Race & Class - Vol. 51 No. 3

Page 25

Matt Carr: Slouching towards dystopia: the new military futurism  25

The Joint Operating Environment 2020 also predicts that ‘it is almost inevitable that joint forces will find themselves involved in combat or relief operations in cities’ and: ‘If there is no alternative than to fight in urban terrain, joint force commanders must prepare their forces for the conduct of prolonged operations involving the full range of military missions.’48 In this environment, the JOE authors note: ‘The very density of building and population will inhibit the use of kinetic means, given the potential for collateral damage as well as large numbers of civilian casualties. Such inhibitions could increase US casualties. On the other hand, any collateral damage carries with it difficulties in winning the “battle of the narrative”.’49

Faced with a barbaric enemy who hides among civilians and ‘seeks the city’ in order to avoid detection and elimination by superior technology, the US military has already begun to seek ways to regain the upper hand and ‘own the city’ in the future. In 1997, the US Marines Corps Warfighting Laboratory designed a wargame entitled Urban Warrior set in a hypothetical ‘urban littoral’ that would be characterised by ‘social, cultural, religious and tribal strife between different groups. Many areas will have scarce resources, including the most basic ones like food and shelter as populations grow and resources shrink even faster.’50

This Hobbesian ‘urban littoral’ is already being regarded in the US military – and by sections of the US media – as if it were inevitable. ‘As cities around the world descend into disorder, the United States will have to step up training local militaries to undertake armed interventions’, warned the New York Times journalist Ken Stier in an article on ‘Feral cities’ in 2007.51 That same year, the US Joint Forces Command began an elaborate three-phased simulation called Operation Urban Resolve 2015, which attempted to assess the ability of the military to operate in a large conurbation modelled on Baghdad. In the simulation, a ‘blue team’ of 300 agents were required to track and eliminate a ‘red team’ of 3,000 ‘insurgents’ in Baghdad in the year 2015. Advanced computer technology was used to create a synthetic urban environment replete with buildings, cars, pedestrians and a population of ‘110,000 discrete person-entities … displaying culturally-appropriate behaviours’. Even the traffic flows were ‘culturally-specific’ so that ‘traffic and civilian presence increased around mosques at the appropriate times for daily prayers’52 in a setting, according to the Pentagon news service TRADOC, that ‘can be tailored to resemble any major urban area from Iraq to Indonesia’.53

Whether military futurists are thinking of Baghdad, Jakarta or Johannesburg, they tend to take it for granted that the military – and the US military in particular – will be the inevitable and indispensable solution to these ‘broken’ mega-cities, fighting an array of ‘conflict entrepreneurs’ and ‘hostile behaviour bad actors’ whose ranks may include insurgents, drug dealers, serial killers, paramilitaries or the ‘angry crowds’ that the US Army Urban Operations manual includes amongst its list of ‘persistent and evolving urban threats’.54

The military has been preparing to confront these threats for some time. In 1999, 6,000 marines and 700 sailors carried out a four-day ‘assault’ and occupation of a defunct naval base in Oakland, California, to rehearse ‘3 block war in 3 dimensions’. The concept of ‘3 block war’ refers to the ability to simultaneously combine