Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [10]
“Get back!” shouted a young marine trying to contain civilians who surged toward some sort of a feeding or detention station.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“These civilians need humanitarian assistance, and we have to screen them, check out that none of them are armed,” the marine said. A helicopter swept low overhead. From a high-rise building nearby came the muffled pop of gunfire.
When the young marines emerged from securing the high rise, they were clad in strange new fatigues, made up of a sooty, bluish-gray “T-pattern” of overlapping squares, rectangles, and lines—like some sort of pixilated abstract cityscape. The gray hues invoked Nazi tunics; the patterns, a confusing and dangerous street grid in a polluted Third World megacity. The broken-down little country where this was happening might have been called the Breakaway Province of Lower Nowhere or the Democratic Republic of Chaos, but it was actually Oakland, California. The year was 1999, and I was watching the future as imagined by the United States Marine Corps: a war game called Urban Warrior taking place on the grounds of a decommissioned naval hospital.
The Marines were expected to move seamlessly from managing refugees, to keeping the peace between warring factions, to attacking renegade militias. In 1999 they called that combination of tasks the “three-block war.” At other times they termed it “military operations other than war.” Now it is known by the old name, “counterinsurgency” (COIN), which one US Army Special Forces colonel once described as “total war at the grassroots level.”1 Call it what you please—small wars, limited war, low-intensity conflict—this type of fighting is moving to the center of the US military agenda just as that agenda begins to address climate change.
The catastrophic convergence of poverty, violence, and climate change is helping fuel the renewed focus on irregular warfare. Implicit in the climate-related writing of the security intellectuals is a central role for counterinsurgency. Throughout their reports are lines such as “Weakened and failing governments, with an already thin margin for survival, foster the conditions for internal conflict, extremism, and movement toward increased authoritarianism and radical ideologies. The U.S. may be drawn more frequently into these situations to help to provide relief, rescue, and logistics, or to stabilize conditions before conflicts arise.”2 The military’s new Tactics in Counterinsurgency Field Manual (FM 3-24.2) describes “the realities of today’s operational environment” as “modified by a population explosion, urbanization, globalization, technology, the spread of religious fundamentalism, resource demand, climate change and natural disasters and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”3
Asymmetry from Above
At the heart of the matter is a strange fact: the US military arsenal is overdeveloped. The United States can annihilate any conventional foe and destroy the planet several times over; it spends more on arms than the fourteen next-largest militaries. But the apocalyptic power of the US atomic arsenal is politically effective only if it is not actually used. It only functions as a threat.
To be effective in a world of failed states, rebellions, coups, civil wars, tribal clashes, pogroms, banditry, narcoviolence, piracy, terrorism, and desperate surges of refugees, US military violence must be applied with restraint—tremendous restraint, given its potential—and with precision. The empire cannot hunt fleas with a sledgehammer. America’s application of real violence requires smaller weapons, greater agility, and subtler tactics capable of achieving nonconventional political victories, such as the pacification of restive populations, the defeat of irregular forces, the containment and exclusion of refugee flows, and the suppression of hungry urban mobs. Thus, COIN is in fashion.
Unfortunately, the current