size of California
can bog down, stretch to the limit, and effectively counterbalance for two
years the might of the U.S. military, despite its trillions of dollars worth
of satellites, armor, artillery, air power, futuristic weapons, and
old-fashioned bullets.

Two years on, as faithful readers of Juan Cole's indispensable Informed
Comment blog can attest, Iraq's anti-occupation movement shows few signs of
slowing. Right now, it's keeping up a steady pace of 50 to 60 attacks a day,
despite frequent cheery pronouncements on our evening news and in the press
about "tipping points" (known back in Vietnam days as "progress" or "the
crossover point," or the infamous "light at the end of the tunnel").

Take, as USA Today's Steven Komarow reports, the military's Abrams tank:
"[D]esigned during the Cold War to withstand the fiercest blows from the
best Soviet tanks, [it] is getting knocked out at surprising rates by the
low-tech bombs and rocket-propelled grenades of Iraqi insurgents. In the
all-out battles of the 1991 Gulf War, only 18 Abrams tanks were lost and no
soldiers in them killed. But since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, with
tanks in daily combat against the unexpectedly fierce insurgency, the Army
says 80 of the 69-ton behemoths have been damaged so badly they had to be
shipped back to the United States."

Nick Turse reminds us below that, however bad the times may be for American
tanks or troops, it's springtime for ever-conglomerating American munitions
makers. For them, and not just for the makers of the most futuristic
weaponry either, the future beckons like a soaring Pentagon budget, like a
strobe light at the end of an ever-darkening tunnel. After all, as Guy
Dinsmore of the Financial Times reported just the other day (US draws up
list of unstable countries):

    "The US intelligence community is drawing up a secret watch-list of 25
countries where instability might precipitate US intervention, according to
officials in charge of a new [State Department] office set up to co-ordinate
planning for nation-building and conflict preventionŠ Conceived out of the
acknowledged failure of postwar reconstruction efforts in Iraq, the new
State Department office amounts to recognition by the Bush administration
that it needs to get better at nation- building - a concept it once scorned
as social work disguised as foreign policy."

And keep in mind that that's just what's happening in the once-scorned State
Department on a budget of virtual pennies. Don't even think about the
interventionary planning going on in a place where you can imagine producing
weaponry systems based on 52 unproven technologies. Tom

    If You Build It, They Will Kill
    U.S. Military Weaponry of the Near Future
    By Nick Turse

    Lets face it, making war is fast superceding sports as the American
national pastime. Since 1980, overtly or covertly, the United States has
been involved in military actions in Grenada, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama,
Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sudan,
the Philippines, Colombia, Haiti (again), Afghanistan (again) and Iraq
(again) and that's not even the full list. It stands to reason when the
voracious appetites of the military-corporate complex are in constant need
of feeding.

    As representatives of a superpower devoted to (and enamored with) war,
it's hardly surprising that the Pentagon and allied corporations are forever
planning more effective ways to kill, maim, and inflict pain -- or that they
plan to keep it that way. Whatever the wars of the present, elaborate
weapons systems for future wars are already on the drawing boards. Planning
for the projected fighter-bombers and laser weapons of the decades from 2030
to 2050 is underway. Meanwhile, at the Department of Defense's (DoD's)
blue-skies research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA), even wilder projects -- from futuristic exoskeletons to
Brain/Machine Interface initiatives -- are being explored.

    Such projects, as flashy as they are frightening, are magnets for
reporters (and writers like yours truly), but it's important not to lose
sight of the many more mundane weapons currently being produced that will be
pressed into service in the nearer term in Iraq, Afghanistan, or some other
locale the U.S. decides to add to the list of nations where it will turn
people into casualties or "collateral damage" in the next few years. These
projects aren't as sexy as building future robotic warriors, but they're at
least as dangerous and deadly, so lets take a quick look at a few of the
weapons our tax dollars are supporting today, before they hurt, maim, and
kill tomorrow.

    Set Phasers on Extreme Pain

    Recently, the Air Force Research Laboratory called for "research in
support of the Directed Energy Bioeffects Division of the Human
Effectiveness Directorate." The researchers were to "conduct innovative
research on the effects of directed energy technologies" on people and
animals. What types of innovative research? One area involved identifying
"biological tissue thresholds (minimum visible lesion) and damage mechanisms
from laser and non-laser sources." In other words, how excruciating can you
make it without leaving telltale thermal burns? And a prime area of study?
"Pain thresholds." Further, there was a call for work to: "Determine the
effects of electromagnetic and biomechanical insults on the human-body."
Sounds like something out of Star Trek, right? Weaponry of the distant
future? Think again.

    In a TomDispatch piece last spring, I mentioned a "painful energy beam"
weapon, the Active Denial System, that was about to be field-tested by the
military. Recent reports indicate that military Humvees will be outfitted
with exactly this weapon by the end of the year.

    I'm sad to report that the Active Denial System isn't the only
futuristic weapon set to be deployed in the near-term. Pulsed Energy
Projectiles (PEPs) are also barreling down the weaponry-testing turnpike.
They are part of a whole new generation of weapons systems that the Pentagon
promotes under the label "non-lethal." The term conveniently obscures the
fact that such weapons are meant to cause intense physical agony without any
of the normal physical signs of trauma. (This, by the way, should make them
-- or their miniaturized descendents -- excellent devices for clandestine
torture).

    PEPs utilize bursts of electrically charged gas (plasma) that yield an
electromagnetic pulse on impact with a solid object. Such pulses affect
nerve cells in humans (and animals) causing searing pain. PEPs are designed
to inflict "excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometers away" No one knows the
long-term physical or psychological effects of this weapon, which is set to
roll-out in 2007 and is designed specifically to be employed against unruly
civilians. But let's remember, the Pentagon isn't the Food and Drug
Administration. No need to test for future effects when it comes to weapons
aimed at someone else.

    20th Century Weaponry for 21st Century Killing

    Just recently the Department of Defense's Defense Contracting
Command-Washington put out a call for various technologies capable of
"near-immediate transition to operations/production at the completion of
evaluation." In other words, make it snappy.

    In addition to a plethora of high-tech devices, from laser-sights for
weapons to battlefield computers, the US Special Operations Forces had a
special request: 40mm rifle-launched flechette grenades. For the
uninitiated, flechettes are razor-sharp deadly darts with fins at their
blunt ends. During the Vietnam War, flechette weaponry was praised for its
ability to shred people alive and virtually nail them to trees. The question
is, where will those Special Ops forces use the grenades and which people
will be torn to bits by a new generation of American flechettes. Only time
will tell, but one thing is certain -- it will happen.

    The Special Ops troops aren't the only ones with special requests. The
Army has also put out a call to arms. While Army officials recently hailed
the M240B 7.62mm Medium Machine Gun as providing "significantly improved
reliability and more lethal medium support fire to ground units," they just
issued a contract to FN Manufacturing Inc. produce a lighter-weight, hybrid
titanium/steel variant of the weapon (known as the M240E6). And these are
just a few of the new and improved weapons systems being readied to be
rushed onto near-future American battlefields.

    Shell Shock

    Obviously, the military is purchasing guns and other weapons for a
reason: to injure, maim, and kill. But the extent of the killing being
planned for can only be grasped if one examines the amounts of ammunition
being purchased. Let's look at recent DoD contracts awarded to just one firm
-- Alliant Lake City Small Caliber Ammunition Company, L.L.C., a subsidiary
of weapons-industry giant Alliant Techsystems (ATK):

    Awarded Nov. 24, 2004: "a delivery order amount of $231,663,020 as part
of a $303,040,883 firm-fixed-price contract for various Cal .22, Cal .30,
5.56mm, and 7.62mm small caliber ammunition cartridges." Work is expected to
be completed by Sept. 30, 2006.

    Awarded February 7, 2005: "a delivery order amount of $20,689,101 as
part of a $363,844,808 firm-fixed-price contract for various 5.56mm and
7.62mm Small Caliber Ammunition Cartridges." Work is expected to be
completed by Sept. 30, 2006.

    Awarded March 4, 2005: "a delivery order amount of $8,236,906 as part of
a $372,586,618 firm-fixed-price contract for 5.56mm, 7.62mm, and .50 caliber
ammunition cartridges." Work is expected to be completed by Sept. 30, 2006.

    You and I can buy 400 rounds of 7.62mm rifle ammunition for less than
$40. Imagine, then, what federal purchasing power and hundreds of millions
of dollars can buy!

    Alliant Ammunition and Powder Co. is also making certain that, as the
years go by, ammo-capacity won't be lacking. In February 2005, Alliant was
awarded "a delivery order amount of $19,400,000 as part of a $69,733,068
firm-fixed-price contract for Services to Modernize Equipment at the Lake
City Army Ammunition Plant" -- a government-owned facility operated by ATK.
Alliant notes that this year it is churning out 1.2 billion rounds of
small-caliber ammunition at its Lake City plant alone. But that, it seems,
isn't enough when future war planning is taken into account. As it happens,
ATK and the Army are aiming to increase the plant's "annual capacity to
support the anticipated Department of Defense demand of between 1.5 billion
and 1.8 billion rounds by 2006." Think about it. In this year, alone, one
single ATK plant will produce enough ammunition, at one bullet each, to
execute every man, woman, and child in the world's most populous nation --
and next year they're upping the ante.

    The Military-Corporate Complex's Merchants of Death

    Once upon a time, a company like ATK would have been classified as one
of the world's "Merchants of Death." Then again, once upon a time -- we're
talking about the 1930s here-- the Senate was a place where America's
representatives were willing to launch probing inquiries into the ways in
which arms manufacturers and their huge profits as well as their influences
on international conflicts were linked to the dead of various lands. Back
then, simple partisanship was set aside as the Senate's Democratic majority
appointed North Dakota's Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye to head the
"Senate Munitions Committee."

    While today's fawning House members can barely get aging baseball heroes
to talk to them, the 1930s inquiry hauled some of the most powerful men in
the world like J.P. Morgan, Jr. and Pierre du Pont before the committee.
Even back in the 1930s, however, the nascent military-industrial complex was
just too powerful and so the Senate Munitions Committee was eventually
thwarted in its investigations. As a result, the committee's goal of
nationalizing the American arms industry went down in flames.

    Today, the very idea of such a committee even attempting such an
investigation is simply beyond the pale. The planning for futuristic war of
various horrific sorts, not to speak of the production and purchase of
weapons and ammunition by the military-corporate complex, is now beyond
reproach, accepted without question as necessary for national (now homeland)
security -- a concept which long ago trumped the notion of national defense.

    The Future Is Now

    While the military-academic complex and DARPA scientists are hard at
work creating the sort of killing machines that a generation back were the
stuff of unbelievable sci-fi novels, old-fashioned firearms and even new
energy weapons are being readied for use by the American imperial army
tomorrow or just a few short years in the future. In February 2005, Day &
Zimmerman Inc., a mega-company with its corporate fingers dipped in
everything from nuclear security and munitions production to cryogenics and
travel services, inked a deal to deliver 445,288 M67 fragmentation hand
grenades (which produce casualties within an effective range of 15 meters)
to the Army in 2006. In which country will a civilian will lose an eye, a
leg, or a life as a result? Weapons made to kill are made to be used. This
year ATK's Lake City Army Ammunition Plant will produce 1.2 billion rounds
of ammunition at the DoD's behest and the company proudly proclaims,
"Approximately 75% of the ammunition produced annually is consumed."

    With all those exotic pain rays, flechettes, super-efficient machine
guns, and rounds and rounds of ammunition readied for action -- and they
represent only a small part of the spectrum of weaponry and munitions being
produced for war, American-style -- more people are sure to die, while
others assumedly will experience "intense pain" from PEPs weapons and the
like. Back in October of last year, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins
University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad,
knocking on thousands of doors throughout Iraq, demonstrated that an
estimated 100,000 civilians had already died violently as the direct or
indirect consequence of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The main cause of
these deaths: attacks by coalition (read as "U.S.") forces. The future
promises more of the same.

    No one should be surprised by these figures -- though many were (and
many also continue to deny the validity of these numbers). It's obvious
that, if you build them; they will kill. And you thought that we were
supposed to "err on the side of life"?

    Nick Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History &
Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia
University. He writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice and
regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex and the homeland
security state.

Copyright 2005 Nick Turse

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posted April 1, 2005 at 6:16 pm
     
             
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