San
Francisco Bay View
National
Black Newspaper of the Year
San Francisco, April 21, 2004 Urban warfare:
Is Iraq a rehearsal for US hoods*? [*US
slang: Black neighbourhoods] by Mike Davis THE young American Marine is
exultant. "It's a sniper's dream," he tells a
Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts
of Fallujah. "You can go anywhere, and there so many ways to
fire at the enemy without him knowing where you
are." "Sometimes a guy will go down, and I'll let him
scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies.
Then I'll use a second shot." "To take a bad guy out," he explains, "is an
incomparable adrenaline rush." He brags of having
"24 confirmed kills" in the initial phase of the
brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of
300,000 people. Faced with intransigent popular resistance that
recalls the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968,
the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate
terror. According to independent journalists and
local medical workers, they have slaughtered at
least 200 women and children in the first two weeks
of fighting. The battle of Fallujah,
together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia
cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests,
not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of
Washington's ability to dominate what Pentagon
planners consider the "key battlespace of the
future" - the Third World city. The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood
militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite
Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists to rethink
what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: "Militarized
Operations on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately, a
National Defense Panel review in December 1997
castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted
combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of
the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World. As a result, the four armed services,
coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group,
launched crash programs to master street-fighting
under realistic third-world conditions. "The future
of warfare," the journal of the Army War College
declared, "lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise
buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the
broken cities of the world." Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to
teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the
state-of-the-art tactics -- especially the
sophisticated coordination of sniper and demolition
teams with heavy armor and overwhelming airpower --
so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces in
Gaza and the West Bank. Artificial cityscapes -- complete with "smoke
and sound systems" -- were built to simulate combat
conditions in densely populated neighborhoods of
cities like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine
Corps Urban Warfighting Laboratory also staged
realistic war games ("Urban Warrior") in Oakland
and Chicago, while the Army's Special Operations
Command "invaded" Pittsburgh. Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are
graduates of these Urban Warrior exercises as well
as mock combat at "Yodaville," the Urban Training
Facility in Yuma, Arizona, while some of the Army
units encircling Najaf and the Baghdad slum
neighborhood of Sadr City are alumni of the new $34
million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana. 
THIS tactical "Israelization" of U.S. combat
doctrine has been accompanied by what might be
called a "Sharonization" of the Pentagon's
worldview. Military theorists are now deeply
involved in imagining how the evolving capacity of
high-tech warfare can contain, if not destroy,
chronic "terrorist" insurgencies rooted in the
desperation of growing mega-slums.
To help develop a geopolitical framework for
urban war-fighting, military planners turned in the
1990s to the RAND Corp.: Dr. Strangelove's old alma
mater. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by
the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for war-gaming
nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping
plan the Vietnam War in the 1960s. These days RAND does cities -- big time. Its
researchers ponder urban crime statistics,
inner-city public health and the privatization of
public education. They also run the Army's Arroyo
Center, which has published a small library of
recent studies on the context and mechanics of
urban warfare. One of the most important RAND projects,
initiated in the early 1990s, has been a major
study of "how demographic changes will affect
future conflict." The bottom line, RAND finds, is
that the urbanization of world poverty has produced
"the urbanization of insurgency" -- the title, in
fact, of their report. "Insurgents are following their followers into
the cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated
zones' in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine,
nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban
counterinsurgency." As a result, the slum has
become the weakest link in the American empire. The RAND researchers reflect on the example of
El Salvador, where the local military, despite
massive U.S. support, was unable to stop FMLN
guerrillas from opening an urban front. Indeed,
"had the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
rebels effectively operated within the cities
earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how
much the United States could have done to help
maintain even the stalemate between the government
and the insurgents." More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has
made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal.
"Rapid urbanization in developing countries,"
writes Capt. Troy Thomas in the spring 2002
issue, "results in a battlespace environment that
is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly
unplanned." Thomas contrasts modern, "hierarchical" urban
cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily
crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or
terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling
slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by
"informal, decentralized subsystems, where no
blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the
system are not readily discernable." Using the "sea
of urban squalor" that surrounds Pakistan's Karachi
as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering
challenge of "asymmetric combat" within "non-nodal,
non-hierarchical" urban terrains against
"clan-based" militias propelled by "desperation and
anger." He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos,
Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other
potential nightmare battlefields. However, Capt. Thomas -- whose article is
provocatively entitled "Slumlords: Aerospace Power
in Urban Fights" -- like RAND, is brazenly
confident that the Pentagon's massive new
investments in MOUT technology and training will
surmount all the fractal complexities of slum
warfare. One of the RAND cookbooks, "Aerospace Operations
in Urban Environments," even
provides a helpful table to
calculate the acceptable threshold of "collateral
damage" -- aka dead babies -- under
different operational and political
constraints. The occupation of Iraq has, of course, been
portrayed by Bush ideologues as a "laboratory for
democracy" in the Middle East. To MOUT geeks, on
the other hand, it is a laboratory of a different
kind, where Marine snipers and Air Force pilots
test out new killing techniques in an emergent
world war against the urban poor. Historian
and social critic Mike Davis, a former
meat cutter and long distance truck driver, is
the author of the acclaimed "City of Quartz:
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles," among
many other books and essays, and a 1998
MacArthur Foundation Fellow.San
Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper of
the Year 4917 Third Street San Francisco
California 94124 Phone: (415) 671-0789 Fax:
(415) 671-0316 Email:
editor@sfbayview.com. 
Nov 2003 Arab
television station is kicked out of
Iraq
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