OMNI
STAR
WARS PROTEST TO STOP MILITARIZATION OF SPACE, NEWSLETTER #7, MARCH 28, 2020.
BUILDING A
CULTURE OF PEACE, Justice, and Ecology,
Compiled by Dick
Bennett
(#1 December 13, 2006; #2 January 24, 2008; #3
October 4, 2008; #4 October 2-9, 2010; #5, October 1-8, 2011; #6, October 6-13,
2012)
Contents #7, US Militarization of Space from Reagan to
Obama
(#1 December 13, 2006;
#2 January 24, 2008;
#3 October 4, 2008;
#4 October 2-9, 2010;
#5, October 1-8, 2011;
#6, October
6-13, 2012)
Panel with Air force Secretary Heather Wilson and Rep. Mike
Rogers (R-AL), 12-30-17
Letter from Bruce Gagnon, August 1, 2017
FCNL, Nuclear Calendar
Global Network, Nuclear Conference
Pax Americana
Online
Tomgram: McCoy, Super Weapons
Slater, Missile Ban Treaty
Possible New US
Trump’s new STAR WARS: SPACE
FORCE
Panel with Air force
Secretary Heather Wilson and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) at Reagan National Defense
Forum 12-30-17. Subject: US space power, specifically exceeding
Russian and Chinese war-fighting capability and US policy if another country
attacks a US satellite. Rogers is Chair
of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. These are the types of automaton warriors
deciding US and world future far from and unaffected by the needs and desires
of the people of the world.
LETTER FROM BRUCE GAGNON
August 1, 2017 [The first two parts discuss
conventional US air war preparation; the third discusses the new THAAD missile
base at Kodiak, Alaska, targeting surrounded China and Russia. –Dick]
Dear Friends,
The last two years I wrote this summer update letter to you from
South Korea. This year I am home in Maine, but in some regards I feel
like I am back in South Korea. The heavy US militarization that so many
around the world feel daily as it impacts their lives is bumping up against us
here these days more than ever.
On August 26 the Navy Blue
Angels
flight team will do an airshow in our local community and I am organizing a
protest to oppose the event. Our slogan will be ‘Real Angels Don’t Drop
Bombs’. These airshows are a recruiting gimmick at a time when the
military is in desperate need for more of our kids to fight in America’s wars
for fossil fuels.
The Blue Angels team burns over 8,000 gallons of fuel in one day
and significantly contributes to global warming. On the one hand
our government encourages us to conserve fuel and protect the environment, and
then sponsors this wasteful and polluting event. (It should be remembered
that the Pentagon has the largest carbon boot print on the Earth.)
We can’t eat the bombs dropped from these F-18 war
planes.
Social and environmental programs are being cut while the Pentagon spends
54% of every discretionary tax dollar on endless war.
In addition, we’ve recently learned that the Navy is preparing for full-scale war games all along the east coast
from Florida to Maine. The Navy intends to fire missiles, rockets, lasers,
grenades and torpedoes, detonate mines and explosive buoys, and use all types
of sonar in a series of live war exercises in inland and offshore waters along
the East Coast.
“The Navy must train the way we fight,” says a promotional video for what is called "Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Phase III."
“The Navy must train the way we fight,” says a promotional video for what is called "Atlantic Fleet Training and Testing Phase III."
The dates and exact locations of the live weapon and sonar
exercises are secret. In all, 2.6 million square miles of land and sea along
the Atlantic Coast and Gulf of Mexico will be part of the aerial and underwater
weapons firing.
I mention these two events because they remind me so much about
what is happening in South
Korea and Okinawa where the Pentagon’s military operations are expanding so much
that it must have more land and more off-shore areas, to ‘fight’ its war
exercises.
In South Korea and Okinawa people for years have been daily
protesting US military operations. They’ve been dragged away from newly
constructed bases that will service the US Navy, Marines, Army and Air Forces.
They’ve been jailed and beaten. But they keep going back – day
after day. Many of the people who are doing these protests are older
women. Simple farmers and fishing people who see their culture and life being
taken from them by these aggressive US military activities in their
communities.
I often wonder what it would take for Americans to react in
similar ways. What would it take for Americans to protest every single
day for 10 years straight? Could we ever be so moved and alarmed to take
a stand like the people I’ve had the great honor to meet in recent years?
I’d like to share one more story about a place in America that is
being heavily militarized against the local people’s will. It’s Kodiak Island, Alaska.
Some years ago I visited Kodiak Island on a speaking trip at the
invitation of local peace activists. The mayor of their village came to
my talk as the entire community was in an uproar over the plan to build a space
launch facility on Kodiak. Kodiak is famous for bears and salmon fishing
and a pristine public beach area called Narrow Cape. The space launch
facility was built at Narrow Cape and today the facility is undergoing a huge
expansion.
Israel plans to test its Arrow anti-ballistic missile interceptor from
pristine Kodiak Island. Admiral James Syring, director of the US
Missile Defense Agency (MDA) recently told a congressional committee that the US is Israel’s
partner in developing that country’s missile defense system. “Israel has
significant range constraints within the Mediterranean. And one of the better
places to test is in Alaska, from Kodiak,” Syring said. The work would be
a component of the $80 million contract between MDA and the Alaska Aerospace
Corporation.
Also
under that umbrella contract, MDA plans to launch THAAD missiles from Kodiak Island in the coming months. The testing of THAAD –
Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense program – will include a series of launches. The launch
facility at Narrow
Cape has been bulldozed and gravel pads have been put down in preparation for
THAAD tests. The MDA said there could be up to 300 military and aerospace
workers brought to Narrow Cape. Narrow Cape as a favorite public recreation
area might now be a thing of the past.
The
THAAD ‘missile defense’ system has been deployed by the Pentagon in Guam and
just months ago in a melon farming community called Seongju, South Korea.
Protests there have been happening day and night for the last year as the
citizens, again mostly elders, are doing everything they can to reject THAAD.
They don’t want the newly constructed US Army base there, they don’t want
THAAD there, they don’t want to become a target if war starts with Russia and China (since that is who THAAD
would be used against) – the people just want to be left alone. Like
Okinawans they have experienced war and don’t want their children and
grandchildren to have to go through such a horrid experience.
Some
people speculate that Americans have become spoiled because we make war on
others but have not ever had our entire nation devastated by war. The
Russians (who the US media and both political parties love to demonize) lost 27
million citizens when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during WW II. That
is why they get nervous today as NATO expands up to the Russian borders, and
the US deploys ‘missile defense’ systems in Romania and Poland and on Navy
Aegis destroyers in the Mediterranean, Black and Baltic seas.
[Bruce with a personal note.
I use his first name because he visited OMNI for 2 days soon after OMNI
began, speaking a UAF and other locations.
I hope you will send him a contribution, and to OMNI. --Dick]
As
an organizer I spend my time trying to educate the public about what our
country is doing around the world. I try to get people to react, to join
protests, to write letters to the local papers, and to go to places like South
Korea and Okinawa to see for themselves what the US military is doing there.
But in all my years as an organizer I can’t think of a time when it has
been so hard to turn people out as it is today. At the same time it seems
to me that we are living in the most dangerous time of my life.
I
turned 65 just a few weeks ago. Some folks retire at my age. I
won’t. I will keep organizing and protesting as long as I can. I
will continue to speak out in solidarity with those around the world who are
trying to lift the US military boot off their necks. I will continue to
sit in the streets or step over a ‘forbidden line’ and risk arrest if it helps
bring some sanity to our world and helps even just a little bit to protect the
future generations.
If
you feel the work of the Global Network is still important then please help us
continue our efforts for peace on Earth and in space. We are trying hard
but we can’t do it alone.
In
peace,
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (blog)
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
http://www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com (blog)
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. - Henry David Thoreau
Nuclear Calendar [December 23, 2013 for 2014. Thanks to the FCNL and other anti-nuclear
weapons orgs. this detailed, regular calendar continues to this day.]
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
Global Network 22nd Annual
Conference
Glo
bal Network
[globalnet@mindspring.com]
bal Network
[globalnet@mindspring.com]
Actions
To:
GN List Serve
[globenet@yahoogroups.com]
Monday, December 23,
2013 3:57 PM
Global Network 22nd Annual Conference
March 14-16, 2014
The 2014 Global Network space organizing conference will be
held near Vandenberg AFB, California Conference Center
in Santa Barbara Santa Barbara
Speakers at the March 15 event will include: David Krieger
(Nuclear Age Peace Foundation), Dave Webb (Chair, Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament-UK & Global Network board convener), Dennis Apel (Guadalupe
Catholic Worker House), Christine Hong (Korea Policy Institute and UC Santa
Cruz), Andrew Lichterman (Western States Legal Foundation), and Mary Beth
Sullivan (social worker & peace conversion activist). Music will be
provided by singer/songwriters Tom Neilson and Holly Gwinn Graham.
We will have limited sleeping space (dormitory style)
available at the La Casa de Maria Retreat center so reservations will be
necessary. (Other hotel information will be available if you would prefer
those arrangements.) We will provide meals for those staying at the
conference center. A sliding scale charge will run from $50-$150 (pay
what you can best afford.)
There will be no charge for the Saturday, March 15 public
event that will be held at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Santa Barbara
Events will conclude on March 16 after lunch.
Please sign me up for a sleeping space at the retreat center on March 14 & 15. Enclosed is _________ (Pay what you can best afford between $50-$150) Meals are included.
Please send me local hotel information in the
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau
Pax Americana Now Online
The excellent documentary film Pax Americana & the Weaponization of
Space can now be
watched on Youtube. Just go to YouTube and type in the film
name and it should come up for viewing. The film, created by
Dennis Delestrac,
has been widely seen in
canada and throughout
Europe on public TV. Theaters in Spain and latin America
showed it as well. Delestrac was never able to sign a distribution deal to show
the film in the US
Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Super Weapons and Global Dominion
Posted by Alfred
McCoy at 9:32am, November
8, 2012.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch.
(Click the
image)
(Click the
image)
(Click the
image)
[Note
for TomDispatch Readers: As
many of you know, without the Nation Institute, a
no-name listserv would never have become TomDispatch -- and that splendid
outfit has supported this site ever since. Let me recommend one thing in
return: each year the Institute holds a gala dinner to raise much-needed funds
to keep its programs operating. (And what programs they are! Naomi
Klein, Jonathan Schell, Chris Hedges, and TD’s Nick Turse are all fellows.
The Institute also sponsors an important fund for investigative journalism and houses the Nation Books imprint, among other
things.) If you have the money, please consider buying a ticket to their
dinner as a way to help them by clicking here.
It’s a blast of an event. This year speakers include Senator Bernie Sanders,
NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous, and the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel,
and it’s being MC'd by Chris Hayes. While you’re at it, check out my recent
interview with
Bill Moyers. That way you’ll recognize me and can come by and say hi that
night. I always attend. Tom]
In the
1950s and early 1960s, the Cold War was commonly said to have partially plunged
“into the shadows” as a secret, off-the-grid, spy-versus-spy conflict fought
between the planet's two superpowers. No one caught this mood better than John
le Carré in his famed Smiley novels which offered a riveting portrait of
Soviet, British, and American spies locked in mortal combat, yet with more in
common with each other than with either of their aboveground societies.
So many decades later, with the Soviet Union long gone, it’s strange to
discover that, in the case of the United States
Admittedly,
since World War II, control over war -- who to fight, when to wage it, and how
to fight it -- has been on a migratory path into the White House and the
national security bureaucracy, leaving Congress and the American people out in
the cold. In the last decade, however, a
high-tech, privatized, covert version of war has become presidential property,
fought at the White House’s behest by robots, warrior corporations,
and two presidentially controlled “private” forces (a paramilitarized CIA and
the Joint Special Operations Command).
With this transformation has gone a series of decisions that have plunged
American-style war ever further into darkness. In the last few years, for
instance, two presidents, enveloped in a penumbra of secrecy and without the
knowledge of the American people or possibly much of Congress, deployed the
latest in experimental weaponry -- weapons that could someday unravel our world
-- in the first cyberwar in history.
They wielded what someday will undoubtedly be
reclassified as weapons of mass destruction against Iran, paving the
way for future global cyberwars which could devastate this country.
In the
same years, the same two presidents took control of another new form of
conflict, drone warfare.
Across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa ,
they launched massive, high-tech campaigns
of assassination (“targeted killings”) that may have no equivalent in
history. These have involved hundreds of air strikes and thousands of casualties.
Enfolded in secrecy, a complex, increasingly codified panoply of national
security processes (including “terror Tuesday” meetings to decide just who to
kill), the president has turned himself into our first assassin-in-chief.
As the Washington Post recently reported in a three-part series, he has also
overseen a process by which ad
hoc killing has morphed into
a codified, bureaucratic, normalized killing
machine deeply embedded in the White House, a “disposal matrix” or “kill list” that will be
handed off to future presidents in a “war” (once known as the Global War on
Terror) with at least “a decade” to go and possibly no end in sight. In a
language that used to be left to Hollywood
In one Post piece focused on Camp
Lemonnier in Djibouti as the key base for presidential war in
Africa , a detail caught my eye. It
seemed to capture the ever-darkening nature of this war-making moment.
Speaking of the hundreds of elite special operations forces there, Craig
Whitlock wrote, “Most of the
commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops
on the base.” Put another way, this new form of warfare is far enough
into the shadows that the names of a major part of the U.S. military, tens of thousands of elite troops whose command has just
gotten its own “secret targeting center” in Washington 15 minutes from the White House, can’t even be
known to other U.S. military personnel who work with them.
Imagine,
then, what our world might be like once future techno-versions of presidential
war now being developed come online. What will it mean when, in the third
decade of this century, in pursuit of the same Global War on Terror, drone war
has morphed into a “triple canopy space shield” and “robotic information
system,” as described today in chilling detail by Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch regular and lead author of the new book Endless Empire: Spain’s
Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline? Imagine when,
from outer space to the spreading Camp Lemonniers of planet Earth, the White
House can make secret war in a myriad of high-tech and robotic ways without
even a nod to you and me. By then, in at least one possible future, our
whole world may lie in those shadows. Tom
Beyond Bayonets and Battleships
Space Warfare and the Future ofU.S.
By Alfred W. McCoy
Space Warfare and the Future of
By Alfred W. McCoy
It’s 2025
and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills
the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern
age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed,
knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals
biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced
cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information
system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S.
They are
still operating in another age. “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time
since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney
during the last presidential debate.
With words of withering mockery, President Obama shot
back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the
nature of our military's changed... the question is not a game of Battleship,
where we're counting ships. It's what are our capabilities.”
Obama
later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was
work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need
in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking
about space.”
Amid all
the post-debate media chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have
a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the
president’s sparse words. Yet for the
past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has
presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation
far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale
weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold
new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly
responsible should U.S.
While the
technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have
deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power.
It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world
stage with its conquest of the Philippines Philippines ,
Vietnam , and Afghanistan -- the U.S.
That
military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification,
then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam
This distinctive
U.S.
During two
extraordinary decades, American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex
telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil
Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch
card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of
America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla
resistance that persisted in the Philippines
for a decade after 1898, the U.S.
When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of
U.S. military intelligence”
Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years
before in the Philippines
A version
of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington
Yet by
early 1944, the OSS U.S.
information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed
under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove
so crucial for America
Computerizing
Vietnam
Under the
pressures of a never-ending war in Vietnam ,
those running the U.S. U.S.
military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam
Most ambitiously, the
U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern
In this
pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also
accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to
significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone. By war’s end,
it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make
3,500 top-secret surveillance sorties over China ,
North Vietnam , and Laos
On
balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American
“pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of
Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully
destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort. Despite a dismal succession of
short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power,
all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its
advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began
creating a third -- robotic -- information regime.
The
Global War on Terror
As it
found itself at the edge of defeat in the attempted pacification of two complex
societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new
technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare
-- all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far
more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before.
After six
years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq U.S.
patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access
instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia
When
President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan
Launched
as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone
was first deployed in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation
Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter
killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as
sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back
to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development,
between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000
hours.
By 2009,
the Air Force and the CIA were already deploying a
drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan , Iraq ,
and Pakistan Pakistan U.S.
In the
same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally,
online. Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the
development of acyberwarfare capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002,
President George W. Bush illegally authorized the National Security Agency to scan
countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret “Pinwale”
database. Similarly, the FBIstarted an Investigative Data Warehouse that,
by 2009, held a billion individual records.
Under
Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an
offensive “cyberwarfare” capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran Ft. Meade , Maryland , and
a cyberwarfare center at Lackland Air Base in Texas
A
Robotic Information Regime
As with
the Philippine Insurrection and the Vietnam War, the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan
By 2020,
this new defense architecture should theoretically be able to integrate space,
cyberspace, and terrestrial combat through robotics for -- so the claims go --
the delivery of seamless information for lethal action. Significantly, both
space and cyberspace are new, unregulated domains of military conflict, largely
beyond international law. And Washington
hopes to use both, without limitation, as Archimedean levers to exercise new
forms of global dominion far into the twenty-first century, just as the British Empire once ruled from the seas and the Cold War
American imperium exercised its global reach via airpower.
As Washington Paris
Although U.S.
At the
lowest tier of this emerging U.S. aerospace shield, within striking distance of
Earth in the lower stratosphere, the Pentagon is building an armada of 99
Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling
all terrain within a 100-mile radius, electronic sensors to intercept communications,
efficient engines for continuous 24-hour flights, and eventually Triple Terminator missiles to destroy targets below. By late
2011, the Air Force and the CIA had already ringed the Eurasian land mass with a network
of 60 bases for drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, allowing
air strikes against targets just about anywhere in Europe, Africa, or Asia.
The
sophistication of the technology at this level was exposed in December 2011 when one of the CIA’s
RQ-170 Sentinels came down in Iran
If things
go according to plan, in this same lower tier at altitudes up to 12 miles
unmanned aircraft such as the “Vulture,” with solar panels covering its massive
400-foot wingspan, will be patrolling the globe ceaselessly for up to five
years at a time with sensors for “unblinking” surveillance, and possibly
missiles for lethal strikes. Establishing the viability of this new technology,
NASA’s solar-powered aircraft Pathfinder, with a 100-foot wingspan, reached an
altitude of 71,500 feet altitude in 1997, and its fourth-generation successor
the “Helios” flew at 97,000 feet with a 247-foot wingspan in 2001, two miles
higher than any previous aircraft.
For the
next tier above the Earth, in the upper stratosphere, DARPA and the Air Force
are collaborating in the development of the Falcon
Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle. Flying at an altitude of 20 miles, it is
expected to “deliver 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical
miles from the continental United
States
At the
outer level of this triple-tier aerospace canopy, the age of space warfare
dawned in April 2010 when the Pentagon quietly launched the X-37B space drone, an unmanned
craft just 29 feet long, into an orbit 250 miles above the Earth. By the time
its second prototype landed at
Vandenberg Air Force Base in June 2012 after a 15-month flight, this classified
mission represented a successful test of “robotically
controlled reusable spacecraft” and established the viability of unmanned space
drones in the exosphere.
At this
apex of the triple canopy, 200 miles above Earth where the space drones will
soon roam, orbital satellites are the prime targets, a vulnerability that
became obvious in 2007 when China China
Ultimately,
the impact of this third information regime will be shaped by the ability of
the U.S.
For a new
global optic, DARPA is building the wide-angle Space Surveillance
Telescope (SST), which could be sited at bases ringing the globe for a quantum
leap in "space surveillance.” The system would allow future space
warriors to see the whole sky wrapped around the entire planet while seated
before a single screen, making it possible to track every object in Earth
orbit.
Operation
of this complex worldwide apparatus will require, as one DARPA official explained in 2007, "an integrated
collection of space surveillance systems -- an architecture -- that is
leak-proof." Thus, by 2010, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency had 16,000 employees, a $5 billion budget,
and a massive $2 billion headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, with 8,500
staffers wrapped in electronic security -- all aimed at coordinating the
flood of surveillance data pouring in from Predators, Reapers, U-2 spy planes,
Global Hawks, X-37B space drones, Google Earth, Space Surveillance Telescopes,
and orbiting satellites. By 2020 or thereafter -- such a complex techno-system
is unlikely to respect schedules -- this triple canopy should be able to
atomize a single “terrorist” with a missile strike after tracking his eyeball,
facial image, or heat signature for hundreds of miles through field and favela,
or blind an entire army by knocking out all ground communications, avionics,
and naval navigation.
Technological
Dominion or Techno-Disaster?
Peering
into the future, a still uncertain balance of forces offers two competing scenarios
for the continuation of U.S. United
States
However,
as in Vietnam , history
offers some pessimistic parallels when it comes to the U.S. Washington
to more military misadventures akin to Vietnam
or Iraq , creating the
possibility of yet more expensive, draining conflicts, from Iran to the South China Sea .
If the
future of America’s world power is shaped by actual events rather than
long-term economic trends, then its fate might well be determined by which
comes first in this century-long cycle: military debacle from the illusion of
technological mastery, or a new technological regime powerful enough to
perpetuate U.S. global dominion.
Alfred
W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. A TomDispatch regular,
he is the lead author of Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat,
Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (University of Wisconsin
Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch
book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire:
Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright
2012 Alfred W. McC (D: This also
appeared in Space Alert! Dec. 2012).
ALICE SLATER. “TIME FOR A
MISSILE BAN TREATY.” SPACE ALERT! (FALL 2013).
“This
lunatic program, dreamt up by Reagan and known by its comic book reality, Star
Wars, will never work.” And “it’s
costing billions of dollars and untold losses of intellectual treasure applied
to meaningless work.” Therefore, “it’s
time to call for a missile ban treaty.”
But the US has
blocked repeated attempts by China
and Russia
MORE FIRST STRIKE WAR
PREPARATIONGlobal Network
[globalnet@mindspring.com]To: GN List Serve
[globenet@yahoogroups.com]
Saturday, February 01, 2014 10:29 AM
The Department
of Defense, directed by Congress, is undertaking the completion of Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for a potential additional
'Ground-based Mid-Course Missile Defense' (GMD) site in the continental United
States. (The other current GMD site is located at Fort
Greeley in Alaska
There are several types of "missile
defense" systems today. Some are on Navy Aegis destroyers (testing
quite successfully), some are deployed on Army mobile launchers, while the GMD
system is based underground. The GMD system, whose mission is to have an
interceptor missile hit an "enemy" nuclear missile in deep space, has
not had any real success in their testing program - many of the tests have been
scripted to appear successful.
A new
GMD site could cost more than $5 billion to build. Boeing manages the GMD
program while Raytheon and Orbital Sciences Corporation build the interceptors
('kill vehicles') and the rockets.
These "missile
defense" systems are key elements in US China
and Russia China or Russia
would attempt to fire their remaining nuclear forces at the US US US
first-strike attack sword lunges into the heart of China
or Russia
Maine
State Rep. Andrea Boland (Sanford) told me last week that North Korea , Iran
and Russia are eager to
attack the US Maine
Now is the time for public outcry against this East coast GMD
site. Activists in Maine , Ohio , Michigan and New York must speak out against the madness of US
In the end "missile defense" is destabilizing as it forces
Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky
as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau
Contents of #4 2010
PBS film on colonizing outer space.
New film on arming the heavens
for wars.: Pax Americana
Web sites on Keep Space for Peace Week 2010
Contents of #5 2011
War Is a Crime.org
Pax Americana Film
Contents of #6 2012
Keep Space for Peace Week (as of August 2012)
Activities 2012
END STAR WARS NEWSLETTER #7
No comments:
Post a Comment