Citadel & Sidewalk

Assembled by Mike Soron for personal research & communal use

Filed under: us military

Matt Yglesias: US military should develop an urban force to be used in domestic policing

Matt Yglesias has written a post proposing a new US military force that operates in foreign and domestic urban environments. It is truly a Foucauldian Boomerang: he proposes a police/security force to meet foreign adversaries in non-US cities that can then be transplanted to "high-crime jurisdictions" in the US for domestic "surges", then back to the colonies again.

The beginning of the framework is that we should reduce the scale of our economic commitment to the military, which over time means not just fiddling with procurement but actually doing less and having a smaller force structure. Less what? In particular, I think we should actually move away from the COIN/MOOTW paradigm and focus on the idea of deterring and defeating military attacks on the United States and sundry allies. It should be possible to do that without representing 50 percent of global defense expenditures, especially when the allies in question are generally the richest countries on earth. []

What we need, I think, is some form of American gendarmerie—a quasi-military federal organization specialized in police/security functions rather than finding and killing bad guys per se. Such a force would, unlike today’s military, have a valuable peacetime domestic role to play as a flexible auxiliary police force that could assist high-crime jurisdictions with the kind of temporary infusion of extra personnel that can help push crime rates down to a lower equilibrium. A “surge” if you will. But it would also be prepared to deploy abroad in the case of contingencies. The regular military would be big enough to beat an adversary (i.e., a lot smaller than the regular one) but it would need to call on the gendarmes (who naturally would need a less French name) to conduct an occupation. This means we wouldn’t be caught lacking capacity in a real emergency, but since the gendarmes would be performing a useful peacetime domestic service politicians would (appropriately) feel that initiating situations that require their mobilization is high cost situation that ought to be avoided if possible.

via yglesias.thinkprogress.org

New US Military Drone Designed to Spy on an Entire City

From AFP:

The US military plans to deploy a new intelligence drone in Afghanistan, which military experts say will allow US troops to monitor much larger operational theaters than before, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

The newspaper said the airborne surveillance system is called Gorgon Stare and will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system consists of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, which can can transmit up to 65 live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements, the paper said.

By contrast, current Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a narrow area the size of a building or two, The Post noted.

“Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at,and we can see everything,” the paper quoted [an Air Force spokesperson].“

The imperial sky robots see all: First in Afghanistan, with inevitable deployments for mega-events and everyday use in NATO-bloc cities.

The choice of Gorgon as a moniker is a bit disturbing, which is the intent.

Chair of the US Joint Chiefs "connects the dots between energy, security and our future"

Climate Progress directs our attention to a recent speech by the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, given at a Pentagon energy security conference. While politicians, media, and the public dither and procrastinate over de-carbonizing, US armed forces are making focused changes today and preparing for an operating environment disrupted by particular climate and resource predicaments.

[...] we are in fact seeing evidence of climate change’s potential impacts on our security. Near the polar cap, waterways are opening that we couldn’t have imagined it a few years ago – opening trade routes, presenting both opportunity and vulnerability and rewriting the geopolitical map of the world...

We in the Defense Department have a role to play here. Not solely because we should – should be good stewards of our environment and our scarce resources but also because there is a strategic imperative for us to reduce risk, improve efficiencies and preserve our freedom of action wherever we can...

When we consider the estimates of a fully burdened cost of diesel fuel approached $400 a gallon and required 1.3 gallons of fuel to use per gallon delivered at some forward-operating locations, these benefits start to really add up. This translates to fewer Marines maintaining fuel storage and distribution systems, fewer Marines dedicating their lives to protect the convoys in the routes used to deliver the fuel, or as this conference theme tells us: Saving energy saves lives.

In a similar systems approach, the Army out of Fort Irwin employed insulating foam on the roofs of its overseas deployment structures to save millions per month in air conditioning costs.  And they are now working on a shower-water recycling system for their forward operating bases...

Simply put, we cannot think about energy after we get there – wherever there may be. Energy security needs to be one the first things we think about before we deploy another soldier, before we build another ship or plane and before we buy or fill another rucksack… And the demand for energy is not going to ease anytime soon.

This is no small matter. In addition to the newly developing waterways near the polar ice caps in 2008, the National Intelligence Council identified 20 of our bases that are physically at risk as a result of a rising level of the ocean.

 

Full text of the speech is available here. 
Posterous theme by Cory Watilo