[117386] in Cypherpunks
Geodesic Warfare?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Thu Sep 2 00:40:39 1999
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Date: Wed, 1 Sep 1999 21:22:28 -0400
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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The unintended consequences of "organized" warfare against the
ungoverned, followed by more HERF-FUD. They'll be talking about Tesla
death-rays next...
Cheers,
RAH
--- begin forwarded text
From: believer@telepath.com
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 1999 13:27:01 -0500
To: ignition-point@precision-d.com
Subject: IP: War by Other Means
Sender: owner-ignition-point@precision-d.com
Reply-To: believer@telepath.com
Source: Washington Times
http://www.WashTimes.com/opinion/bering.html
War by other means
By Helle Bering
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
QUANTICO, Va.
The wars of the future ain't what they used to be. Not too
long ago, the future of warfare -- at least in the popular
mind -- looked much like George Lucas' "Star Wars," exciting,
glamorous, speed-of-light fast. Some recent U.S. military
engagements bear some resemblance to that concept. The
high-tech air war against Saddam Hussein, which preceded
ground operations in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 as
broadcast on CNN looked to an American audience mostly
like a video game. And this spring the Kosovo war was
conducted at a clinical distance of 15,000 feet in altitude with
not a single combat casualty on our side.
There is, however, a yawning disconnect between these
images and other types of warfare, which will be with us in the
21st century, unless human nature is miraculously transformed
in the next four months. With the end of the Cold War, the
world saw a resurgence of tribal warfare and terrorism, man
fighting man on the most primitive level. Think back to our
military misadventure in Somalia, where two Black Hawk
helicopters went down in Mogadishu Oct. 3, 1993, costing 18
American Rangers their lives -- one American casualty being
dragged through the streets to the cheering of the crowds.
Those images caused our ignominious retreat. Or think of the 1
million Rwandans hacked to death with machetes in that
country's civil war, which President Clinton now regrets that
we failed to stop. Or look at the news reports out of Kosovo,
where old-fashioned revenge killing of Serbs by Albanians is
taking place under the eyes of NATO peacekeeping troops in
a distinctly low-tech environment. Here torches, knives and
semiautomatic guns are the weapons of choice.
The question then becomes, how do modern human beings
prepare to fight what looks very much like Stone Age wars?
The U.S. Marine Corps has an interest in finding out because
typically, a Marine expeditionary force will be the first
dispatched to a scene of trouble. At the Marine Corps
Warfighting Laboratory at Quantico, which was set up in 1994,
these questions are being analyzed and solutions proposed for
the 21st century. The field of study is as wide as biological and
chemical warfare, amphibious landings, computer laboratory
simulations, and cultural intelligence seminars producing
manuals to understand the culture and mores of far-flung hot
spots.
The idea that future American wars will be fought at
dizzying altitudes is not given much credence here. After all, the
safest place to be during the NATO air war against Yugoslavia
was with the army of the enemy. With all the ordnance
dropped over Kosovo, some of it hitting refugee convoys and
passenger trains, NATO managed to kill a total of either seven
or 13 tanks, depending on whose count you accept. That's not
giving U.S. taxpayers a whole lot for their money. "We need to
get our eyes on the target on the ground," says Chief of Staff
Col. Gary Anderson. It seems that fighting wars can still be
down and dirty, and even cost American lives.
Among the issues keenly studied at the laboratory is how to
deal with urban situations, like the one we faced in Mogadishu,
where guerrillas, hooligans and crowds of civilians made up a
highly confusing mix. Last fall, the Marines staged Operation
Urban Warrior in the San Francisco area for just this purpose.
In street-to-street combat with civilians all around, they did not
fare well, sustaining casualties of 30-70 percent. For maximum
verisimilitude, actors were brought in to play civilians,
producing interesting results. "What do you do if you have a
300-pound woman sitting down in front of your vehicles?" Col.
Anderson says. "It took most of half a company to move her."
In December 1998, an exercise at Quantico aimed to refine
the Marine Corps' techniques with the use of "non-lethal
weapons" in urban crowd situations. According to the Marine
analysis report, " 'Blackhawk Down': Non-lethals Experiment,"
a major problem is the practice of using unarmed civilians as
shields, a technique used also against the Russians by the
Chechens and by Hezbollah terrorists against Israeli forces in
southern Lebanon.
"Given the moral and political drawbacks of killing civilian
noncombatants, one would like to have a means of rendering a
person harmless without killing him or her," the report says
commendably. Non-lethal weapons studied range from the
more obvious rubber bullets, batons and shotgun-fired
"beanbag rounds," to devices that produce unbearable noise
(one recalls the tactic of playing John Denver songs at high
volume to drive Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega from his
hiding place during the U.S. invasion in 1989), to dazzling lights
and the intriguingly named "directed energy weapons" (DEW).
One such DEW is a so-called "barrier weapon" that creates
a zone of such discomfort as to be impassable; another is a
"penetrator" DEW that could disable people at a distance, even
within a building. Fascinating though this sounds, these
weapons were apparently too politically incorrect for
deployment. "The main conclusion of that experiment was that
the legal, policy, and public affairs considerations were at least
as strongly driven by the weapons' side effects as by their
intended effects, and probably more so," the study says. In
other words, a losing public-relations battle can sink a useful
weapon.
The world has changed in the past 10 years and surely for
the better. What we need now is to invest in military resources
to deal with new realities. It is good to have the Marine Corps
on the job.
Helle Bering is editorial page editor of The Washington
Times.
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
