Clean and Lovely

If you're anything like me, you've gotten your fill of irresponsible, extremist rhetoric over the past few weeks. I think it's high time we put all that aside, so that we can consider -- as dispassionately as possible -- the necessity of exterminating Evildoers with drones.

As Danger Room notes, NPR's Neal Conan recently presided over a chinwag on this very topic. Given how déclassé our national discourse has been lately, I can't tell you how pleasant it was to hear this matter discussed politely and rationally, as befits civilized adults in The Greatest Country on Earth.

First, Conan gives us a timely lesson on military history:

PAUL (Caller): Good afternoon, gentlemen. I'm a former Marine, and I work in law enforcement, and so while I can't say that I perfectly understand all of the costs and all of the factors that are involved in this, I do support the drone strikes because that I feel that some of the alternatives, as one of your speakers just pointed out, are much bloodier, whether it would be a Dresden-style, you know, aerial rolling bombardment, artillery...

CONAN: Well, nobody bombs like that. The United States doesn't bomb like that anymore. They are JDAMs that are dropped with geo-positioning satellites that are quite accurate.

Perhaps I'm reading Conan uncharitably — which is easy to do, since he's the main reason I'd rather chew thumbtacks than listen to NPR — but it sounds as though he thinks the mass incineration of civilians in Dresden resulted from the inaccuracy of our weapons, rather than from the Allies' decision to drop several hundred tons of incendiary bombs in and around the city center, while using conventional explosives to destroy water mains and block evacuation routes.

The fact that replicas of German apartments were built at Dugway Proving Ground, complete with typical working-class furniture, in order to make sure that the firebombing campaign would produce the requisite shock and awe, also suggests that the raids on Dresden were "quite accurate," in their own little way.

Nitpicking aside, everyone agrees that drones sometimes kill bystanders who may or may not be innocent. Prof. Peter Alston, who is the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, expresses the misgivings of the average filthy hippie:

You can't simply say that any civilians who are killed are collateral damage, but that's too bad. You can't say that, one, because international law prohibits it, and two, because...you are dramatically turning off the people of Pakistan and making the war far harder for the United States to win.

Which prompts Prof. Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University to leap up and slap the hash pipe from Alston's teeth:

This phrase, international law doesn't permit, makes it sound that there's a world government, and there's a world court, and all these players out there behave, and this bad United States gets out of line.

There's a jungle out there, and the law of the jungle prevails....

Speaking as one of those schmucks who assumed not only that there is a world court, but also that treaties signed by the United States have some sort of legal and ethical force, I can't tell you how liberating it is to know that we actually get to do whatever the fuck we want 'cause nature is red in tooth and claw. I guess we should be grateful to the Islamofascists for impressing this point on us so forcefully.

Etzioni goes on to claim that there's no such thing as "a clean, lovely war." Which is quite accurate, as strawman arguments go. I myself have argued that our condemnation of chemical weapons may simply be an attempt to make conventional weapons seem civilized. I've even been known to sneer at environmentally friendly munitions.

And yet. It's one thing to acknowledge that killing is killing, whether it's done with phosgene or thermobaric shells. But the claim that international law must play second fiddle, at best, to "the law of the jungle" has legal and moral implications that go very far beyond the issue of drone operations in Pakistan.

The funny thing about Etzioni's position is that drones appeal to him because "the drone can linger hours over the target making sure lawyers can look at it." Obviously, he believes that war is cleaner and lovelier with drones than without. But when questions arise about the legality of (certain) drone attacks, citing the law apparently becomes "legalistic" and "simplistic." When confronting barbarians, you can't let the laws that supposedly distinguish you from barbarians tie your hands: if the Evildoers are unmanly enough to hide among civilians, it makes killing them that much more of a duty.

The argument that America is wonderfully judicious in its use of force, and that the law of the jungle prevails in any case, is either becoming more common, or I'm noticing it more. Either way, I'm pretty sure that laws are supposed to apply even to people who are quite certain that their intentions are good.

The Eyes of Others

As part of the DoD's Quadrennial Defense Review for 2010, Michèle Flournoy and Shawn Brimley discuss emerging threats to a "global commons" comprising sea, air, space, and cyberspace. It's an interesting use of the word "commons," in that these domains remain "free" to the extent that America dominates them.

Apparently, this contradiction has not escaped people in other countries:

[R]ising powers will not likely be content to simply acquiesce to America's role as uncontested guarantor of the global commons. Countries such as China, India, and Russia will demand a role in maintaining the international system in ways commensurate with their actual or perceived power and national interests. Such demands are already occurring, from declarations of interest in space capabilities, to indications that the Indian and Arctic oceans will become new global centers of gravity.

It sounds like what we're discussing is not maintaining these commons, but enclosing them. Though as we learned when we were trying to save Western Civilization from the Viet Cong, it sometimes becomes necessary to destroy a village in order to save it.

The consequences of a shift in the international system that opens [!!!] the global commons for other state and non-state actors to pursue their interests — and perhaps credibly threaten America's use of these domains — are likely to be profound....

One worry is that The Evildoers will "look for ways to deter, deny, or frustrate our ability to swiftly employ and sustain combat forces across a variety of scenarios." The logical method is asymmetric warfare, which involves "using both simple and sophisticated technologies in innovative ways."

Of course, a strong global posture isn't necessarily a good defense against these tactics. A few years back, we bankrupted and demoralized ourselves by launching two pointless wars, which just goes to show how easily strength becomes weakness. The state's "need" to launch and sustain attacks is a structural flaw that asymmetrical warfare seeks to exploit, as I've illustrated more than once with this quote from Mr. Osama bin Laden:

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note …

One of the exciting new challenges, in coming years, will be to "[advance] our interests while legitimizing our power in the eyes of others." It's hard to believe no one thought of this before.

While legitimate global dominance has its diplomatic and philosophical aspects, it's sustained, as ever, by "power projection"...armed drones, for instance. Like heaven in the eyes of fundamentalist Christians, it's a generous gift from a loving father, and woe betide you if you dare to refuse it.

Being as the Obama administration has rejected the more déclassé aspects of BushCo's imperial arrogance, Flournoy and Brimley are careful to stress that "protecting and sustaining stability throughout the global commons cannot be achieved by America alone. We must lead in the creation of international norms and standards that can help advance the common good and expand the rule of law in these domains of growing importance."

Which sounds pretty good, as long as we don't simply come up with norms and standards that sanctify transnational logistics, and enforce them "surgically" with all sorts of long-range, remotely controlled weapons. Unfortunately, we may have no choice, given the likelihood that there'll be opposition to our domination of the global commons...even though we can be fairly sure that this opposition will grow louder and more compelling and more violent as a direct result of the actions we're taking to head it off.

Such is life, though. Maybe thermite-bearing termites will help.

Either way, there are difficult days ahead, and "the same factors that may engender the rise of new great powers may also accelerate the decline of other states that — by virtue of poor leadership, economics, and/or geography — are unable to adapt to a new era and meet the basic needs of their populations." Let's hope it can't happen here!

On the bright side, Flournoy and Brimley are concerned about the effects of climate change. So we are making progress, of a sort.

Determined Terrorists

A thoughtful article in the Washington Post informs us that OMG we're all gonna die.

In early 2006, a mysterious cosmetics trader named Rakhman began showing up at salons in St. Petersburg, Russia, hawking a popular anti-aging drug at suspiciously low prices. He flashed a briefcase filled with vials and promised he could deliver more -- "as many as you want," he told buyers -- from a supplier somewhere in Chechnya.

Rakhman's "Botox" was found to be a potent clone of the real thing, but investigators soon turned to a far bigger worry: the prospect of an illegal factory in Chechnya churning out raw botulinum toxin, the key ingredient in the beauty drug and one of world's deadliest poisons. A speck of toxin smaller than a grain of sand can kill a 150-pound adult.

So can inadequate access to healthcare, and far more of us will face that threat in the coming year. Which I suppose makes illicit Botox a welcome distraction from our real problems.

Obtaining the most lethal strain of the bacterium might have posed a significant hurdle for would-be terrorists in the recent past. But today, the prospect of tapping into the multibillion-dollar market for anti-wrinkle drugs has spawned an underground network of suppliers and distributors who do most of their transactions online, the researchers found. Customers don't need prescriptions or identification, other than a shipping address.

As the article notes a couple of paragraphs later, "the amount of poison in a prescribed dose is so small that a determined terrorist would have to obtain hundreds of vials at $400 each to kill even a single person."

Still, al-Qaeda are nothing if not determined! And however little toxin there may be in counterfeit Botox, there's no denying that a single gram of botulinum toxin could kill a million people, give or take (as long as you lined them up in an orderly fashion, administered the correct dose under laboratory conditions, and refused to give them medical attention even if they could afford it).

You know what else could kill a million people? A million bullets. Think about it!

The WaPo saw fit to devote three pages to this "story." That's space they could've allocated to glibertarian arguments against healthcare reform, or yet another summary of denialist talking points from George Will, so I guess they must've thought it was really, really important.

In other news:

Whipped to a froth of fear and loathing by the Farm Bureau and county commissions, property-rights zealots who hate all things federal save farm support are using Rozol [chlorophacinone] to neutralize the Endangered Species Act and eliminate black-footed ferrets....

Because Rozol is so deadly to all wildlife, the law requires that it be placed inside prairie dog holes. Instead, the county commission's applicator showed up uninvited on the Haverfield ranch, tossing Rozol-laced bait around like confetti. The state has ordered him to pay a $2,800 fine.

UPDATE: Cheryl has more, as does Armchair Generalist.

A Very Satisfying Place to Be

Textron Defense Systems has built a better mousetrap:

The Sensor Fuzed Weapon is a marvel of military technology, says its maker, Textron Defense Systems. An advanced "cluster bomb," it is designed to spray 40 individual projectiles of molten copper, destroying enemy tanks across a 30-acre swath of battlefield.

The problem is, cluster bombs are unpopular. Worse, a major international treaty against them is pending. The USA didn't sign it, of course -- we're not idiots -- but potential client nations did. What to do?

Textron, with the support of the Pentagon and the State Department, is mounting a campaign to derail the cluster-bomb treaty and write a new set of rules under the United Nations that would make it easier to sell its weapon around the world.

And why not? Who, after all, is more qualified to define the laws of "civilized" warfare than a company that stands to benefit from selling an advanced cluster bomb?

Textron’s primary argument for scrapping the treaty is that 99 percent of the bomblets released by the Sensor Fuzed Weapon will explode in combat, leaving only a tiny amount of unexploded ordinance that could be picked up by a child or hit by a farmer’s plow. Textron calls this capability "clean battlefield operation."

Emphasis added, but probably unnecessary.

As we all know, tank combat takes place in vast wastelands littered with transparent Platonic solids, so neither the 30-acre kill zone nor the "tiny amount" of leftover UXO has any real significance to civilians. If you don't believe me, do the math: Assuming you drop, say, 100 Sensor Fuzed Weapons on the Hun, there'd only be 40 unexploded bomblets left over.

Since that's practically nothing, it's little wonder that the US Air Force has bought 4,600 of these weapons, which should produce well under 2,000 pieces of UXO (while boosting tourism, ideally). And it's no wonder at all that Textron's president of business development is glutinous with self-approbation:

“Knowing that we are in no way, shape or form contributing to [civilian suffering] is really a very satisfying place to be," he said.

This is a moral high ground that very few of us can hope to invade and occupy. You can't blame Textron for trying to secure its perimeter.

To that end, they've launched a PR Website that's pleadingly titled "dontbanthesolution.com." If you read it, you'll learn that it's not just the relatively small number of unexploded bomblets that makes this weapon the greatest shield against human suffering since the invention of ether. There's also the fact that it saves us from having to use "greater numbers of traditional bombs" on whatever mongrel nations are currently threatening the repose of Our Innocent Children.

Think how much less misery the unnecessary, illegal, incompetent, vicious, and apparently interminable war on Iraq would've caused if the Coalition of the Willing had restricted itself to using these well-nigh surgical munitions. Now, multiply that humanitarian benefit by every other grotesquely cynical war of choice we've launched over the last 40-odd years, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what's at stake here. As humanitarians, lovers of peace, and children of God, we owe it to the memory of our innocent victims to insist on advanced cluster bombs with no fewer than 40 submunitions, whether we're defending brutal client states, fragile political egos, oil company profits, or the moral rights of US arms manufacturers.

Now, if Textron would restrict itself to environmentally preferable components, and manufacture the Sensor Fuzed Weapon with solar-thermal energy, I'd feel even better about our new era of sustainable power.

(Photo by Ken Jarecke.)

Casting the Runes

The CIA is allegedly supplying foreign informants with electronic chips that help UAVs to identify and destroy targets:

It sounds like a tinfoil hat nightmare, come to life: tiny electronic homing beacons, guiding CIA killer drones to their targets. But local residents and Taliban militants in Pakistan’s tribal wildlands say that’s exactly what’s happening. Tribesman in Waziristan are being paid to “plant the electronic devices” near militant safehouses, they tell the Guardian. “Hours or days later, a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles.”

This reminds me of M.R. James' 1911 horror story Casting the Runes, the villain of which murders a man by handing him a slip of paper covered with runes that mark him for death at the hands of a demon. The tables are turned on the villain when the paper is eventually passed back to him. (That's fiction for you.)

Presumably, someone always doublechecks each chip's coordinates before sending out a UAV, in order to make sure it hasn't been placed on a hospital or a school or an NGO facility. If so, we can stop worrying about that, and concentrate on worrying about this:

19 year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped “confession” of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy. “I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,” he said. "If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”

But Rehman says he didn’t just tag jihadists with the devices. “The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money,” he added. Which raises the possibility that the unmanned aircraft — America’s key weapons in its covert war on Pakistan’s jihadists and insurgents — may have been lead to the wrong targets.

Apart from the remote possibility that people could collect these chips on behalf of AQ (or whomever), and use them for all sorts of practical jokes, it seems like there are some excellent opportunities here for very emphatic score-settling. It's not difficult to imagine a couple million bucks going up in smoke so that we can inadvertently take sides in some longstanding local feud.

That's assuming Rehman's story is true. The idea that we'd give a 19-year-old $122 to scatter these chips around like a lethal Johnny Appleseed seems farfetched to me. On the other hand, so do the last sixty years.

If it is true, we can at least be fairly certain that the evildoers will not be reverse-engineering these chips; hell, they barely understand how to use telephones. If they want sophisticated equipment like this, they'll probably have to wait until their wealthy proxies can buy it readymade at IDEX.

In the meantime, that thoughtful centrist Leon Panetta assures us that UAVs are "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership." (Apart from feeding them cookies, that is.) This overconfident, illogical assertion is entirely different from Dick Cheney's overconfident, illogical assertions on torture. For one thing, it's Panetta speaking.

The virtue of these weapons is supposed to be that they allow us to act as we see fit, without taking "unnecessary" risks, let alone suffering casualties. In fact, that's one of the worst things about them. As P.W. Singer argues, "These weapons don’t just create greater physical distance, but also a different sort of psychological distance and disconnection. The bomber pilot isn’t just above his target, but seven thousand miles away. He doesn’t share with his foes even those brief minutes of danger that would give them a bond of mutual risk."

Which brings us back to James' story. The odd thing about casting the runes is that you can't simply mail them to the victim, or slip them into someone's jacket pocket or wallet. The spell doesn't work unless you meet your target face to face, with whatever personal risk that may entail. Even demons have their limits, it seems.

In unrelated news:

Glasgow video game company T-Enterprise has hired Moazzam Begg, a former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, as a consultant on upcoming video game Rendition: Guantanamo, a title set in the infamous U.S. prison camp.

(Illustration from Jacques Tourneur's film Curse of the Demon, 1957.)

Non-Lethal Protection

As everyone knows, pirates (!!!!) are the worst existential threat this nation has faced since sometime last week.

What to do? If you've browsed the comments sections on popular blogs and news sites, you're probably aware that "KILL 'EM ALL!" remains the acme of sophisticated strategic thinking in many circles. This plan is usually recommended as though it's the easiest thing in the world to do, and the hardest thing to imagine doing. Its advocates always seem very proud that they know something the experts don't...just as their forebears did when they leaned against the pickle barrel with their thumbs in their suspenders, and offered a one-step solution for the nigra problem.

You'd think that this resolute optimism would make equally short work of every other problem we face. But if you scream "INSURE 'EM ALL!" or "PAY 'EM ALL A LIVING WAGE!" you'll be astonished at how quickly these folks develop an appreciation of nuance. (I suppose it's possible that these positions are actually consistent, in that they're both informed primarily by bone-deep sadism...but honestly, what are the odds?)

Anyway, there's the "KILL 'EM ALL!" school of anti-piracy. And there's their great enemy, the "Offer the Pirates Aromatherapy and Jungian Analysis While Holding Hands and Singing 'Kumbaya'" school, which comprises everyone who doubts that screaming "KILL 'EM ALL!" really makes you the new Clausewitz.

And then there's the reasonable, centrist Third Way, which is spearheaded by defense contractors and theorists; its motto is "kill some of 'em; torture, burn, blind, poison, electrocute, detain, or starve others; threaten the rest of 'em; and eventually become rich and influential enough to drive US policy towards your preferred high-ticket weapon system." This approach has the support of conservatives and liberals, so you know it's much closer to correct than anything on the extremist sides of the argument.

Apropos of which, Rep. Joe Sestak wants us to deter pirates with the Active Denial System, or "pain ray." David Hambling begs to differ.

Theoretical studies for the maritime tests showed that reflections from the hull could produce "hotspots" with twice the normal energy density, while reflections off the water could be three to four times the baseline....

The whole point of the ADS is that it is not supposed to cause harm. If you zap a boatload of suspected pirates and some of them jump into the water while others keep coming, do you cease fire? Continue firing until you cause real damage ("Ha ha, let's fry 'em!") and legally you might as well have a machine gun. If you're forced to stop, then how useful is the weapon?

Good question. Since the whole point is to avoid making merchant crews feel like they're in a real-life game of Area 51 or House of the Dead, the pain ray does seem like a nonstarter. Fortunately, Sestak is not out of ideas:

According to Rep. Sestak, a barrier might be what's needed to protect merchant vessels. One maritime security company makes an electric fence called Secure Ship. It's linked to a sophisticated alarm system and provides 9,000 volts of non-lethal protection which completely blocks access to the ship. Plus, it has the added benefits of preventing stowaways or thieves from getting on to the ship when it is in port. However, for obvious reasons, Secure Ship only recommended for vessels with a non-flammable cargo. And determined pirates will probably eventually get through it – if they remembered to bring wirecutters and insulated gloves. Despite the shortcomings, the fence might buy the crew valuable time while they call for help.

If the fence had three layers, it'd buy the crew even more time. And as always, the perimeter should be patrolled by drones or militarized animals (unless the Minutemen are willing to trade their pickups for speedboats and redeploy to the Indian Ocean, which would give us the best of both worlds).

Still, these are all stopgap measures. I think it'd be best to enclose each ship in a huge metal sphere filled partially with water, and let it travel over the bounding main like a hamster in a ball, thanks to a rotary apparatus at the prow. It could even be spiked all over, like an enormous pollen spore (isn't biomimesis all the rage these days?).

I imagine David Hambling will have some petty objection to this scheme, too, so I'll just launch a pre-emptive first strike on his pet idea:

Instead of going after the pirates, why not disable their boats? Something like the Running Gear Entanglement System -- or "James Bond Harpoon"-- might do the job. It releases a high-tensile line which snags on the boat's propeller. This would allow the pirates' target to escape, leaving the stranded pirates to be dealt with by the nearest warship in due course.

An entangler has a number of advantages over other options. One is the low cost, which should be thousands of dollars, rather than tens of thousands for LRAD or millions for ADS. Given a suitable launching system, it should be possible to deploy an entangler at a good range. And its method of operation means nobody gets deafened, blistered or blinded by friendly fire if it all goes wrong. Of course there's a risk of entangling the wrong small boats, but that's not the same as the risk of leaving people injured for life.

The thing is, there's also a risk of entangling whatever birds, fish, and aquatic mammals have managed to survive years of toxic dumping and overfishing. I'm not convinced that choking and strangling and drowning what's left of Somalia's wildlife is the best way to deter regional piracy, in the long run. As I've argued elsewhere, we only have one planet, so it's essential that we find sustainable, eco-friendly ways to thwart, cripple and destroy the subhuman filth who threaten our way of life.

All of which makes me more certain than ever that my giant metal sphere is the only feasible solution to Somali piracy. If anyone from Raytheon or BAE wants to discuss this further, you'll find me lying in the gutter in front of the Alibi tiki bar on Interstate Avenue.

Electricity Plus Water

Although most of us are preoccupied with the agony of our country's self-inflicted wounds, the extent of which an amateur like Osama bin Laden can only envy, the threat posed by Islamic frogmen is still grave and gathering.

A few military experts hoped that this problem could be solved by training dolphins to attack enemy swimmers. But some people -- let's call 'em "traitors" -- argued that that was...well, not entirely ethical, but also pretty fucking stupid, when you come right down to it.

Noses were accordingly reapplied to the grindstone, and in due time, we arrived at Plan B:

[T]he sea service is bankrolling an alternative project: an "electrical swimmer barrier... that will take advantage of ocean oil-barrier deployment technology, the conductive properties of near-coast waters, and the physiological sensitivities of human swimmers to electrical shocks."

Electricty plus water usually makes for a dangerous combination. But this system will be "non-lethal," promises Bedford, Massachusetts' Diversified Technologies, Inc., which recently won a Navy contract to start development on the thing.

Here's one of those tiresome semantic quibbles that've made me famous from Uelen to Shishmaref: the opposite of "dangerous" is not "non-lethal." The Taser, for instance, is a non-lethal weapon. All it really takes to earn that designation is the lack of an intent to kill on the part of the weapon's designers; without that intent, any deaths that occur are simply unfortunate accidents that happen to troublemakers who deserve whatever they get.

I don't want to be seen as a coddler of terrorists, who may be plotting to strap themselves with explosives, swim from Bullhead City to Laughlin, and launch a suicide attack on the Colorado Belle Casino, for all I know. But I can't help thinking that this barrier is more likely to be used to protect our language, borders, and culture from migrant lettuce-pickers.

The system is "deployable and retrievable by two persons working from a 24- to 28-foot boat," which begs the question of how we'll keep evildoers from tampering with it and its power source. Maybe its perimeter can be patrolled by attack dolphins.

What really interests me about this scheme is how well it'd work against people who are wearing some sort of electrically insulating suit. Which, in turn, brings up the question that always fascinates me about projects like these: what's the cost to evildoers of adapting to a barrier of this sort, versus the cost to us of re-engineering the system once it's been overcome?

(Image at top via Modern Mechanix.)

Invasive Species

Danger Room reports that Israel has imported elands from Africa, in order to defoliate its border with Lebanon:

The antelope have been stationed on Israel's border with Lebanon, to eat up the "problematic foliage that distorts views of the Lebanese side and within which Hezbollah guerrillas could hide," Ha'Aretz reports....

There are now "between 500 and 700 elands" at military bases throughout Israel, according to the paper.

DuPont and Monsanto must be furious over this new harbinger of our dark green future. Look for Steven Milloy to take a sudden interest in the dangers of invasive wildlife later this week.

Now that Israel has pressed this exotic animal into military service, how will its enemies respond? If the countries surrounding Israel suddenly start stocking up on spotted hyenas, this might suggest that a new biological arms race is underway. It'd probably be wise to classify zoos as dual-use facilities, just in case.

In Algeria, meanwhile, 40 alleged terrorists have died of a disease alleged to be bubonic plague. Guess what this proves?

Dr Igor Khrupinov, a biological weapons expert at Georgia University, told The Sun..."Contagious diseases, like ebola and anthrax, occur in northern Africa. It makes sense that people are trying to use them against Western governments."

Well, sure. Plague occurs in northern Africa, and Algeria is in northern Africa, so if terrorists hiding in the wilds of Algeria are dying of plague...it must logically be a failed bioterror plot. Assuming otherwise would be like assuming that an eland just happened to wander over to the Israel/Lebanon border.

The natural world is increasingly implicated in our conflicts, it seems; perhaps we'll end up with a new natural order in which species are geographically distributed according to their wartime (i.e., everyday) usefulness, and a plague epizootic among ground squirrels will be all the excuse one needs to launch a preemptive strike against a foreign government.

Which raises an important question: In an era when cameras and transmitters can easily be implanted in a springbok's horns, and rats can be controlled by radio, can we afford the luxury of cross-border animal migration any longer? Obviously, we need to deploy a reliable microbe-herding system wherever possible. But how much good will this do when hummingbirds and bar-tailed godwits are allowed to flit across the borders of sovereign nations as though they didn't exist?

"Joking" aside, no sooner did I write this than I stumbled upon a like-minded quote from Jena Osman at Subtopia:

By definition, a refuge is a safe place for those in danger: a nature refuge shelters wildlife from over-hunting and habitat loss, a refugee camp protects innocent civilians from perilous warring forces. But the closer one looks at these spaces of protection, the more permeable their borders, the more complex the acts of isolation they require....

In this climate, a place of refuge (be it for birds, for natural resources, or for people) seems less possible than ever.

(Image at top from "Scrap Happy Daffy" 1943.)

Two Planets, No Waiting

A new study suggests that by 2030, we'll need two planets to support ourselves in the style to which we've become accustomed.

This study has some obvious conceptual problems. First, it ignores the potential benefits of wise policies like granting Monsanto patents on food crops, or killing all Islamofascists. Second, it's an example of what Gregg Easterbrook calls the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends: it overlooks the fact that science and markets will inevitably solve the problems caused by overconsumption, just as they've always done in the past.

As if to prove my point, India is lighting our way into the future by announcing its intent to mine the moon for uranium:

The Indian mission is scheduled to last two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.

This could provide a virtually limitless source of cheap, safe energy...so long as you ignore the staggering expense of interplanetary extraction and transportation, along with all the other little details that make this idea pointless, impractical, dangerous, and bizarre. Still, it's the thought that counts!

Of course, once India sets up housekeeping up on the moon, we know precisely where that will lead: Great Britain will move to establish a Lunar Raj and a new era of Company Rule, which will be cheered on interminably by Niall Ferguson and John Derbyshire (who has already been worrying himself sick over the threat of lunar multiculturalism).

One thing the moon doesn't have is fish. Rain follows the plow, granted...but I still think we should suspend this practice until we can get our lunar fisheries up and running.

Despite continuous warnings of emptying oceans due to overfishing, a new report finds that one-third of the world’s total marine catch is not feeding humans, but livestock. The fish are ground-up into meal and fed to pigs, poultry, and even farm-raised fish.

At the risk of sounding like some sort of radical firebrand, this is simply wasteful. There are plenty of redundant animals we don't eat that could just as easily be ground en masse into poultry feed. Rats come to mind, as do squirrels, vultures, and snakes; all of 'em will taste like chicken, in the end. That ought to keep us going until we're able to set up Punch and Judy shows by the lunar seaside.

If anyone doubts that scientific progress will reduce the resource exploitation that it constantly makes easier and more efficient, here's an inspiring example of human ingenuity:

A device placed on, say, a supermarket shelf scans the face of the person standing in front of it. It determines whether the person is a man or a woman and sends that information to a digital screen nearby. The screen will play an ad for women's razors if a woman is watching, Jeeps if a man is watching, or Gap if both a man and woman are watching. "People are not even aware that they are being watched and monitored," Rabenou said.

The video analytics software to do this was developed for the Israeli homeland security department. It can determine, by facial clues, the gender and age of the faces it scans. By next year, the company says, the software will be able to ascertain ethnicity as well.

The device can also track how long people stand in front of a retail display, determining whether the display is clear. In an Israeli trial, it helped advertisers realize that a lot of men were buying Pampers on Thursday nights, so the company started a promotion that gave free razors to shoppers who bought two packs of Pampers.

How's that for beating swords into plowshares? Of course, this sophisticated technology is intended to increase witless hyperconsumption...but why couldn't it be put to better uses?

Just imagine if it were used to display comforting messages when it detects shoppers with haggard, worried faces. Suppose I go into the drugstore, looking for a straight razor with which to slash my wrists. The store's video analytics software would recognize my puffy, red eyes, and the tears streaming down my cheeks, and it'd promptly cue up some reassuring message like "there is plenty of uranium on the moon," or "Precious Gems Discovered on Mars." And suddenly, I'd find the strength to carry on.

And that's just what's possible today. Who knows what we'll accomplish tomorrow?

Food Deserts and Fortifications

A paper in The International Journal of Health Geographics discusses the use of GIS to track the evolution of urban "food deserts":

The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.

The problem of spatial inequalities isn't confined to southern Ontario, needless to say. Cervantes goes so far as to suggest that the current food shortage deserves some of the attention that's currently being given to lapel pins and bowling scores:

This is not a temporary problem. It's a long-term, secular (as the economists say) trend. The planet is running out of stuff -- water, land, topsoil, petroleum, atmosphere.

In America, at least, higher food prices may have some connection with the crackdown on immigrant workers, as well as hard-right hysteria over the AgJOBS Act. Still, this is the sort of situation that can trigger mass migration and civil unrest, making border security -- regional, national and local -- more important than ever.

The $20 million prototype for the virtual fence near Tucson may've been scrapped -- along with the law it was supposed to protect and represent -- but the outlook for solid walls and barriers is very promising indeed, especially when it comes to protecting microborders. Whether you're planning "a gated community or an insurgent holding pen," or some convenient amalgam of the two, blast walls are de rigeur in the modern City of Refuge (which will ideally protect us not only from being punished for unintentional killing, but also from being accused of it).

Unfortunately, simply building walls isn't enough to protect yourself from the tired, and the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You also have to make sure that no one gets around, under, or over them. In that regard, knowledge is power, especially when it confirms what you already believe.

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to find a small business with a Top Secret security clearance that can snoop on Spanish language conversations transmitted over foreign communications systems and "instantaneously" translate those conversations from Spanish into English....

The translation company would be expected to create online records of "complex foreign voice radio transmissions containing technical terminology, advanced grammar and syntax, and colloquial conversational forms"....

The problem is, when people know they're being overheard, they can use codes, or intentionally spread misinformation, or simply agree to meet up in person. That's why DARPA's Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) is so exciting:

These half-bug, half-chip creations — DARPA calls them "insect cyborgs" — would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.

Scientist Amit Lal and his team insert mechanical components into baby bugs during "the caterpillar and the pupae stages," which would then allow the adult bugs to be deployed to do the Pentagon's bidding.

The article ends with a joke that has considerably more than a grain of truth to it:

Presumably, enemy arsenals will soon be well-stocked with Raid.

It's easy to imagine pesticides being the first line of defense against these cyber insects, regardless of any collateral damage to "useful" species; one thing DARPA will probably want to do is create hybrids that are immune to common pesticides (particularly in Latin America, where a much wider range of chemicals is used).

At that point, I suppose evildoers would have to clear their confidential meeting places with flamethrowers, or perhaps jamming signals. There's also the possibility that natural predators -- for lack of a better term -- will eat some of these semi-mechanical bugs; they should probably be equipped to deliver an electric shock, or a squirt of some noxious liquid, that'll discourage hungry birds and bats.

Surely none of these problems is insurmountable, given what's at stake in a world that's low on resources (or finds it impractical to distribute them equitably, which amounts to the pretty much the same thing).

In completely unrelated news, Bruce Schneier asks a serious question, and provides a serious answer:

[G]iven a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

Frightening, isn't it? There oughta be a law.

(Illustration from The War Illustrated, April 3 1915.)

What Some Nobody Thinks

CKR was kind enough to ask me to participate in an inter-blog conversation on nuclear weapons policy. My first impulse was to decline; much smarter people than I have studied this problem for many, many years, and there’s absolutely no chance that I’m going to come up with any insights they’ve missed.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for trying to clarify what I think, and why I think it, even if it ultimately benefits no one but myself. (Also, I have a charge to keep: if woefully uninformed people refrain from grappling with the great problems of our age, the Blogosphere as we know it will wither and die.)

Unless your name is Richard Perle or Dick Cheney, your goal is probably nonproliferation now and disarmament…someday. In order to model good behavior, encourage transparency, and win concessions from other countries, it makes sense to reduce our nuclear stockpile to a minimum that would still deter “rational” states from launching a first strike (with some sort of surplus included to allow for redundant targeting, malfunctions, and so forth).

Three or four hundred nuclear weapons would be adequate for this purpose, I think. I should add that I’ve never been entirely convinced that our stockpile prevented attacks by rational governments, who'd presumably have other compelling reasons not to launch a first strike. But there’s lots of room for debate here, and since total unilateral disarmament is a nonstarter in many circles it’d be counterproductive to insist on it.

The threat of reprisal can’t reliably deter irrational attacks, and may even make them more likely. (If a well-heeled fundamentalist cult can wipe out two or more cesspools of urban depravity by detonating one bomb, why shouldn’t they?) Looking at the threats we currently face, it seems pretty clear that nonstate groups like AQ are preeminent, both in terms of seeking nukes, and in being willing to use them regardless of consequences.

Which is pretty much what one would expect. As the excesses of globalization inspire national, ethnic, and religious identities to assert or reassert themselves, mutual assured destruction becomes less a threat than a promise: God will know his own.

Fortunately, the threat of nuclear terrorism seems to be pretty small (though perhaps not as small as it seemed a couple of days ago). And it can probably be staved off indefinitely through diplomacy and cooperation, as well as aggressive - in the sense of competent and thorough - nonproliferation and interdiction measures. (If it can’t, that’s too bad, because we really don’t have any other plausible tools in the shed.)

The NPT loophole for “peaceful” use seem to be me to be flawed (and not just because I’m one of those dirty fucking hippies who’d prefer to see people using solar-thermal power). If we’re serious about nonproliferation, we ought to discourage the construction of new reactors, period.

Since that’s probably not going to happen, I’d go along with the idea of an international fuel bank. (But I can’t help adding that we might have more carrots to offer nuclear-leaning nations if we’d devoted our considerable national resources to alternative energy technologies a few decades back.)

An important part of strengthening what Robert G. Spulak gratingly called “the nuclear stigma philosophy” would be to give up our strategic ambiguity in regards to first use, nuclear response to chemical attacks, and so forth, and acknowledge that the most serious threats we face are from accidents, or being provoked by terrorists into overreaction (i.e., into doing their bidding). At the risk of sounding utopian, I think that a leader worthy of the name could and would explain this to the public, and be understood.

The really difficult step is to realize that nuclear weapons aren’t representative of our power, but of our vulnerability. In particular, the alleged obligation to retaliate – to indulge in ambiguously retributive violence simply because it’s expected - ties our hands, limits our options, and may ultimately put us precisely where our enemies (foreign and domestic) want us.

There's earnest talk of the need for a new and improved military deterrent, but I suspect that this concept of deterrence is very close to being outmoded; it's our military superiority, after all, that's driven the present trend towards drastic forms of asymmetrical warfare. In this sense, the "freedom" we're spreading militarily and economically is the freedom to act without being constrained by the fear of death. This problem can't be solved by force.

I’m not naïve enough to think that this view of things is likely to catch on (though I don't think it's as unlikely as someone like Frank Gaffney might argue). In the meantime, I do think it’s necessary to delegitimize (redelegitimize?) nuclear reprisal, especially in the event of a terrorist attack. While it may be impossible to override the demand for retaliation, we’ll have a much better chance if we collectively recognize the point at which our power is, or becomes, our weakness.

The supreme obstacle, as I see it, is that the defense industry and its political sockpuppets benefit simultaneously from overdramatizing the problems we face, and overstating our ability to solve them by building new weapons systems - nuclear and otherwise - and launching new wars. In addition to undermining democracy and bankrupting the country, promoting this giddy blend of panic and overconfidence gives enemies like AQ an opportunity to set our own power in motion against us through various forms of information warfare and symbolic attack. Without serious new restrictions on defense-industry lobbying, profiteering, and the privatization of conflict, nonproliferation will remain a much harder road than it has to be.

(Illustration by Jules White.)

They're All Around!

We're in a war for our very survival against radical Islam. Which means it's time for all patriotic Americans to harass Mexicans at the local big-box hardware store:

For Truman Fields, the war against foreign invaders begins at home -- Home Depot.

Several times a month during Florida's latest building boom, the retired IBM executive climbed into his Dodge pickup and cruised home-improvement stores or construction sites in southwest Florida. Armed with a camera and a missionary's zeal, he'd look for groups of Hispanic men and start snapping pictures. Fields, 66, assumed anyone who ran off was here illegally....

"They're all around if people will just open their eyes."

The goal here is to prevent La Reconquista, which is at least as imminent as our national subjection to Sharia. (This dual threat is what makes the strategic thinking of America's own modern-day Clausewitz more compelling than ever.)

Some people call the anti-immigrant movement racist. It isn't, though. It's RACIST.

"Real Americans Committed to Integrity, Sovereignty and Truth."

"That's what 'racist' means to us."

And really, what other interpretation matters?

Truman Fields believes that people who run away from him are probably here illegally. If we could somehow make an armed drone "understand" this deep insight, it'd free confused, angry, and racist RACIST Americans from the drudgery of playing soldier in strip malls, and let them return to more personally fulfilling endeavors.

A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like.

This technology could also prevent messy situations like the recent tasing of a mildly argumentative motorist; eliminating the human factor will make summary punishment easier to accept, or at least harder to argue with:

Police in Texas want to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot speeders, and now Miami cops are also looking at drones for SWAT Teams.

These systems are fallible, of course. That's why we need lots of them, everywhere. Traditionally, the border has been visualized as something like the aseptic seal that keeps a product uncontaminated. We'd be better off seeing it as something more like the immune system, with the official border as a skinlike barrier, concerned private citizens as pattern recognition receptors, and armed drones as monocytes.

Xenophobes, racialists and paranoiacs have an advantage when it comes to viewing human beings as pathogens that are "all around if people will just open their eyes." Thus, their visionary insights will be invaluable in helping to define and deploy this vital new security technology.

You may think this is insane. But to me, "insane" simply means "Improving National Security As Needed, Eternally."

Gauntlets of Deterrent

Back in 2006, the Wall Street Journal cautioned Republicans against relying on immigrant-bashing to win political victories:

[I]mmigration is an issue, like trade, that always looks better in the polls than it does on election day; very few people vote because of it.

The truth of this statement is nicely borne out by a post at Migra Matters, which contrasts pre-election excitement over "the Republican advantage in the emotional debate over illegal immigration" with the post-rout realization that immigration "won't be a silver bullet for Republicans."

We won't linger over this sad scene; as Shakespeare wrote, it's "better to weep at joy than to joy at weeping." Let's turn instead to the Minutemen's private border fence, which Chris Simcox formerly described as a "high-tech, double-layered gauntlet of deterrent."

Behold this fence, you would-be maids and lettuce-pickers, and tremble:

Simcox now says that he never promised to build the high-tech security fence on Ladd's ranch. And he insists the barbed-wire fence really does protect the country.

Meanwhile, a fence proposed along the Rio Grande may "cut farmers off from prime farmland close to the water," but that's the way things go in our ever-accelerating era of dromological conflict:

The fence would be at least 15 feet high and capable of withstanding a crash of a 10,000-pound vehicle going 40 mph, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

And Boeing's virtual border fence is sending border agents scurrying after raindrops and whirling leaves:

“When you promise to have a screen in a car that’s supposed to help you chase aliens and you find out you’re chasing raindrops, it causes skepticism,” Richard Stana, director of Homeland Security and Justice issues at the Government Accountability Office, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Oct. 24....

Then again, maybe it's just as well that all these fences are ill-conceived or defective, given that a secure border would be bad for business:

"Building a wall in and of itself is not the solution, we know that. Our economy would not respond very well to that, that's not the goal of our program."

(Ilustration at top: "Security Fence" by Rodger Roundy, 2006.)

Bitter Rivalry and Hate

In 1857, Manhattan was patrolled by competing police departments: the Municipals and the Metropolitans. According to a contemporary, their rivalry was relatively mild, at first:

Notwithstanding this duality of city guardians, there were no more murders, robberies and assaults, than usual. All this time war was progressing, although no overt act was committed, the arms used as yet being only the tongue of bitter rivalry and hate.

Soon enough, though, things escalated:

Friction soon developed between the rival police forces. On June 14, 1857, The New-York Times reported that members of the Metropolitan Police Force had arrested a man for disorderly conduct on East 9th Street, but that he had been immediately seized by a member of the Municipal Police Force. A group of the Metropolitans promptly “remonstrated” with the Municipal, and soon regained custody of the miscreant, in the process arresting the Municipal and another city officer who had attempted to come to his assistance.

Now that you've read that, read this:

The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and a spinoff group of disaffected Minuteman members plan separate monthlong deployments along the border, beginning Friday and Saturday, respectively.

The Minuteman group said it will have members on patrol along the Mexican border in Arizona, California and Texas, and also plans to post members along the Canadian border in Washington state....

Meanwhile, the Patriots' Border Alliance, created after disagreements this spring led to the expulsion of several original Minuteman Civil Defense Corps members and officers, is to stage its inaugural 30-day border watch operation starting Saturday in the Palominas area, south of Sierra Vista and west of Naco.

Click here if you wish to trace the complex genealogy of these squabbling superpatriots. You should also note the alleged problems between citizen's groups and federal agents.

Volunteers who have converged on the Mexican border to watch for illegal immigrants are disrupting U.S. Border Patrol (search) operations by unwittingly tripping sensors that alert agents to possible intruders, an agency spokesman complained Monday.

This is why the border must be guarded by machines. You'll never hear Raytheon's Active Denial System 2 compare System 1 to male genitalia, or call it "a swine who lives in a cat box," even though System 2 is clearly superior when it comes to dealing with harsh border conditions:

System 2 was built for 125 degrees Fahrenheit with sun loading, and for rain. System 1 – you can’t let it rain a whole bunch. We’re not watertight. As soon as it starts raining, we pull it into the garage. System 2 has been tested for rain and tested for dust.

While I suspect that ADS sentries could be taken out with a few bullets, or even a well-aimed brick, the idea of an invisible line that can't be crossed appeals to the poetic side of our nature. Mayors who oppose the building of a border fence may want to consider deploying ADS to keep defense contractors (and their horde of undocumented laborers) from approaching the proposed worksite:

Mayors along the Texas-Mexico border have begun a quiet protest of the federal government's plans to build a fence along the border: They are refusing to give access to their land.

Mayors in Brownsville, Del Rio and El Paso have denied access to some parts of their city property, turning away federal employees assigned to begin surveys or conduct other preliminary work on the fence meant to keep out illegal immigrants.

"This is exercising our rights. This is our property. We are not going to make it easy for them," said Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada, who refused last month to sign documents granting government workers permission to enter city property.

Perhaps the Minutemen - and their bickering splinter groups - should undertake a new campaign to keep the borders' borders open.

(Image at top via Urbanography.)

Evolution of the Eye

Mayor Bloomberg's recent visit to London has given him a special insight into the rights and responsibilities of American citizens:

Residents of big cities like New York and London must accept that they are under constant watch by video cameras, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.

"We are under surveillance all the time" from cameras in shops and office buildings, "and in London they have multiple cameras on every bus and in every subway car," he added.

This isn't authoritarianism, but a gesture of blessing from the Invisible Hand:

"The people of London not only support it, but if Ken Livingstone didn't do it they would try to run him out of town on a rail. We live in a dangerous world, and people want to have security cameras."

Our "dangerous world" also threatens us with devastating accidents and illnesses. But the notion that we could adapt and improve the UK's healthcare system remains controversial at best, despite widespread public support.

Also, drivers remain more dangerous than terrorists, but I don't see New Yorkers begging Bloomberg to ban cars, or force them to drive at five miles per hour within city limits.

But then, danger is being redefined - and personified - as "terrorism," and the public's predictable panic and confusion is conveniently being hailed as informed consent to surveillance.

I don't like arguing against the inadequacy of surveillance cameras, for the same reason I don't like arguing that torture doesn't work; doing so implies that authoritarian measures would be OK if only they were more effective. That said, there does seem to be some evidence that London's security cameras don't work:

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any....

A report by the criminal justice charity Nacro in 2002 concluded that the money spent on cameras would be better used on street lighting, which has been shown to cut crime by up to 20 per cent.

Well, what of it? Creationists routinely attempt to question the evolution of the eye by asking "what good is five percent of an eye?" Like a few cells with a rudimentary ability to distinguish between light and dark, London's surveillance system may turn out to be a step on the path towards 20/20 vision.

"We can read fingerprints from about five meters...all 10 prints," said Bruce Walker, vice president of homeland security for Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N). "We can also do an iris scan at the same distance."

And as we all know, seeing is believing.

Flat Evil

In one of his typically economical summations of the Evildoers' weltanschauung, President Bush explained that "they're flat evil. That's all they can think about, is evil."

A brain that thinks about nothing but evil will look as abnormal to an fMRI technician as it does to God, which may offer Civilization a powerful weapon against the theory, as well as the practice, of evildoing:

SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory....

Marketed in North America as SSRM Tek, the technology will soon be tested for airport screening by a U.S. company under contract to the Department of Homeland Security.

"If it's a clean result, the passengers are allowed through," said Rusalkina, during a reporter's visit last year. "If there's something there, that person will need to go through extra checks."

I assume "clean" means a properly horrified or angry subconscious response, as opposed to, say, resentful nostalgia for the dear dead days of national unity. Or pride at having been "proved fucking right" about the ragheads.

Once we've used this system (and this one) to purge the body politic of active and larval terrorists, I'm hoping we can redesign it to screen public servants for authoritarian tendencies. It could flash subliminal images of torture at Abu Ghraib, and inflatable detention camps on the Texas border, and the active denial system, and perhaps even SSRM Tek itself, and then measure the subject's enjoyment. Anyone who showed signs of excitement - more drooling than usual, for instance - would be barred from holding public office.

There may be a few false positives now and again, but that's a small price to pay to keep American democracy safe.

(Photo at top via Mr. Bali Hai.)

An Inch of Space

Danger Room reports on DARPA's plan to deploy a stationary surveillance drone that will watch over a target area for months or years:

Today's Global Hawk reconnaissance drones can stay in the air for up to 40 hours. DARPA program manager Wade Pulliam would like to increase that by 1,000 times, or more -- getting a robotic surveillance plan [sic] that can stay in the air for 5 years, or 44,000 hours, straight. The project is called "Vulture." And it won't be easy, Pulliam admits.

One of the major problems is finding an energy source, though Pulliam looks forward - as who wouldn't? - to the tantalizing possibility that 'the machine could power up by "consuming organic material from the surrounding environment."'

Ideally, the drone would also dispense instant, white-hot death to evildoers. But either way, we can take a quasi-pornographic pleasure in the thought that the Vulture will "not allow potential foes "an inch of space, not allow them a moment's rest, not allow them to have an easy breath."

In my Friday Hope Blogging posts, I often mention ideas that seem to me to be unrealistic, on the assumption that trying to achieve them may lead to unexpected advances. Obviously, one could make the same argument for research into the Vulture. (Chinese alchemists may not have discovered the elixir of life, but they are credited with inventing gunpowder.)

As I've argued before, weapons like the Vulture "engender those to whom punishment is due." By opposing such a system (or living in the same building, or neighborhood, or city, as someone who does), one potentially becomes its target (and thus, its justification). In an interview with Bryan Finoki, Stephen Graham discusses the increasingly problematic role of urbanization in TSAIEWDNBIFSWHTUTAAWTTTSTCOTFW:

[H]igh-tech military dominance is assumed to directly fuel the urbanisation of resistance....[I]t is as though global urbanisation is a dastardly plan to thwart the U.S. military gaining the full benefit from the complex, expensive and high-tech weapons that the military-industrial complex has spent so many decades piecing together. Annoyingly, cities, as physical objects, simply get in the way of the U.S. military’s technophiliac fantasies of trans-global, real-time, omnipotence.

Since unregulated urbanization and sprawl (and the centralized and inflexible infrastructure that supports them) are desiderata of the "free market," the neoliberal project will inevitably make it harder to fight the extremism that its own extremism creates. Speaking of which, Arms and Influence points out that what makes Iraq's electrical grid an effective tool for social control is precisely what makes it vulnerable to attack:

The Ba'athist regime under Saddam Hussein built a centralized electricity grid, in part as a instrument of political control; now, that centralization works against the government that replaced the Ba'athists.

Insurgent groups know that they can easily disrupt the highly centralized electricity distribution network, undermining the "civil affairs" side of counterinsurgency, with very little effort.

We can only hope that if we divert enough money from our own public health and infrastructure, the Vulture will someday guard Iraq's centralized, privately owned electrical grid. In the meantime, we can exercise that famous conservative fiscal restraint by outsourcing our war on Iraqi malcontents to Central American malcontents:

Herard von Santos Mendes, a Salvadoran army veteran who fought against guerrillas there in the 1990s, said he went to Iraq in 2004 ''as a soldier of fortune.'' Santos Mendes said he and 40 countrymen were asked to sign a legal liability contract in English -- while airborne to Iraq -- that they didn't understand.

''The only thing the U.S. company wanted was cheap labor,'' Santos Mendes said by telephone from El Salvador.

(Illustration: "This Victorian version of a print from 1621 shows how Protestants believed that God helped to protect England from Catholic plots. As Guy Fawkes goes to set fire to the gunpowder fuse, the eye of God is on him; the message of the print is that it is God who will shortly reveal the conspiracy and save the Protestant religion.")

Facts on the Ground

An article by Nick Turse describes the DoD’s worldwide land holdings:

The DoD's "real property portfolio," according to 2006 figures, consists of a total of 3,731 sites. Over 20% of these sites are located on more than 711,000 acres outside of the U.S. and its territories. Yet even these numbers turn out to be a drastic undercount. For example, while a 2005 Pentagon report listed U.S. military sites from Antigua and Hong Kong to Kenya and Peru, some countries with significant numbers of U.S. bases go entirely unmentioned -- Afghanistan and Iraq, for example.

The DoD also dabbles in landscaping, architecture, and urban design on land it doesn’t own. As a logical complement to the barricades - or peace walls, if you prefer - that partition Iraqi neighborhoods, the city of Karbala will be “protected” with a massive trench:

The Karbala trench will create a 10-foot-deep crescent, buttressing approaches from the Sunni Muslim stronghold of Ramadi, about 70 miles northwest of Karbala, to the main highway running south to Najaf. Police towers will punctuate the trench, which will funnel traffic to checkpoints outside the city center.

At least one resident of Karbala seems skeptical:

"If the trench will prevent car bombs, let them make a thousand trenches," said Haider Abdul Razzaq, 39, who runs a hotel for pilgrims. "But I'm afraid the trench wouldn't stop the terrorists from their plans to kill civilians if they couldn't reach the shrines."

That’s defeatism, pure and simple. And besides, why should you make a thousand trenches, when you can dig a single thousand-foot trench and patrol it with drones designed for urban canyons?

Meanwhile, the Monolithic Dome Institute is bringing us a step closer to our Dark Green Future.

[The] temporary structures are inexpensive and easy to build and provide efficient heating and cooling, according to [REF Power Surety Task Force chief Daniel] Nolan. The vinyl domes are inflated and then sprayed internally with insulation to give them form, he explained. Concrete is sprayed on the inside to make them more structurally sound, and Nolan said there is potential to spray concrete on the outside to add ballistic protection...

The MDI is excited about the carceral applications of their buildings, and with good reason:

Can a Monolithic Dome be designed as a prison or jail? The answer is an emphatic Yes. In fact, if there are any buildings that ought to be Monolithic Domes, they are jails and prisons.

Consider just a few of the advantages of the dome over conventional designs:

• Monolithic Domes cost less to build, operate and maintain.
• The domes' interiors can be open and clear, free of supporting pillars or columns and free of walls that create hiding places. That openness provides clear views of all activities at all times, and those better sight lines translate into less staffing, and that's where the big money is saved.
• A Monolithic, steel-reinforced concrete shell is impenetrable. Inmates simply cannot chisel or knife their way through it.

Interestingly, the firm was initially reluctant to brand itself as a supplier of prison buildings.

[W]hy haven't we pushed harder on jails? It's my wife's fault. One day Judy said to me, "David, do you really want your Monolithic Domes best known as prisons and jails?" I didn't.

Till then, we had been constructing bulk storages and a few designed buildings. Had we started with prisons and jails, we probably would not have been able to get into the school and church market.

But now that Monolithic is somewhat established in church and school design, incorporating prison design into what we offer should not strike potential clients as "weird."

Weird? Hardly. In fact, it’s easy to imagine these energy-efficient domes springing up across Iraq like pieces on a Go board:

Go is a territorial game. The board, marked with a grid of 19 lines by 19 lines, may be thought of as a piece of land to be shared between the two players….

The players normally start by staking out their claims to parts of the board which they intend eventually to surround and thereby make into territory. However, fights between enemy groups of stones provide much of the excitement in a game, and can result in dramatic exchanges of territory.

All this can be viewed, if you like, as a preamble to Bryan Finoki’s interview with Neil Smith on the military planks of capital accumulation:

The spatial dimensions of military power are in the end tied to economic interests. The proliferation of U.S. military bases around the world is precisely about pacifying all regions of the world to enable and facilitate massive capital investment. How better to do so that to send the city re-builders in with the city destroyers. Turnover time is reduced to almost zero. I'm not suggesting that specific wars, invasions, or urban military projects are organized with all of this fully in mind; rather, a certain military intent and economic logic finds themselves working hand in hand.

(Image at top: "Possible design for a typical cell block," via the Monolithic Dome Institute.)

Economy of Force

Those of us who are disturbed by the US policy of walling-off Iraqi neighborhoods have apparently failed to understand that the walls were built for a reason:

"The point of the walls was to structure the environment, to hold the city and keep it safe," [Retired Colonel David Kilcullen] tells DANGER ROOM. "It's like [keeping] guard inside a concrete building, instead of in the middle of a field... You don't need vast maneuver forces to do it... It's the principle of economy of force."

Thank heavens we didn't listen to the dirty fucking hippies who opposed the war. If we had, we might never have learned that partitioning urban neighborhoods is useful when you invade a country illegally - for no reason, at an incalculable expense – and find yourself facing a determined, creative insurgency.

Maybe I’m a sourpuss, but I see the construction of neighborhood walls – “necessary” or not – as symbolic of why the occupation is a failure (as well as a crime, and an act of elemental stupidity). Never mind the PR catastrophe of evoking the wall between Israel and Palestine, or the absurdity of trying to “break the cycle of sectarian violence” by setting sectarian divisions literally in stone; the simple fact is that building barriers on other people’s land makes them angry, and any security you earn with this strategy is likely to be fleeting at best.

Unfortunately, building barriers is a centerpiece of post-9/11 strategic thinking; it’s right up there with killing ‘em all, and ordering our womenfolk to ramp up production of white babies.

Barriers aren’t just defenses, of course; they’re also vulnerable infrastructure that must be defended, lest the evildoers blow them up, or tunnel under them, or assassinate the people guarding them, or what have you. That’s why Taser International’s Taser Remote Area Denial (TRAD) is such an exciting development. Basically, it’s a robotic taser that will patrol “high value facilities or operations such as checkpoints, command centers, depots, aircraft insertions, and spec ops, as well as fixed installations such as embassies, air fields, utility facilities, pipelines, etc."

Like all the best robots, TRADs can distinguish between friend and foe, and act accordingly:

Once an engagement decision is made (either by the operator or the system depending on user selected settings), the TASERNET program selects the specific TRAD units best suited for engagement and transmits fire authorization. The TRAD unit will then arrest the targeted individuals by providing complete incapacitation.

In other words, they've found an unmet need in their target market, and they intend to fulfill it.

A shrewd commenter at Danger Room thinks the TRAD could be knocked off its spindly little legs without much effort, or simply riddled with bullet holes from a safe distance. This is a serious concern, which is why I suggest that any TRADs deployed should be under constant surveillance by armed microdrones, and protected from enemy approach by automated kill zones.

Otherwise, we run the risk of wasting the taxpayers' money by having our robot guardians used for target practice.

(Illustration from the October 1948 issue of Popular Science, via Modern Mechanix.)