The Pentagon's fantasies of containing "failed, feral cities"

Paul Verhoeven's Robocop seems more and more to be the inspiration for the Pentagon's wet dreams of world domination. The United States military has deduced, after getting its ass kicked time and time again by brown people armed only with seat-of-the-pants technology and local knowledge, that it needs more, smarter firepower, if it hopes to control the planets favelas -- from Baghdad to Bogota -- where resistance to American domination is sure to be based. If there's a very nice payday in these schemes for military contractors at the public's expense, well, so much the better....

Nick Turse points out rather well in his Pentagon to Global Cities -- Drop Dead, that ever since the Pentagon became, well, the Pentagon, the American record in war fighting has really pretty much been for shit. Lots of death and destruction, to be sure, but not many W's:

[E]ven with high-tech exploding frisbees, spider-man suits, terminator-like robots, and urban training facilities galore coming on line. In the wars begun since the U.S. high command moved into its own self-described virtual "city" -- the Pentagon -- a distinct inability to decisively defeat any but its weakest foes has been in evidence.

Well, the planners and dreamers reason, we just haven't been throwing enough tax dollars at the problem, so they have redoubled their efforts to create an array of lethal, high-tech gadgets that would make Q of James Bond fame salivate.

But my thinking is that, after the contractors who develop the HURTS (Heterogeneous Urban RSTA Teams) and Nano air vehicles (mechanized gnats, I kid you not) receive their handsome slice of our hard-earned bucks, the Imperial Dreamers will still be at Square One. I'm thinking that their best efforts will result in something that more resembles the ED-209 -- the extremly lethal machine that couldn't handle going down stairs -- than Robocop himself.

At least I hope that to be the case, because by the time all these systems are in place, I fear that there won't be a very distinct line in the Pentagon's thinking to distinguish between domestic and foreign-born troublemakers. Is it too paranoid to think that these tools of destruction will surely work as well in neutralizing "terrorists" and "drug dealers" ... in Detroit as in Dhakka....

As Tom Englehardt writes in his introduction to Turse's piece:

The future -- whether imagined as utopian or dystopian -- was, not so long ago, the province of dreamers, or actual writers of fiction, or madmen and cranks, or reformers and journalists, or even wanna-be war-fighters, but not so regularly of actual war-fighters, or secretaries of defense, or presidents. In our time, the Pentagon and the IC have quite literally become the fantasy-based community. And yet, strangely enough, the urge of our top policy-makers (and allied academics and scientists) to spend their time in relatively distant futures has been little explored or considered by others.

A couple of things can be said about this near compulsion. First, it's largely confined to the arts of war. There is no equivalent in our government when it comes to health care or education, retirement or housing. No well-funded government think-tanks and lousy-with-loot research organizations are ready to let anyone loose dreaming about our planet's endangered environment, for instance. The future -- the only one our government seems truly to care about -- is most distinctly not good for you. It's a totally weaponized, grimly dystopian health hazard for the planet.

Of course, future fictions are notorious for their wrong-headedness. All you have to do is check out old utopian or dystopian fiction, if you don't believe me. The scandal here is not that, like most human beings, our soldiers and spies are sure to be desperately wrong on most aspects of their future fictions. The scandal is that we're mortgaging our wealth and our futures, whatever they may be, to their bloodcurdling, self-interested, and often absurd fantasies.

After all, they're running a giant, massively profitable business operation off fictional futures, while creating their own armed reality at our expense.

Later this week on Tomdispatch, writes Englehardt, Frida Berrigan will explore another aspect of "the future the Pentagon has planned for us," an overview of the major American weapons systems "being prepared for a planet that will never exist."