Good god. The British were planning to build a training camp for the Taliban. You'll have to scroll down a bit ... for some silly reason the top of the page is crowded with links.
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Showing posts with label warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warfare. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Drilling for Martial Law
There's a massive terror drill going on in Portland this week, with 6000 responders and 9000 volunteer 'victims'.
From BBC Channel 4 News:
From BBC Channel 4 News:
Three fictional "dirty bombs" are to be the trigger for the biggest terror drill in US history.
More than 15,000 people will take part in the 25 million dollar TopOff 4 exercise which will simulate a series of terror attacks across America.
The Department of Homeland Security said the aim was to "address policy and strategic issues that mobilise prevention and response systems".
PORTLAND, Ore. - It's the largest terror drill in U.S. history, and the nation will have its eyes on Portland.
This week, the city becomes ground zero as a fake dirty bomb goes off on a set resembling the Steel Bridge, covering the city in "make believe" radiation.
Beyond a terror attack, it's also a test for any catastrophic disaster - to prevent the fatal mistakes the nation witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
System-wide failures left thousands in jeopardy as emergency officials at all levels misjudged, mis-communicated and underestimated the storm.
In Portland, new communication plans, equipment and people will be put to the test.
"I'd rather much see if there are things we need to do to improve through this exercise than waiting till a real-life event came," Mayor Tom Potter said.
The mayor will be among 6,000 responders and volunteer victims working on the drill at Portland International Raceway and at local hospitals, where triage stations are ready to evaluate the wounded.
The drill scenario goes like this: terrorists who have been planning attacks in Oregon, Arizona and the U.S. Territory of Guam are able to bring radioactive material into the U.S. The first of three coordinated attacks occurs in Guam with the detonation of a dirty bomb and widespread contamination in a populous area near a power plant. Similar attacks then occur in Portland and Phoenix.
Despite the size of the drill, don't expect to see any real-life disruptions on the roads, highways, bridges or hospitals. Most of the action will be behind the fence at Portland International Raceway and out of sight. The only thing you might see is emergency vehicles racing around town.
If you notice anything unusual and wonder if it is a part of the training exercise, you can call 211. The phone number will be activated on Tuesday.
So they managed to find 9,000 volunteer victims, to be serviced by 6,000 responders (military, police, medical, fire, and environmental.) I'm not sure if that's a realistic ratio of responders to victims in the event of a real actual terrorist strike, but putting that aside, I can't help but wonder if this isn't really drilling for martial law. It wouldn't be the first time. Remember 7/7? From globalresearch.ca: "A fictional "scenario" of multiple bomb attacks on London's underground took place at exactly the same time as the bomb attack on July 7, 2005 ... The fictional scenario was based on simultaneous bombs going off at exactly the same time at the underground stations where the real attacks were occurring." The article includes the transcript of a radio interview with Peter Power, Managing Director of a consulting firm that was contracting with the London Metropolitan Police:
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
This is what the enemy does. They carry out terrorist attacks themselves, in order to frighten the population and enact even stricter control. In order to cover the preparations for the strike massive exercises are staged, during which the terrorists, if discovered, can be explained away as part of the drill. Then, when the drill becomes real, the emergency services are already on their toes, ready to respond and limit the damage. Everyone involved promptly forgets that they were just drilling for the exact thing that happened, and fails to take a moment to examine the odds against that happening ... especially when it happens over and over again. If you have a couple of hours to kill, here, go watch Terrorstorm (after you finish reading this, of course.)
Will something very bad happen in Oregon, Phoenix, and Guam this week? Who knows? Not me. Just like most terrorist attacks are real, so are most drills. Then again, history is full of examples of nations using the excuse of military drills to launch an attack on their enemies. Or at the very least, intimidate them. The modern practice of concealing real terrorist attacks on one's own citizenry within fake-but-real drills is simply the latest and most perverse twist in the history of this venerable tactic.
There's a presidential election coming up. Whether the game plan is to temporarily suspend that election in favor of an extended period of martial law, or merely to scare the populace into the Ice Queen's waiting arms - and who knows? Perhaps both outcomes are on the table, in a plan A/Plan B, heads I win tails you lose kind of way - I have no doubt that another scripted terror attack will strike the US sometime between now and a year this November. Even if the terror drill scheduled for this week remains nothing more than a drill, there will be something similar before long.
You know, that terror attack will be scheduled for right around the time that the US dollar inflates away to airy nothing, and it's economy with it. It might even be intended as the final nudge that pushes it over the abyss into national bankruptcy. People are going to be sitting in the middle of massive heaps of stuff, most of it owned by someone else, repossesed by the banks in the wake of an epidemic of unpayable credit-card debt (expect Congress, assuming it still operates, to rule all debt invalid, but only when everyone but the rich is utterly bankrupt) ... all that stuff, and unable to get together enough money for food.
I present to you my vision of a future America:
Some cities, contaminated by radiation or infection (or, hey, why not both?), get evacuated, and it's citizens put in refugee camps ... no doubt soon to become labor camps, as Halliburton comes along and offers to 'pay' them to rebuild, well, whatever it decides should be rebuilt. Even in cities (yet) unassaulted by terror, the security apparatus has everything locked up tight as a prison, and defending freedom from terror has become a sick joke. With the economy on the skids, jobs scarce, and wealth massively concentrated in the hands of a small elite, crime has spiked due to sheer desperation (in the sense of true crime, such as theft or violence, rather than violations of the myriad of inane regulations that the criminal code has become); those caught, and not simply killed, are charged with terrorism and added to the labor camps. At some point simple vagrancy might become an offense punishable by conscription. And expect lots of black people to fill the camps in the beginning. After all, they're already the poorest demographic, and the most prone to crime. So it'll look a lot like slavery, though everyone will be too polite to call it that. And hey, this time around it'll be slightly more colorblind: there will be whites in the camps, and latinos, and asians. Slavery might not manage to be morally correct, but politically correct? No problem.
Then there's the possibility of an already ongoing multi-front war in the Middle East having expanded to include against Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, so that it's now requiring millions of soldiers in order to fight (hello, conscription!) instead of the mere hundreds of thousands it currently involves. The conflict might even proceed well for while, at least if the Chinese come in and throw their industrial weight (idle for lack of rich Americans to sell to) behind their manpower (playing America's role from the last two world wars during the current one: building stuff for the combatants for a while, letting them wear each other down, and then picking a side and going in for the kill.) America's toast if that happens. Then again, China might well continue to support America, as part of a mutual agreement to carve up the world. If that happens, the Empire might well totter on for decades after the final death of the Republic.
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POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
This is what the enemy does. They carry out terrorist attacks themselves, in order to frighten the population and enact even stricter control. In order to cover the preparations for the strike massive exercises are staged, during which the terrorists, if discovered, can be explained away as part of the drill. Then, when the drill becomes real, the emergency services are already on their toes, ready to respond and limit the damage. Everyone involved promptly forgets that they were just drilling for the exact thing that happened, and fails to take a moment to examine the odds against that happening ... especially when it happens over and over again. If you have a couple of hours to kill, here, go watch Terrorstorm (after you finish reading this, of course.)
Will something very bad happen in Oregon, Phoenix, and Guam this week? Who knows? Not me. Just like most terrorist attacks are real, so are most drills. Then again, history is full of examples of nations using the excuse of military drills to launch an attack on their enemies. Or at the very least, intimidate them. The modern practice of concealing real terrorist attacks on one's own citizenry within fake-but-real drills is simply the latest and most perverse twist in the history of this venerable tactic.
There's a presidential election coming up. Whether the game plan is to
You know, that terror attack will be scheduled for right around the time that the US dollar inflates away to airy nothing, and it's economy with it. It might even be intended as the final nudge that pushes it over the abyss into national bankruptcy. People are going to be sitting in the middle of massive heaps of stuff, most of it owned by someone else, repossesed by the banks in the wake of an epidemic of unpayable credit-card debt (expect Congress, assuming it still operates, to rule all debt invalid, but only when everyone but the rich is utterly bankrupt) ... all that stuff, and unable to get together enough money for food.
I present to you my vision of a future America:
Some cities, contaminated by radiation or infection (or, hey, why not both?), get evacuated, and it's citizens put in refugee camps ... no doubt soon to become labor camps, as Halliburton comes along and offers to 'pay' them to rebuild, well, whatever it decides should be rebuilt. Even in cities (yet) unassaulted by terror, the security apparatus has everything locked up tight as a prison, and defending freedom from terror has become a sick joke. With the economy on the skids, jobs scarce, and wealth massively concentrated in the hands of a small elite, crime has spiked due to sheer desperation (in the sense of true crime, such as theft or violence, rather than violations of the myriad of inane regulations that the criminal code has become); those caught, and not simply killed, are charged with terrorism and added to the labor camps. At some point simple vagrancy might become an offense punishable by conscription. And expect lots of black people to fill the camps in the beginning. After all, they're already the poorest demographic, and the most prone to crime. So it'll look a lot like slavery, though everyone will be too polite to call it that. And hey, this time around it'll be slightly more colorblind: there will be whites in the camps, and latinos, and asians. Slavery might not manage to be morally correct, but politically correct? No problem.
Then there's the possibility of an already ongoing multi-front war in the Middle East having expanded to include against Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, so that it's now requiring millions of soldiers in order to fight (hello, conscription!) instead of the mere hundreds of thousands it currently involves. The conflict might even proceed well for while, at least if the Chinese come in and throw their industrial weight (idle for lack of rich Americans to sell to) behind their manpower (playing America's role from the last two world wars during the current one: building stuff for the combatants for a while, letting them wear each other down, and then picking a side and going in for the kill.) America's toast if that happens. Then again, China might well continue to support America, as part of a mutual agreement to carve up the world. If that happens, the Empire might well totter on for decades after the final death of the Republic.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Today in the News
Well, it looks like the iFly is moving along just about right on schedule, albeit in a somewhat creepier way than expected: Robobugs spotted at anti-war protests in Washington. Personally I can think of much better ways to use this technology, but then again, I'm not a modern-day stasi.
The Turks are claiming NATO's been helping the PKK launch terror attacks. Anything to keep people afraid. The Turks aren't taking it lying down though: Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has announced plans to launch raids into Iraqi Kurdistan. That's bound to piss of the Americans.
Vicente Fox openly claims that the long-range plan is for the creation of an 'Amero', an Americas-wide currency union. This is pretty obvious when you think about it; after all, the EU evolved from the European Coal and Steel Community to an entity one step short of an actual nation in just under fifty years. Still, there's a big difference between integrating European countries which, however different the cultures might be, at least share common values on human rights and such ... and jamming together the US and Canada (open societies that place a high value on the rule of law and individual freedom) with Mexico (one of the world's worst slave states.)
On the political front, Ron Paul - the only non-plastic candidate in the current presidential race - is warning that the US dollar could well collapse essentially to zero, a scenario that's hold-your-forehead-and-groan it's so bloody obvious to anyone with a modicum of knowledge of economics (which is almost no one.)
This could well be nothing but signaling (as Tom Barnett would no doubt argue), or it could be very ominous (which is what the Taiwanese would say): China promotes military officers experienced in Taiwan affairs. By affairs, of course, the headline means "planning for war with Taiwan."
Vaccine-linked polio hits Nigeria. That's happening a lot these days. The natives are learning to run when white men show up with the meds. Think maybe they know something we don't?
Rice to meet Russian human rights activists. Helps to get to know the enemy, no?
Private security convoys strike fear in Baghdad. You know it's bad when they're more scared of Blackwater than they are of either al Qaeda or the marines.
Monday, September 10, 2007
Strategic Implications of Robots
This paper, Theoretical, Legal and Ethical Impact of Robots on Warfare, makes the point that warfare may well become much more common as a direct result of the widespread of use of robots.
Sphere: Related ContentKiller Robots
Let's consider for a moment the implications of a military armed with robots. Lots of robots.
If you want to be pedantic, you could argue that this had already begun with the use of cruise missiles. Certainly the introduction of the Predator in Afghanistan, and it's rapid conversion to a missile-platform, marked a milestone. The development of the SWORDS, though, is something you sort of have to sit up and take notice of. Read this Defense Review article for the details on that, if you haven't already heard of it.
Now, this year's models are rather clunky, with their tracks and their hydraulics; a supplement but certainly not a replacement for actual boots on the ground. The technology is only going to advance, though, and it will do so quite rapidly. It could easily progress to the point where the robots are agile enough and smart enough that they can wage war with very minimal human supervision, perhaps nothing more than a token authorization to kill. At the same time, as the cost of manufacturing robots decreases, it could eventually get cheaper to manufacture ten robots and send them in the place of a single human.
(As a side-note, while soldiers could very well be replaced by mechanical killing machines, I very much doubt aid workers could be, at least not as easily. Post-conflict reconstruction ops are likely to be the very last service to be mechanized.)
The US could simply build up stockpiles of robots to be deployed at a moment's notice, to make war on anyone within strike range. Admittedly, this is a capability they already have, but robots would allow them to concentrate military force as never before; support units (mechanics, mostly) who never leave the base would be able to support ten times as much destructive potential, all the scarier for the fact that it can be wielded with a precision unthinkable in any previous war.
Territory could be defended the same way, and of course if the US can build lots of cheap killer robots, well, so can any other country. Which they will, and which development will undoubtedly lead to the odd spectacle of wars in which only machines are destroyed, with nary a drop of human blood shed in the process (I can't help but mention the explanation for warfare at the end of 1984, that it served primarily to burn off wealth and prevent the people from becoming rich.)
That bit about blood not being spilt doesn't necessarily follow, and indeed I expect a long time will pass before any war is truly free of bloodshed. Nevertheless I expect robotic warfare to make war gentler on humans than it has ever been. The men pulling the trigger are no longer, after all, in life-or-death situations; they're sitting at an easy-chair, somewhere in a control building (or maybe their apartment) back in the home country. People will naturally assume that a certain coolness should accompany that absence of risk; soldiers (if indeed they are still referred to as such) will be expected to behave more as judges do. Incidents such as gang rapes will disappear as a matter of course (given that the troops are no longer within sexual range of any potential victims); accidental killings will not be tolerated; and massacres will simply not happen. The operator of a remote killing machine will be held to a standard higher than that required of a chivalrous knight, and he will be held to it more strictly.
A lot of people get nervous at the idea of killer robots, and I don't blame them. The idea of an autonomous mechanical killing machine is pretty scary, especially if they go fully autonomous and start killing everyone a la Terminator. I think it will be a positive development. Wars might ultimately become a mixture of law enforcement and public spectacle along the lines of a sporting event.
But just to keep you from thinking I'm too rosy on this, I'll leave you with this:
It is well that war is so terrible - we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
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