The Empire 130

Tom Engelhardt schrijft:

'Tomgram: Frida Berrigan, How the Pentagon Stole the Future.

Just this week, the Bush administration is considering making a little futuristic news. The President might soon approve "a major step forward in the building of the country's first new nuclear warhead in nearly two decades," the Reliable Replacement Warhead. If only names were reality...
Critics are already claiming that the new "hybrid" design of the weapon, now planned to come on-line in 2012, will raise safety and other questions (and may someday lead to the resumption of underground nuclear testing). In other words, peering into our nuclear future, it's possible to imagine that -- to the tune of an estimated $100 billion -- the crucial word is likely to be "proliferation."
In fact, the future, as the military sees it, is simply filled to the brim with multibillion dollar American weapons systems of a sort that were once relegated to sci-fi novels for spacey boys. Now, they are the property of spacey generals, strategists, military planners, and corporate CEOs. Just a week ago, the Bush administration presented a supplemental military budget of nearly $100 billion to Congress to cover our ongoing disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as to replace equipment lost or worn out in both. But evidently Air Force officials, in a "feeding frenzy," just couldn't resist slipping in a futuristic ringer -- the funding, according to Jonathan Karp of the Wall Street Journal, for two of Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, a high-tech plane still in development.
By the way, as Richard Cummings points out in a stunning recent piece on Lockheed in Playboy, Dick Cheney's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, is a registered Lockheed lobbyist and his wife Lynne was on Lockheed's board until he became Vice President. On settling into Washington, George Bush appointed Lockheed's President and CEO Robert J. Stevens to his Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. "Albert Smith, Lockheed's executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions, was appointed to the Defense Science Board. Bush had appointed former Lockheed chief operating officer Peter B. Teets as undersecretary of the Air Force and director of the National Reconnaissance Office," and that was just the beginning as the military-industrial revolving door spun wildly and the corporation made money hand over fist.
This month Tomdispatch is focusing special attention on the Pentagon, militarization, and the imperial path. Sunday, Nick Turse laid out Pentagon plans to fight crucial future battles in Baghdad 2025 and the mega-slums of other global cities. Today, Frida Berrigan of the Arms Trade Resource Center and a regular writer for this website, considers a range of weapons systems slated to come our way somewhere between tomorrow and 2040. If that's not ownership of the future, what is? Next week, stay tuned for a Michael Klare series on the militarization of energy policy. Tom

Raptors, Robots, and Rods From God: The Nightmare Weaponry of Our Future By Frida Berrigan TomDispatch.com
Tuesday 09 January 2007
We are not winning the war on terrorism (and would not be even if we knew what victory looked like) or the war in Iraq. Our track record in Afghanistan, as well as in the allied "war" on drugs, is hardly better. Yet the Pentagon is hard at work, spending your money, planning and preparing for future conflicts of every imaginable sort. From wars in space to sci-fi battlescapes without soldiers, scenarios are being scripted and weaponry prepared, largely out of public view, which ensures not future victories, but limitless spending that Americans can ill-afford now or twenty years from now.
Even though today the Armed Forces can't recruit enough soldiers or adequately equip those already in uniform, the Pentagon is committing itself to massive corporate contracts for new high-tech weapons systems slated to come on-line years, even decades, from now, guaranteed only to enrich their makers.
Future Combat Systems
The typical soldier in Iraq carries about half his or her body weight in gear and suffers the resulting back pain. Body armor, weapon(s), ammunition, water, first aid kit - it adds up in the 120 degree heat of Basra or Baghdad.
Ask soldiers in Iraq what they need most and answers may include: well-armored Humvees (many soldiers are jerry-rigging their own homemade Humvee armor); more body armor (an unofficial 2004 Army study found that one in four casualties in Iraq was the result of inadequate protective gear), or even silly string (Marcelle Shriver found out that her son was squirting the goo into a room as he and his squad searched buildings to detect trip wires around bombs).
The same Army that can't provide such basics of modern war is now promising the Future Combat Systems network (FCS), a "family of systems" that will enable soldiers to "perceive, comprehend, shape, and dominate the future battlefield at unprecedented levels." The FCS network will consist of a "family" of 18 manned and unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, sensors, and munitions, including:
· eight new, super-armored, super-strong ground vehicles to replace current tanks, infantry carriers, and self-propelled howitzers;
· four different planes and drones that soldiers can fly by remote control;
· several "unmanned" ground vehicles.
Put together these are supposed to plunge soldiers into a video-game-like version of warfighting. The FCS will theoretically allow them to act as though they are in the midst of enemy territory - taking out "high value" targets, blowing up "insurgent safe houses," monitoring the movements of "un-friendlies"- all the while remaining at a safe distance from the bloody action.
To grasp the futuristic ambitions (and staggering future costs) of FCS, consider this: The Government Accounting Office (GAO) notes that "an estimated 34 million lines of software code will need to be generated" for the project, "double that of the Joint Strike Fighter, which had been the largest defense undertaking in terms of software to be developed."
In charge of this ambitious sci-fi style fantasy version of war are Boeing and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation). They are the "Lead Systems Integrators" of this extraordinarily complex undertaking, but they are working with as many as 535 more companies across 40 states. They promise future forces the ability to break "free of the tyranny of terrain" and "an agile, networked force capable of maneuver in the third dimension" in the words last March of retired Major General Robert H. Scales in a Boeing PowerPoint presentation entitled "FCS: Its Origin and Op Concept."
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld once famously asserted, "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have." Pentagon planners seem to have taken the opposite tack. They prefer the military they, or their blue-sky dreamers, wish to have for the kinds of wars they dream about fighting. And it won't be cheap. A March 2005 GAO report found that the total program cost of Future Combat Systems alone "is expected to be at least $107.9 billion." In 2005, the Pentagon had already allocated $2.8 billion in research and development funds to FCS and, in fiscal year 2006, that was expected to increase to $3.4 billion. (Keep in mind, that all such complex, high-tech, weapons-oriented systems almost invariably go far over initial cost estimates by the time they come on line.)
"The Maserati of the Skies"'

Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=155521 Of:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011007F.shtml