| |
 |
Sunday, April 11, 2004 |
Rise of the Machines
By Conn Hallinan
April 8, 2004
Submitted to Portside
The press had lots of fun with the recent robot
debacle in the Mojave Desert. Competing for $1
million in prize money, 15 vehicles headed off on a
142-mile course through some of the most forbidding
terrain in the country. None managed to navigate even
eight miles. The robots hit fences, caught fire,
rolled over, or sat and did nothing.
However, the purpose of the event was not NASCAR for
nerds, but a coldly, calculated plan to construct a
generation of killer machines.
Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), the Mar. 13 "race" was part of the
Department of Defense's (DOE) plan to make one third of
the military's combat vehicles driverless by 2015. The
push to replace soldiers with machines is impelled by an
over extended military searching for ways to limit US
casualties, a powerful circle of arms manufactures, and
an empire-minded group of politicians addicted to
campaign contributions by defense corporations.
This "rise of the machines" is at the heart of the Bush
Administration's recent military budget. Sandwiched into
outlays for aircraft, artillery and conventional
weapons, are monies for unmanned combat aircraft, robot
tanks, submarines, and a supersonic bomber capable of
delivering six tons of bombs and missiles to anyplace on
the globe in two hours.
DARPA, the agency behind these Buck Rogers weapons
systems, has a mixed track record, somewhere between
silly and sobering. The mechanical elephant it developed
for the Vietnam War was not a keeper, and one doubts
that the robot canine for the Army, aptly dubbed "Big
Dog," will ever get off the drawing boards. But DARPA
also gave us stealth technology, the M-16 rifle, cruise
missiles, and the unmanned Predator armed with the
deadly Hellfire Missile.
It is presently deploying a carbon dioxide laser to spot
snipers in Iraq, as well as a "sonic" weapon that can
supposedly disable demonstrators at 300 yards with a
145-decibel blast of sound.
Boeing is busy testing its UCAV X-45A unmanned combat
air craft for DARPA, while Northrop Grumman is working
on a competitor, the X-47A Pegasus. DARPA has already
field-tested the A-160 Hummingbird, an unmanned chopper
for the Marines that can carry 300 pounds of missiles up
to 2,500 miles.
According to U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Penn), chair of
the House Subcommittee on Procurements, one-third of
U.S. tactical-strike aircraft will be unmanned within
the next 10 years.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing, along with Carnegie Mellon
University, are developing ground combat vehicles: the
Gladiator, the Retiarius, and the Spinner.
The military's interest is in part a function of the
Vietnam Syndrome: lots of aluminum caskets and weeping
survivors play poorly on the six o'clock news. While so
far the Bush Administration has managed to keep these
images at arms length by simply banning the media from
filming C-130s disgorging the wounded and the slain, as
casualty lists grows longer, that will get harder to do.
The lure of being able to fight a war without getting
your own people killed is a seductive one. "It is
possible that in our lifetime we will be able to run a
conflict without ever leaving the United States," Lt.
Col. David Branham told the New York Times last year.
A high tech machine war would allow the U.S. to quickly
strike over enormous distances, an important capability
in the Bush Administration's pre-emptive war strategy.
Project Falcon, under development by Lockheed Martin and
Northrop Grumman, is a case in point. While the press
has billed the recent successful test of the X-43
Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle with its scramjet as a boon to
commercial aircraft---40 minutes from Washington to
Paris---DARPA has something a good deal more sinister in
mind.
"The X-43 has everything to do with defense and very
little to do with aerospace," Paul Beaver, defense
analyst for Ashbourne Beaver Associates told the
Financial Times. "But if it can be dressed up as a
commercial aerospace program it allows NASA (National
Aeronautics and Space Administration) more access to
funding."
Such a bomber---manned or unmanned---could strike a
target anywhere on the globe within two hours. The
revolutionary scramjet can accelerate an aircraft to 10
times the speed of sound, making it virtually
invulnerable.
An inordinately large section of Bush's military budget
will end up in the coffers of the "Big Five"--- Lockheed
Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, and General
Dynamics. But unraveling that budget is no easy task.
The budget request for fiscal 2005 is $401.7 billion, a
9.7% jump, but there are a host of programs hidden in
other budgets. For instance, the $401.7 figure doesn't
include $18.5 billion for nuclear weapons, because that
expense is tucked away in the Department of Energy
budget. Homeland Security, and related programs in
Transportation, Justice, State, and the Treasury, add
another $42.5 billion. What should also be included are
the Department of Veterans Affairs ($50.9 billion) as
well as the interest on defense related debt ($138.7
billion).
The Administration has already informed Congress that it
intends to ask for a $50 billion supplement for the war
in Iraq and Afghanistan (it got $62.6 billion last
spring and $87 billion in November).
Hit the add button, and the military budget looks more
like $702.3 billion. That's real money.
But not for the troops. The average front-line trooper
makes $16,000, the same as a Wal-Mart clerk, and
according to a study by "Nickel and Dimed" author
Barbara Ehrenreich, more than 25,000 military families
are eligible for Food Stamps. The new budget will raise
wages 3.5%, but most of that hike will go to the high
tech Air Force (9.6%), not the larger Army (1.8%).
The arms corporations are another matter. Lockheed
Martin, Boeing, and Northrop Grumman will corner one out
of every four of those dollars.
There are other spigots besides the military budget that
pour money into the coffers of the Big Five. The big
winners in NASA's budget boost will be Boeing, Lockheed
Martin, Northrop Grumman, and TRW, all major space
contractors.
This generosity is repaid come Election Day. In the 2002
election cycle, defense firms, led by Lockheed Martin
and Northrop Grumman, poured over $16 million into
Political Action Committees (PAC) at a ratio of 65% for
Republicans and 35% for Democrats. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics, those figures appear to
be holding in the run up to the 2004 elections as well.
The collusion between politicians, the military and the
defense firms is particularly egregious in the
Administration's race to deploy an anti-ballistic
missile (ABM) system. The ABM soaked up 15 percent of
the $43.1 billion slated for weapons development in
2003---60% of which went to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and
Raytheon--- and it is getting a major boost in the new
budget.
The hemorrhaging of money by the ABM has churned up
opposition from current and former military leaders. Led
by retired Admiral William Crowe, former chair of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, 48 admirals and generals recently
urged that the Administration halt deploying the ABM and
instead divert the $53 billion slated to be spent on the
system over the next five years to protecting the
nation's ports from terrorism.
While the military budget and ancillary programs
continue to balloon, domestic spending will rise a tepid
.5 percent; the White House is highlighting its plan to
raise education spending by 3 percent, but that will
only mean a jump of $1.6 billion, less than the cost of
a single Northrop Grumman B-2 bomber.
Machines that think and kill are expensive, and very few
companies have the wherewithal to make them on the scale
needed for the US to continue its imperial reach. The
synergy between the massive companies that benefit from
empire, and their ability to fill the election coffers
of those who dream of a world more akin to the 19th than
the 21st century, is a powerful one.
Add to that a military beset by re-enlistment
difficulties, and the circle comes complete: war that is
costly but, for our side, largely bloodless-virtual war.
Bloodless war is an illusion. More than 600 U.S. solders
have died in Iraq, and thousands of others have been
wounded and maimed. No one knows how many thousands of
Iraqis have died, because, as Lt. Cmdr. Jane Campbell
told the New York Times, "We don't keep a list. It's
just not policy."
In his book Virtual War, historian Michael Ignatieff
asks the question: "If western nations can employ
violence with impunity, will they not be tempted to use
it more often?"
The "impunity," of course, is fantasy. Our military may
indeed be able to kill at enormous distances with its
Frankenstein killing machines. But all that means is
that civilians, not the military, become targets. Ask
the relatives of those who died in the Twin Towers, the
embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the nightclub on
Bali, and the commuter train in Spain if high tech war
has no casualties.
---
Conn Hallinan is an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus
and a provost at the University of California at Santa
Cruz
12:31:21 AM
Google It!
|
|
© Copyright 2005 The Usual Suspect.
|
|
