Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums

[Joanne98]

Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=19095

Nick Turse explores the dreams Pentagon planners are propounding about future war-fighting in the burgeoning slums of our planetary mega-cities and the high-tech gear and weaponry that is being produced for those dreams.


So you think that American troops, fighting in the urban maze of Baghdad's huge Shiite slum, Sadr City, add up to nothing more than a horrible mistake, an unexpected fiasco? The Pentagon begs to differ. For years now, U.S. war planners have believed that guerrilla warfare is the future -- not against Guevarist focos in the countryside of some recalcitrant, possibly-oil-rich land, but in growing urban "jungles" in the vast slum cities that increasingly dot the planet.

Take this urban-labyrinth description, for instance. "Indigenous forces deploying mortars transported by local vehicles and ready to rapidly deploy, shoot, and re-cover are common… an infantry company as part of the US rapid reaction forces has been tasked with the… mission to secure several objectives including the command and control cell within a 100 square block urban area of the capital…"

Is it Baghdad? It's certainly possible, since the passage was written in 2004 with urban warfare in Iraq's capital already an increasingly grim reality for Washington's military planners. But the actual report -- by an official from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's blue-skies research outfit -- focused on cities-of-the-future, of 2025 to be exact, as part of "a new DARPA thrust into Urban Combat."

Fear of urban warfare has long been an aspect of American military planning. Planners remember urban killing zones of the past where U.S. forces sometimes suffered grievous casualties, including in Hue, South Vietnam's old imperial capital, where "devastating" losses were incurred by the Marines in 1968; in the Black-Hawk Down debacle in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993, where local militias inflicted 60% casualties on Army Rangers; and, of course, in the still-ongoing catastrophe in Iraq's cities.

In fact, military planners cannot have been shocked to find themselves fighting in the streets and alleyways of Baghdad (as well as Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, Najaf, and Tal Afar) these last years. Prior to the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq, American newspapers were full of largely military-leaked or inspired fears that, as Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote in the Washington Post in late September 2002, Saddam Hussein "would respond to a U.S. invasion by attempting to… draw U.S. forces into high-risk urban warfare." It was feared that the taking of "fortress Baghdad," as then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld termed it, might prove costly indeed.

On April 8, 2003, however, the Washington Post reported that "U.S. Army troops rolled into Baghdad" and conventional wisdom in and out of the administration held that "victory" -- the very name given to the first major base the U.S. established in Iraq, "Camp Victory" right at the edge of Baghdad International Airport -- was close at hand.

That was then, of course. Last October 8th, exactly 3 years and 6 months later, the Post confirmed that the worst pre-invasion fears of military planners had, in fact, come true – even if somewhat belatedly and with Saddam Hussein imprisoned somewhere in the confines of Camp Victory. The "number of U.S troops wounded in Iraq," wrote reporter Ann Scott Tyson, "has surged to its highest monthly level in nearly two years as American GIs fight block-by-block in Baghdad." In fact, aside from the huge Sunni stronghold of Anbar Province, Baghdad had, by then, become the deadliest location for U.S. troops in Iraq and urban warfare in a slum city, involving snipers, IEDs, suicide car bombs, and ambushes of all sorts had, it seemed, become America's military fate.
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=19095