"Slouching Toward Baghdad"

Mike Davis, February 28, 2003

Imperial Washington, like Berlin in the late 1930s, has become a
psychedelic capital where one megalomaniacal hallucination succeeds
another. Thus, in addition to creating a new geopolitical order in
the Middle East, we are now told by the Pentagon's deepest thinkers
that the invasion of Iraq will also inaugurate "the most important
'revolution in military affairs' (or RMA) in two hundred years."

According to Admiral William Owen, a chief theorist of the
revolution, the first Gulf War was "not a new kind of war, but the
last of the old ones." Likewise, the air wars in Kosovo and
Afghanistan were only pale previews of the postmodern blitzkrieg that
will be unleashed against the Baathist regime. Instead of old-
fashioned sequential battles, we are promised nonlinear "shock and
awe."

Although the news media will undoubtedly focus on the sci-fi gadgetry
involved - thermobaric bombs, microwave weapons, unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs), PackBot robots, Stryker fighting vehicles, and so on

- the truly radical innovations (or so the war wonks claim) will be
in the organization and, indeed, the very concept of the war.

In the bizarre argot of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation
(the nerve center of the revolution), a new kind of "warfighting
ecosystem" known as "network centric warfare" (or NCW) is slouching
toward Baghdad to be born. Promoted by military futurists as a
"minimalist" form of warfare that spares lives by replacing attrition
with precision, NCW may in fact be the inevitable road to nuclear war.

FROM DESERT STORM TO WAL-MART

Military "revolutions" based on new technology, of course, have come
and gone since air-power fanatics like Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell,
and Hugh Trenchard first proclaimed the obsolescence of traditional
armies and battleship navies in the early 1920s. This time, however,
the superweapon isn't a long-distance bomber or nightmare H-bomb but
the ordinary PC and its ability, via the Internet, to generate
virtual organization in the "battlespace" as well as the marketplace.

Like all good revolutionaries, the Pentagon advocates of RMA/ NCW are
responding to the rot and crisis of an ancien regime. Although Gulf
War I was publicly celebrated as a flawless victory of technology and
alliance politics, the real story was vicious infighting among
American commanders and potentially disastrous breakdowns in
decision-making. Proponents of high- tech warfare, like the 'smart
bomb' attacks on Baghdad's infrastructure, clashed bitterly with
heavy-metal traditionalists, while frustrated battlefield CEO Norman
Schwarzkopf threw stupefying tantrums.

The battles continued back in the Pentagon where the revolutionaries
-- mostly geekish colonels bunkered in a series of black-box think
tanks -- found a powerful protector in Andrew Marshall, the venerable
head of research and technology assessment. In 1993, Marshall - a
guru to both Dick Cheney and leading Democrats - provided the
incoming Clinton administration with a working paper that warned that
Cold War weapons "platforms" like Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and
heavy tank battle groups were becoming obsolete in face of precision
weapons and cruise missiles.

Marshall instead proselytized for cheaper, quicker, smarter weapons
that took full advantage of American leadership in information
technology. He warned, however, that "by perfecting these precision
weapons, America is forcing its enemies to rely on terrorist
activities that are difficult to target." He cast doubt on the
ability of the Pentagon's fossilized command hierarchies to adapt to
the challenges of so-called "asymmetric warfare."

The revolutionaries went even further, preaching that the potentials
of 21st century war-making technology were being squandered within
19th century military bureaucracies. The new military forces of
production were straining to break out of their archaic relations of
production. They viciously compared the Pentagon to one of the "old
economy" corporations -- "hardwired, dumb and top-heavy" -- that were
being driven into extinction in the contemporary "new economy"
marketplace.

Their alternative? Wal-Mart, the Arkansas-based retail leviathan. It
may seem odd, to say the least, to nominate a chain store that
peddles cornflakes, jeans and motor oil as the model for a leaner,
meaner Pentagon, but Marshall's think-tankers were only following in
the footsteps of management theorists who had already beatified
Wal-Mart as the essence of a "self-synchronized distributed network
with real-time transactional awareness." Translated, this means that
the stores' cash registers automatically transmit sales data to
Wal-Mart's suppliers and that inventory is managed through
'horizontal' networks rather than through a traditional head-office
hierarchy.

"We're trying to do the equivalent in the military," wrote the
authors of Network Centric Warfare: developing and leveraging
information superiority, the 1998 manifesto of the RMA/NCW camp that
footnotes Wal-Mart annual reports in its bibliography. In
"battlespace," mobile military actors (ranging from computer hackers
to stealth bomber pilots) would be the counterparts of Wal-Mart's
intelligent salespoints.

Instead of depending on hardcopy orders and ponderous chains of
commands, they would establish "virtual collaborations" (regardless
of service branch) to concentrate overpowering violence on precisely
delineated targets. Command structures would be "flattened" to a
handful of generals, assisted by computerized decision-making aides,
in egalitarian dialogue with their "shooters.'"

The iconic image, of course, is the Special Forces op in Pathan drag
using his laptop to summon air strikes on a Taliban position that
another op is highlighting with his laser designator. To NCW gurus,
however, this is still fairly primitive Gunga Din stuff. They would
prefer to "swarm" the enemy terrain with locust-like myriads of
miniaturized robot sensors and tiny flying video cams whose
information would be fused together in a single panopticon picture
shared by ordinary grunts in their fighting vehicles as well as by
four-star generals in their Qatar or Florida command posts.

Inversely, as American "battlespace awareness" is exponentially
increased by networked sensors, it becomes ever more important to
blind opponents by precision air strikes on their equivalent (but
outdated) "command and control" infrastructures. This necessarily
means a ruthless takeout of civilian telecommunications, power grids,
and highway nodes: all the better, in the Pentagon view, to allow
American psy-op units to propagandize, or, if necessary, terrorize
the population.

THE PENTAGON'S WHIRLING DERVISHES

Critics of RMA/NCW have compared it to a millennial cult, analogous
to bible-thumping fundamentalism or, for that matter, to Al Queda.
Indeed, reading ecstatic descriptions of how "Metcalfe's Law"
guarantees increases of "network power proportional to the square of
the number of nodes,'" one wonders what the wonks are smoking in
their Pentagon basement offices. (Marshall, incidentally, advocates
using behavior-modifying drugs to create Terminator-like
'bioengineered soldiers.')

Their most outrageous claim is that Clausewitz's famous "fog of war"
-- the chaos and contingency of the battlefield -- can be dispelled
by enough sensors, networks, and smart weapons. Thus vice-admiral
Arthur Cebrowski, the Pentagon director for "force transformation,"
hallucinates that "in only a few years, if the the technological
capabilities of America's enemies remain only what they are today,
the US military could effectively achieve total "battlespace
knowledge."

Donald Rumsfeld, like Dick Cheney (but unlike Colin Powell), is a
notorious addict of RNA/NCW fantasies (already enshrined as official
doctrine by the Clinton administration in 1998). By opening the
floodgates to a huge military budget (almost equal to the rest of the
world's military spending combined), 9.11 allowed Rumsfeld to go
ahead with the revolution while buying off the reactionaries with
funding for their baroque weapons systems, including three competing
versions of a new tactical fighter. The cost of the compromise -
which most Democrats have also endorsed - will be paid for by
slashing federal spending on education, healthcare, and local
government.

A second Iraq war, in the eyes of the RNA/NCW zealots, is the
inevitable theater for demonstrating to the rest of the world that
America's military superiority is now unprecedented and unduplicable.
Haunted by the 1993 catastrophe in Mogadishu, when poorly armed
Somali militia defeated the Pentagon's most elite troops, the war
wonks have to show that networked technology can now prevail in
labyrinthine street warfare. To this end, they are counting on the
combination of battlefield omniscience, smart bombs, and new weapons
like microwave pulses and nausea gases to drive Baghdadis out of
their homes and bunkers. The use of "non-lethal" (sic) weapons
against civilian populations, especially in light of the horror of
what happened during the Moscow hostage crisis last October, is a war
crime waiting to happen.

But what if the RNA/NCW's Second Coming of Warfare doesn't arrive as
punctually promised? What happens if the Iraqis or future enemies
find ways to foil the swarming sensors, the night- visioned Special
Forces, the little stair-climbing robots, the missile-armed drones?
Indeed, what if some North Korean cyberwar squad (or, for that
matter, a fifteen-year-old hacker in Des Moines) manages to crash the
Pentagon's "system of systems" behind its battlespace panopticon?

If the American war-fighting networks begin to unravel (as partially
occurred in February 1991), the new paradigm - with its "just in
time" logistics and its small "battlefield footprint" - leaves little
backup in terms of traditional military reserves. This is one reason
why the Rumsfeld Pentagon takes every opportunity to rattle its
nuclear saber.

Just as precision munitions have resurrected all the mad omnipotent
visions of yesterday's strategic bombers, RNA/NCW is giving new life
to monstrous fantasies of functionally integrating tactical nukes
into the electronic battlespace. The United States, it should never
be forgotten, fought the Cold War with the permanent threat of "first
use" of nuclear weapons against a Soviet conventional attack. Now the
threshold has been lowered to Iraqi gas attacks, North Korean missile
launches, or, even, retaliation for future terrorist attacks on
American city.

For all the geekspeak about networks and ecosystems, and millenarian
boasting about minimal, robotic warfare, the United States is
becoming a terror state pure and simple: a 21st century Assyria with
laptops and modems.

Mike Davis is the author of City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, and most
recently, Dead Cities, among other works. He now lives in San Diego.

[This article first appeared on tomdispatch, a weblog
of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate
sources, news and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in
publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture.]