by
Tom Engelhardt

Recently
by Tom Engelhardt: Lessons
From Lost Wars in 2012

Offshore
Everywhere
How Drones, Special Operations Forces, and the U.S. Navy Plan to
End National Sovereignty As We Know It

Make no mistake:
we’re entering a new world of military planning.  Admittedly,
the latest proposed Pentagon budget manages
to preserve just about every costly toy-cum-boondoggle from the
good old days when MiGs still roamed the skies, including an uncut
nuclear
arsenal.  Eternally over-budget items like the F-35 Joint
Strike Fighter, cherished by their services and well-lobbied congressional
representatives, aren’t leaving the scene any time soon, though
delays
or cuts
in purchase orders are planned.  All this should reassure us
that, despite the talk of massive cuts, the U.S. military will continue
to be the profligate, inefficient, and remarkably
ineffective institution we’ve come to know and squander
our treasure on.

Still, the
cuts that matter are already in the works, the ones that will change
the American way of war.  They may mean little in monetary
terms – the Pentagon budget is actually slated
to increase through 2017
– but in imperial terms they will make a difference.  A new
way of preserving the embattled idea of an American planet is coming
into focus and one thing is clear: in the name of Washington’s needs,
it will offer a direct challenge to national sovereignty.

Heading
Offshore

The Marines
began huge amphibious exercises – dubbed
Bold Alligator 2012 – off the East coast of the U.S. last week,
but someone should IM them: it won’t help.  No matter what
they do, they are going to have less
boots on the ground in the future, and there’s going to be less
ground to have them on.  The same
is true for the Army (even if a cut of 100,000 troops will still
leave the combined forces of the two services larger
than they were on September 11, 2001).  Less troops, less full-frontal
missions, no full-scale invasions, no more counterinsurgency: that’s
the order of the day.  Just this week, in fact, Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta suggested that the schedule
for the drawdown of combat boots in Afghanistan might be speeded
up by more than a year.  Consider it a sign of the times.

Like the F-35,
American mega-bases, essentially well-fortified American towns plunked
down in a strange land, like our latest “embassies” the
size of lordly
citadels, aren’t going away soon.  After all, in base terms,
we’re already hunkered
down in the Greater Middle East in an impressive way. 
Even in post-withdrawal Iraq, the Pentagon is negotiating
for a new long-term defense agreement that might include getting
a little of its former base space back, and it continues to build
in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile, Washington has typically signaled
in recent years that it’s ready to fight to the
last Japanese prime minister not to lose a single
base among the three dozen it has on the Japanese island of
Okinawa.

But here’s
the thing: even if the U.S. military is dragging its old habits,
weaponry, and global-basing ideas behind it, it’s still heading
offshore.  There will be no more land wars on the Eurasian
continent.  Instead, greater emphasis will be placed on the
Navy, the Air Force, and a policy “pivot”
to face China in southern Asia where the American military position
can be strengthened
without more giant bases or monster embassies.

For Washington,
“offshore” means the world’s boundary-less waters and
skies, but also, more metaphorically, it means being repositioned
off the coast of national sovereignty and all its knotty problems. 
This change, on its way for years, will officially rebrand the planet
as an American
free-fire zone, unchaining Washington from the limits
that national borders once imposed.  New ways to cross borders
and new technology for doing it without permission are clearly in
the planning stages, and U.S. forces are being reconfigured accordingly.

Think of the
raid that killed Osama bin Laden as a harbinger of and model for
what’s to come.  It was an operation enveloped in a cloak of
secrecy.  There was no consultation with the “ally”
on whose territory the raid was to occur.  It involved combat
by an elite special operations unit backed by drones and other high-tech
weaponry and supported by the CIA.  A national boundary was
crossed without either permission or any declaration of hostilities. 
The object was that elusive creature “terrorism,” the
perfect global will-o’-the-wisp around which to plan an offshore
future.

All the elements
of this emerging formula for retaining planetary dominance have
received plenty of publicity, but the degree to which they combine
to assault traditional concepts of national sovereignty has been
given little attention. 

Since November
2002, when a Hellfire missile from a CIA-operated Predator drone
turned
a car with six alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen into ash,
robotic aircraft have led the way in this border-crossing, air-space
penetrating assault. The U.S. now has drone bases across the planet,
60
at last count.  Increasingly, the long-range reach of its drone
program means that those robotic planes can penetrate just about
any nation’s air space.  It matters little whether that country
houses them itself.  Take Pakistan, which just forced the CIA
to remove its drones from Shamsi
Air Base.  Nonetheless, CIA drone strikes in that country’s
tribal borderlands continue,
assumedly from bases in Afghanistan, and recently President Obama
offered a full-throated public
defense of them.  (That there have been fewer of them lately
has been a political decision of the Obama administration, not of
the Pakistanis.)

Drones themselves
are distinctly fallible, crash-prone
machines.  (Just last week, for instance, an advanced Israeli
drone capable of hitting Iran went
down on a test flight, a surveillance drone – assumedly American
– crashed
in a Somali refugee camp, and a report surfaced that some U.S. drones
in Afghanistan can’t
fly in that country’s summer heat.)  Still, they are, relatively
speaking, cheap to produce.  They can fly long distances across
almost any border with no danger whatsoever to their human pilots
and are capable of staying aloft for extended periods of time. 
They allow for surveillance and strikes anywhere.  By their
nature, they are border-busting creatures.  It’s no mistake
then that they are winners in the latest Pentagon budgeting battles
or, as a headline
at Wired’s Danger Room blog summed matters up, “Humans
Lose, Robots Win in New Defense Budget.”

And keep in
mind that when drones are capable of taking
off from and landing on aircraft carrier decks, they will quite
literally be offshore with respect to all borders, but capable of
crossing any.  (The Navy’s latest
plans include a future drone that will land itself on those
decks without a human pilot at any controls.)

War has always
been the most human and inhuman of activities.  Now,
it seems, its inhuman aspect is quite literally on the rise. 
With the U.S. military working
to roboticize
the future battlefield, the American way of war is destined to be
imbued with Terminator-style terror.

Already American
drones regularly cross borders with mayhem in mind in Pakistan,
Somalia, and Yemen. 
Because of a drone downed
in Iran, we know that they have also been flying surveillance missions
in that country’s airspace as – for the
State Department – they are in Iraq.  Washington is undoubtedly
planning for far more of the same.

American
War Enters the Shadows

Along with
those skies filled with increasing numbers of drones goes a rise
in U.S. special operations forces.  They, too, are almost by
definition boundary-busting outfits.  Once upon a time, an
American president had his own “private
army” – the CIA.  Now, in a sense, he has his own
private military.  Formerly modest-sized units of elite special
operations forces have grown into a force of 60,000, a secret military
cocooned in the military, which is slated
for further expansion.  According
to Nick Turse, in 2011 special operations units were in 120
nations, almost two-thirds of the countries on Earth.

By their nature,
special operations forces work in the shadows: as hunter-killer
teams, night raiders, and border-crossers.  They function in
close conjunction with drones and, as the regular Army slowly
withdraws from its giant garrisons in places like Europe, they
are preparing to operate in a new world of stripped-down bases called
“lily pads” – think frogs jumping across a pond to their
prey.  No longer will the Pentagon be building American towns
with all the amenities of home, but forward-deployed, minimalist
outposts near likely global hotspots, like Camp
Lemonier in the North African nation of Djibouti.

Increasingly,
American war itself will enter those shadows, where crossings of
every sort of border, domestic as well as foreign, are likely to
take place with little accountability to anyone, except the president
and the national security complex. 

In those shadows,
our secret forces are already melding into one another.  A
striking sign of this was the appointment as CIA director of a general
who, in Iraq and Afghanistan, had relied heavily on special forces
hunter-killer teams
and night
raiders, as well as drones,
to do the job.  Undoubtedly the most highly praised general
of our American moment, General David Petraeus has himself slipped
into the shadows where he is presiding over covert civilian forces
working ever more regularly in tandem with special operations teams
and sharing drone assignments with the military.

And don’t
forget the Navy, which couldn’t be more offshore to begin with. 
It already operates 11 aircraft carrier task forces (none of which
are to be cut – thanks to a decision reportedly
made by the president).  These are, effectively, major
American bases – massively armed small American towns – at sea. 
To these, the Navy is adding smaller “bases.”  Right
now, for instance, it’s retrofitting an old amphibious transport
docking ship bound for the Persian Gulf either as a Navy Seal commando
“mothership” or (depending on which Pentagon spokesperson
you listen to) as a “lily
pad” for counter-mine Sikorsky MH-53 helicopters and patrol
craft.  Whichever it may be, it will just be a stopgap until
the Navy can build new “Afloat
Forward Staging Bases” from scratch.

Futuristic
weaponry now in the planning stages could add to the miliary’s border-crossing
capabilities.  Take the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon or
DARPA’s Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, both of which are
intended, someday, to hit
targets anywhere on Earth with massive conventional explosives
in less than an hour.

From
lily pads to aircraft carriers, advanced drones to special operations
teams, it’s offshore and into the shadows for U.S. military policy. 
While the United States is economically in decline, it remains the
sole military superpower on the planet.  No other country pours
anywhere near as much money into its military and its national security
establishment or is likely to do so in the foreseeable future. 
It’s clear enough that Washington is hoping to offset any economic
decline with newly reconfigured military might.  As in the
old TV show,
the U.S. has gun, will travel.

Onshore, American
power in the twenty-first century proved a disaster.  Offshore,
with Washington in control of the global seas and skies, with its
ability to kick down the world’s doors and strike just about anywhere
without a by-your-leave or thank-you-ma’am, it hopes for better. 
As the early attempts to put this program into operation from Pakistan
to Yemen have indicated, however, be careful what you wish for:
it sometimes comes home to bite you.

Note: I
couldn’t have written this piece without the superb reportage of
TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse on bases,
drones,
and special
operations forces.  I offer him a deep bow of thanks. ~ Tom

February
7, 2012

Tom
Engelhardt [send him mail]
co-founder
of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of
the American Empire
Project. His book, The
End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly
issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best
of TomDispatch book, The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire
(Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also
the author of The
American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s. His
latest book is The United States of Fear.

Copyright
© 2012 Tom Engelhardt

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