Tomgram: Nick Turse on The Pentagon's 100-Year War

[unhappycamper]

Tomgram: Nick Turse on The Pentagon's 100-Year War
by Tom Engelhardt | Oct 12 2007 - 9:59am


How can we understand our world, if we have hardly a clue about the mini-worlds where planning for our future takes place? Just the other day, the Washington Post had one of the odder reports of the year. According to journalist Rick Weiss, demonstrators at protests in Washington DC and elsewhere have been independently reporting large "dragonflies" (with a bizarre "row of spheres, the size of small berries, attached along the tails") hovering near their rallies. ("'I'd never seen anything like it in my life,' the Washington lawyer said. 'They were large for dragonflies. I thought, is that mechanical, or is that alive?'")

~snip~

Slum Fights: The Pentagon Plans for a New Hundred Years' War
By Nick Turse

Duane Schattle doesn't mince words. "The cities are the problem," he says. A retired Marine infantry lieutenant colonel who worked on urban warfare issues at the Pentagon in the late 1990s, he now serves as director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at U.S. Joint Forces Command. He sees the war in the streets of Iraq's cities as the prototype for tomorrow's battlespace. "This is the next fight," he warns. "The future of warfare is what we see now."

He isn't alone. "We think urban is the future," says James Lasswell, a retired colonel who now heads the Office of Science and Technology at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment." And Wayne Michael Hall, a retired Army brigadier general and the senior intelligence advisor in Schattle's operation, has a similar assessment, "We will be fighting in urban terrain for the next hundred years."

~snip~

The largest contractors in the military-corporate complex are already hard at work helping the Pentagon prepare for future urban occupations. Raytheon, L-3 Communications, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) -- the 5th, 7th, and 10th largest Pentagon contractors last year, taking in a combined $18.4-plus billion from the Department of Defense -- have all signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with the U.S. Joint Forces Command, according to Berry "Dan" Fox, the Deputy Director of Science and Technology at its Joint Urban Operations Office.


Rest of article at: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/10410



uhc comment: Nick's article is worth reading. Big Brother is coming to a place near you.

[pretzel4gore]

1. the fukking punks piss themselves at global warming...

they can do nothing about thieves in high office, or illegal wars, or fake news, but they can plan to fight teenagers with zip guns and slingshots after the die off makes everything government then does moot, pointless cuz it's now too late...
fukking flying monkees