One nation under
guard
The Marine Corps is making plans to
take over U.S. cities during popular insurrections. They're practicing in
Oakland next week.
By Gar Smith
FORGET THE
MIDDLE EAST. Forget Kosovo. The United States Marine Corps is
convinced that its next major invasion may take place on the west coast of
the United States.
That's right: the marines are preparing to put down an insurrection in
a major American city -- say, San Francisco, or Seattle, or Los Angeles.
They'll be practicing in Oakland March 15-18.
The marines say the exercise, dubbed Urban
Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment, is designed to teach the
armed forces how to distribute humanitarian aid to a big city after a
disaster. But a Bay Guardian review of hundreds of pages of military
documents, obtained through public records requests, from the Marine
Corps' Web site, and from the Alameda County Public Library, reveals a
very different mission.
The
Marine Corps' plans for the invasion reveal that Urban Warrior is designed
to give marines practice in seizing control of urban areas -- including
taking over food and water supplies, utilities, and communications
systems. And statements and articles by military leaders suggest that the
armed forces are preparing themselves to contain popular uprisings --
including uprisings in U.S. cities.
The use of military troops to quell civilian unrest is not
unprecedented. But Urban Warrior represents a dramatic escalation in the
potential use of the military on American soil -- and nobody in the local
or national news media seems to have noticed.
Though San Francisco is no longer slated to serve as the marines'
laboratory, the Oakland political establishment, led by Mayor Jerry Brown,
is rolling out the red carpet for the troops. Four days of mock fighting,
including the firing of 24,000 blank rounds, have been scheduled to take
place at Oakland's abandoned Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. The guns will open
fire at 7:30 in the morning and continue for seven hours at a stretch.
Over the course of five days Urban Warrior vehicles are expected to
consume 18,063 gallons of fuel and generate 1.21 tons of air pollution.
The nitrous oxides produced would be 3.4 times greater than the Bay Area
Air Quality Management District's "significant threshold." (Those figures
don't include air pollution from fuel-inefficient military aircraft, since
the Marine Corps' environmental assessment ruled that its exhaust gases
would not fall into the urban "mixing zone.") During Urban Warrior's grand
finale at Oak Knoll March 18, marines will discharge 60 smoke bombs and
8,000 rounds of blanks in a single hour.
Three-block war
When the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory (MCWL) first proposed
staging Urban Warrior inside San Francisco's Presidio National Park last
year, it described a three-day exercise involving 200 to 300 marines. By
January the exercise included five ships, 6,000 sailors and marines,
fighter jets, helicopters, and four days of simulated combat. National
Park Service officials decided the event had grown too large and pulled
the plug.
In an effort to save the Presidio invasion, Gen. Charles C. Krulak (who
founded the Urban Warfighting Laboratory in 1995) wrote an op-ed in the
San Francisco Examiner appealing to San Franciscans to rally 'round the
flag and allow the attack to proceed. Krulak offered a rather implausible
pretext for exploding thousands of rounds of blanks inside a U.S. city.
"Marines will be transported to the Presidio, where they will provide
humanitarian assistance to 'victims' of an assumed natural disaster,"
Krulak wrote. " 'Rebel' elements opposed to the operation will then
arrive. The situation will deteriorate into conflict." Krulak didn't
explain why "rebels" would be opposed to humanitarian assistance in the
wake of a natural disaster.
"Humanitarian relief" effort involves marines handing out "food, water,
and diapers" to paid actors performing from a prepared script, Urban
Warrior press representative Col. Mark Thiffault told the Bay Guardian.
But Thiffault conceded that "humanitarian assistance is not the primary
goal. We're doing it so we can figure out how to do urban warfare."
A review of hundreds of pages of documents regarding Urban Warrior
exercises around the country and in the Bay Area reveals no plans for
providing humanitarian assistance. The actual goal of the operation is
clearly stated: it is to "penetrate," "thrust," and "swarm" into urban
settings to seize power plants, TV and radio stations, and food and water
supplies, to suppress any local opposition -- and ultimately to control
the cities.
Urban Warrior strategists envision a "future battlefield" defined by
stateless war in an urban terrain, against threats including "criminals
with computers" and "terrorists searching for weapons of mass
destruction." (Curiously, they don't have them; they are merely searching
for them.)
Marine Corps documents explain that the Bay Area operation will pit "an
enhanced Combat Operations Center ... against a well-trained,
well-equipped opposing force with the capability to detonate WMD [a
biochemical 'weapon of mass destruction'] in an urban environment."
While the planners of Urban Warrior gloss over the purported
humanitarian work, the experiment's war-fighting components are proudly
detailed.
Helicopters will hover 1000 feet above the ground. Humvees, light
armored vehicles, and five-ton trucks will add to the din. Monstrous
88-ton, 88-foot-long hovercraft, each big enough to carry four M1A1 tanks,
will move supplies and vehicles from ships to shore. Over the course of
the five-day exercise, Urban Warrior's 1,500-member force would subject
East Bay residents to 14 waves of hovercraft landings, more than 40
aircraft overflights, and the detonation of 60 "flashbang" grenades and
24,000 rounds of blanks.
The purpose of all this disruption is to hone soldiers' skills in
fighting what is known as "the three-block war." The strategies practiced
in Urban Warrior experiments are designed for capturing and holding modern
cities dense with high-rises.
"Urban terrain offsets many of the strengths in the traditional
American way of war," Urban Warrior documents report. They go on to state
that the effectiveness of satellites is severely reduced, rubble from
buildings lends the defender a strategic advantage, and massive numbers of
civilians are likely to get caught in the crossfire.
Urban troops should rely on the "opportune use of indigenous
resources," the documents state. "Developing our ability to effectively
forage for power, water, and fuel may provide a significant reduction in
the logistics requirement on the seabases."
Unfortunately, such foraging would mean seizing resources from the
indigenous population. But that can have its own advantages. To gain
"leverage in establishing control over the urban environment," Urban
Warriors are advised to seize power plants, water plants, and food storage
and distribution centers. Another section of the Urban Warrior game plan
is more direct, recommending operations "designed to collapse essential
functions."
Urban canyons
To enter cities in real-life warfare, the marines plan to use existing
underground passageways, including underground transit systems like BART
and sewer and utility tunnels. "Sewer and underground utility systems
offer one of the most clandestine avenues for penetrating the urban
environment," Urban Warrior documents state. Special troops equipped with
air-quality sensors would slither through city sewers and utility tunnels
on special sleds and trolleys to reach strategic positions. (As a
practical matter, the Urban Warrior invasion plan warns, the "firing of
conventional weapons in an environment with a high methane content may
pose unacceptable risk.")
Marines may also enter from above. The documents envision marines
deftly maneuvering through cities via paragliders, parachutes, and powered
parafoils.
To fight in the spaces between skyscrapers, which the marines refer to
as "urban canyons," the 21st-century marine is being trained to move up
the sides of buildings like a human fly and skitter from one high-rise to
another on rope webs and cable suspension bridges.
The military has developed special weapons to enable U.S. forces to
shoot over the tops of skyscrapers, firing on enemy troops hiding on
adjacent streets. Other weapons blast holes through steel-reinforced
concrete to destroy the inhabitants of a specific room deep inside a
high-rise. Self-loading automated weapons systems can be left parked in
intersections or within buildings, controlled and fired by gunners sitting
in front of computer screens on ships floating safely 12 miles offshore.
Urban Warrior's conceptual experimental framework (CEF) treats
civilians and noncombatants as bothersome inconveniences and logistical
nuisances. "Noncombatants and refugees may be as formidable a factor as
the urban infrastructure," the CEF states. "Refugees are likely to clog
roads, inland waterways, airfields, and ports as well as presenting
commanders with humanitarian support issues."
A section addressing crowd control contains photos depicting helmeted
military police with shields and truncheons surrounding an armored
personnel carrier as it rolls toward a crowd of angry, unarmed civilians.
The marines hope to deal with these crowds using such "non-lethal"
weapons as exploding nets, nausea-inducing ultrasound weapons, blinding
laser lights, incapacitating (and potentially asphyxiating) sticky foams,
and quick-drying substances that can be used to seal doorways, windows,
pipes, and "subterranean avenues of approach." The vast majority of these
technologies, the CEF states, were developed for local police to handle
the antiwar and civil rights protests of the 1960s.
This kind of fighting is notable not for its humanitarian ends but for
its high body count. "Urban fighting has always been one of the most
destructive forms of warfare," wrote Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., the
commandant of the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., in the
October 1998 issue of the Armed Forces Journal. "In the Vietnam War, the
numbers of Marines killed in the battle for Hue exceeded the losses in
WWII's amphibious assault on Okinawa."
Close to home
While Urban Warrior's promoters say such exercises train marines to
enter foreign trouble spots, military documents challenge that assertion.
There are few 15-story urban canyons in third world cities. And the
photographs in Urban Warrior's strategic documents portray targets much
closer to home -- Seattle, Miami, San Diego, New York City, and San
Francisco.
In a rare reference to non-Western countries, the conceptual framework
points out that urban warfare is fundamentally unsuited to most cities in
the developing world. "The squalor and highly inflammable nature of
building materials within many non-Western urban areas -- coupled with the
wide use of propane or natural gas for heating and services -- creates a
risk of catastrophic fire," the document states.
Meanwhile, plans are afoot to increase the military's power in the
event of a national emergency. Earlier this year a disturbing proposal to
commission a supreme military commander to take charge in the event of a
"terrorist threat" received a favorable nod from the White House. A Jan.
28 story in the New York Times reported that "The Pentagon has decided to
ask President Clinton for the power to appoint a military leader for the
continental U.S. because of what it sees as a growing threat of major
terrorist strikes on U.S. soil."
The Times reported that "top White House officials have reacted
favorably," despite concerns from civil libertarians that "such military
power could slowly expand to threaten the privacy, liberty, and lives of
private citizens."
The U.S. Marine Corps document "Why Urban Warrior?" suggests that
foreign terrorists aren't the only domestic threat the military is
readying itself to address.
According to Urban Warrior strategists, approximately 85 percent of the
world's population will live in cities by 2025, and these cities will
contain "all the classic ingredients for conflict. There will be social,
cultural, religious, and tribal strife between different groups. Many
areas will have scarce resources, including the most basic ones like food
and shelter. As populations grow and resources shrink even further, the
chances for conflict will naturally grow with it."
In a January article in Armed Forces Journal International, Col. James
A. Lasswell, head of experimental operations for the MCWL, puts it even
more directly: "There will be widespread economic problems and cultural,
ethnic, and tribal tensions, many caused by wave after wave of
immigration."
In another issue of the same publication, Major General Scales minces
no words about the military's role in urban warfare in the decades ahead:
to fight on behalf of the rich and against the poor.
"The future urban center will contain a mixed population, ranging from
the rich elite to the poor and disenfranchised," he writes. "Day-to-day
existence for most of the urban poor will be balanced tenuously on the
edge of collapse. With social conditions ripe for exploitation, the
smallest tilt of unfavorable circumstance might be enough to instigate
starvation, disease, social foment, cultural unrest, or other forms of
urban violence.
"The enormous problems of infrastructure and the demand for social
services that threaten to swamp governing authorities in the urban centers
of emerging states will most likely worsen," Scales predicts. "Moreover,
the proximity of the disenfranchised to the ruling elite provides the
spark for further unrest and sporadic violence."
Spokesperson Thiffault volunteered that the marines have no plans to
take over U.S. cities.
For all the frightening clarity of the military's plans, the documents
leave one vital question unanswered. Urban Warrior proposes nothing but
open-ended battles for urban terrain. What happens after the marines swarm
ashore and successfully seize a city? At what point would they stop
blasting holes in the urban infrastructure?
"That's one of the difficult points," Thiffault said. "When do we get
out? Who defines how we get out?" He didn't offer any answers.
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