FTR#1221 War Games, Part 3 (Rittenhouse Nation)

In these pro­grams, we con­tin­ue our dis­cus­sion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Com­plex: How the Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives.

Writ­ing in his nov­el Trop­ic of Can­cer, Hen­ry Miller wrote: ” . . . . Amer­i­ca is the very incar­na­tion of Doom. And she will lead the rest of the world into the Bot­tom­less Pit. . . .”  (The quote was includ­ed in his For­give My Grief  books by pio­neer­ing JFK assas­si­na­tion researcher Penn Jones.

Epit­o­miz­ing Miller’s obser­va­tion is what Mr. Emory terms the res­o­nant syn­the­sis of video games and mil­i­tary train­ing and train­ing tech­nol­o­gy:

“. . . . Cer­tain­ly, the day is not far off when most poten­tial U.S. troops will have grown up play­ing com­mer­cial video games that were cre­at­ed by the mil­i­tary as train­ing sim­u­la­tors; will be recruit­ed, at least in part, through video games; will be test­ed, post-enlist­ment, on advanced video game sys­tems; will be trained using sim­u­la­tors, which will lat­er be turned into video games, or on recon­fig­ured ver­sions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehi­cles using devices resem­bling com­mer­cial video game con­trollers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gam­ing head back to their quar­ters to kick back and play the lat­est PlaySta­tion or Xbox games cre­at­ed with or spon­sored by their own, or anoth­er, branch of the armed forces.

More and more toys are now poised to become clan­des­tine com­bat teach­ing tools, and more and more sim­u­la­tors are des­tined to be tomorrow’s toys. And what of America’s chil­dren and young adults in all this? How will they be affect­ed by the daz­zling set of mil­i­tary train­ing devices now land­ing in their liv­ing rooms and on their PCs, pro­duced by video game giants under the  watch­ful eyes of the Pen­ta­gon? After all, what these games offer is less a mat­ter of sim­ple mil­i­tary indoc­tri­na­tion and more like a near immer­sion in a vir­tu­al world of war, where armed con­flict is not the last, but the first—and indeed the only—resort. . . .”

A con­crete exam­ple of that “res­o­nant syn­the­sis” is the bat­tle of 73 East­ing:

“. . . . Just days into the ground com­bat por­tion of the Gulf War, the Bat­tle of 73 East­ing pit­ted Amer­i­can armored vehi­cles against a much larg­er Iraqi tank force. The U.S. troops, who had trained using the SIMNET sys­tem, rout­ed the Iraqis. With­in days, the mil­i­tary began turn­ing the actu­al bat­tle into a dig­i­tal sim­u­la­tion for use with SIMNET. Inten­sive debrief­ing ses­sions with 150 vet­er­ans of the bat­tle were under­tak­en. Then DARPA per­son­nel went out onto the bat­tle­field with the vet­er­ans, sur­vey­ing tank tracks and burned-out Iraqi vehi­cles, as the vet­er­ans walked them through each indi­vid­ual seg­ment of the clash. Addi­tion­al­ly, radio com­mu­ni­ca­tions, satel­lite pho­tos, and ‘black box­es’ from U.S. tanks were used to gath­er even more details. Nine months after the actu­al com­bat took place, a dig­i­tal recre­ation of the Bat­tle of 73 East­ing was pre­miered for high-rank­ing mil­i­tary per­son­nel. Here was the cul­mi­na­tion of Thorpe’s efforts to cre­ate a net­worked sys­tem that would allow troops to train for future wars using the new tech­nol­o­gy com­bined with accu­rate his­tor­i­cal data. . . .”

Plac­ing Hen­ry Miller’s quote into an iron­i­cal­ly-rel­e­vant con­text, a pop­u­lar video game “Doom” quick­ly was adapt­ed to Mar­tine Corps train­ing pur­pos­es:

“. . . . In late 1993, with the green glow of Gulf War vic­to­ry already fad­ing, id Soft­ware intro­duced the video game Doom. Gamers soon began mod­i­fy­ing share­ware copies of this ultra­vi­o­lent, ultra­pop­u­lar first per­son shoot­er, prompt­ing id to release edit­ing soft­ware the next year. The abil­i­ty to cus­tomize Doom caught the atten­tion of mem­bers of the Marine Corps Mod­el­ing and Sim­u­la­tion Man­age­ment Office who had been tasked by the corps’ Com­man­dant Charles Kru­lak with uti­liz­ing “‘com­put­er (PC)-based war games”‘to help the marines ‘devel­op deci­sion mak­ing skills, par­tic­u­lar­ly when live train­ing time and oppor­tu­ni­ties are lim­it­ed.’

“Act­ing on Krulak’s direc­tive, the marines’ mod­el­ing crew nixed Doom’s fan­ta­sy weapons and labyrinthine locale and, in three months’ time, devel­oped Marine Doom, a game that includ­ed only actu­al Marine Corps weapon­ry and real­is­tic envi­ron­ments. Kru­lak liked what he saw and, in 1997, approved the game. . . .”

Next, Turse dis­cuss­es Pen­ta­gon plans to oper­ate in urban slums in the Third World. Mr. Emory notes that many com­bat vet­er­ans of this coun­try’s long counter-insur­gency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are join­ing the increas­ing­ly mil­i­ta­rized police forces in this coun­try.

Pen­ta­gon strat­e­gy as dis­cussed here by Turse may, even­tu­al­ly be real­ized, to an extent, in the U.S., par­tic­u­lar­ly in the event of an eco­nom­ic col­lapse.

More about Pen­ta­gon plans for urban war­fare in slums, osten­si­bly in the devel­op­ing world:

” . . . . As both the high-tech pro­grams and the pro­lif­er­at­ing train­ing facil­i­ties sug­gest, the for­eign slum city is slat­ed to become the bloody bat­tle­space of the future. . . . For exam­ple, the U.S. Navy/Marine Corps launched a pro­gram seek­ing to devel­op algo­rithms to pre­dict the crim­i­nal­i­ty of a giv­en build­ing or neigh­bor­hood. The project titled Find­ing Repet­i­tive Crime Sup­port­ing Struc­tures, defines cities as noth­ing more than a col­lec­tion of ‘urban clut­ter [that] affords con­sid­er­able con­ceal­ment for the actors that we must cap­ture.’ The ‘hos­tile behav­ior bad actors,’ as the pro­gram terms them, are defined not just as ‘ter­ror­ists,’ today’s favorite catch-all bogey­men, but as a panoply of night­mare arche­types: ‘insur­gents, ser­i­al killers, drug deal­ers, etc.’. . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of Colonel Dave Gross­man­’s book On Killing against the back­ground of the res­o­nant syn­the­sis of video games and mil­i­tary train­ing; analy­sis of the use of gam­ing apps by Nazi ele­ments to cel­e­brate school shoot­ings and encour­age them; dis­cus­sion of school shoot­er Niko­las Cruz of Park­land high and his Nazi, white suprema­cist and Trumpian influ­ence; dis­cus­sion of alt-right use of web­sites cater­ing to peo­ple suf­fer­ing from depres­sion for recruit­ing pur­pos­es.

FTR#1219 and FTR#1220 War Games, Part 1 and War Games, Part 2

In these pro­grams, we con­tin­ue our dis­cus­sion of Nick Turse’s 2008 tome The Com­plex: How the Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives.

In this pro­gram, we exam­ine how the mil­i­tary exerts dom­i­nant influ­ence over our enter­tain­ment activ­i­ties and how that, in turn, both affects and bol­sters the Pen­ta­gon.

We begin by “going to the movies.”

The syn­the­sis of Hol­ly­wood and “The Com­plex” is sum­ma­rized by Nick Turse in the pas­sage below. It should be not­ed that the meld­ing of Hol­ly­wood and the mil­i­tary is a foun­da­tion of the deriv­a­tive syn­the­sis of the mil­i­tary and the video-gam­ing industry–the focus of the bulk of these pro­grams.

“. . . . As David Robb, the author of Oper­a­tion Hol­ly­wood: How the Pen­ta­gon Shapes and Cen­sors the Movies, observed: ‘Hol­ly­wood and the Pen­ta­gon have a col­lab­o­ra­tion that works well for both sides. Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­ers get what they want—access to bil­lions of dol­lars’ worth of mil­i­tary hard­ware and equipment—tanks, jet fight­ers, nuclear sub­marines and air­craft carriers—and the mil­i­tary gets what it wants—films that por­tray the mil­i­tary in a pos­i­tive light; films that help the ser­vices in their recruit­ing efforts.’. . .”

Indeed, the very gen­e­sis of video games in deriv­a­tive of the defense indus­try: ” . . . . In 1951, Ralph Baer, an engi­neer work­ing for defense con­trac­tor Loral Elec­tron­ics (today part of Lock­heed Mar­tin) on ‘com­put­er com­po­nents for Navy RADAR sys­tems,’ dreamed up the idea of home video games, which he termed ‘inter­ac­tive TV-based enter­tain­ment.’. . . .”

The Hollywood/Pentagon/gaming indus­try syn­the­sis is epit­o­mized by the Insti­tute of Cre­ative Tech­nolo­gies:

” . . . . The answer lies in Mari­na Del Rey, Cal­i­for­nia, at the Insti­tute for Cre­ative Tech­nolo­gies (ICT), a cen­ter with­in the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia (USC) sys­tem. There, in 1999, the military’s grow­ing obses­sion with video games moved to a new lev­el when Sec­re­tary of the Army Louis Caldera signed a five-year, $45-mil­lion con­tract with USC to cre­ate ICT, says the center’s Web site, ‘to build a part­ner­ship among the enter­tain­ment indus­try, army and acad­e­mia with the goal of cre­at­ing syn­thet­ic expe­ri­ences so com­pelling that par­tic­i­pants react as if they are real.’. . .”

The video game/Pentagon rela­tion­ship has evolved into a fusion of the two: “. . . . The rest fol­lowed, lead­ing to the cur­rent con­tin­u­ous mil­i­tary gaming/simulation loop where com­mer­cial video games are adopt­ed as mil­i­tary train­ing aids and mil­i­tary sim­u­la­tors are reengi­neered into civil­ian gam­ing mon­ey mak­ers in all sorts of strange and con­fus­ing ways. . . .”

Author Turse looked ahead (in 2008) and fore­saw a future that, to a dis­turb­ing extent, has become real­i­ty: ” . . . . Cer­tain­ly, the day is not far off when most poten­tial U.S. troops will have grown up play­ing com­mer­cial video games that were cre­at­ed by the mil­i­tary as train­ing sim­u­la­tors; will be recruit­ed, at least in part, through video games; will be test­ed, post-enlist­ment, on advanced video game sys­tems; will be trained using sim­u­la­tors, which will lat­er be turned into video games, or on recon­fig­ured ver­sions of the very same games used to recruit them or that they played kids; will be taught to pilot vehi­cles using devices resem­bling com­mer­cial video game con­trollers; and then, after a long day of real-life war-gam­ing head back to their quar­ters to kick back and play the lat­est PlaySta­tion or Xbox games cre­at­ed with or spon­sored by their own, or anoth­er, branch of the armed forces. . . .”

FTR#1218 The Military Matrix

Proof that big things can, indeed, come in small pack­ages is Nick Turse’s impact­ful vol­ume The Com­plex: How The Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives. 

Clear­ly writ­ten, brief and to the point, yet alto­geth­er rev­e­la­to­ry, the book details the many ways in which what Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er termed “the mil­i­tary-com­plex” has come to dom­i­nate every­day life in the U.S. to an extent unre­al­ized by even rel­a­tive­ly aware cit­i­zens.

Con­tin­u­ing with the intro­duc­tion to this remark­able tome, we read the con­clud­ing pro­por­tion of the pro­gram, in which the author com­pares the per­va­sive influ­ence of the “Com­plex” to the pop­u­lar sci­ence fic­tion movie The Matrix.

Fur­ther devel­op­ing Turse’s com­par­i­son of the Pen­ta­gon to The Matrix, we high­light part of his con­clu­sion to the intro­duc­tion: “. . . . The high lev­el of mil­i­tary-civil­ian inter­pen­e­tra­tion in a heav­i­ly con­sumer-dri­ven soci­ety means that almost every Amer­i­can . . . is, at least pas­sive­ly, sup­port­ing the Com­plex every time he or she shops for gro­ceries, sends a pack­age, dri­ves a car, or watch­es TV—let alone eats a bar­be­cue in Mem­phis or buys Chris­t­ian books in Hat­ties­burg. And what choice do you have? What oth­er com­put­er would you buy? Or cere­al? Or boots? . . . .”

The remark­able profli­ga­cy of Pen­ta­gon spend­ing is exac­er­bat­ed by the fact that DoD has avoid­ed audits! “. . . . Giv­en such expen­di­tures, it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing to find out that the Depart­ment of Defense has nev­er actu­al­ly under­gone a finan­cial audit. Speak­ing in 2006, Sen­a­tor Tom Coburn (R‑Oklahoma) made spe­cial note of the DoD’s ‘inabil­i­ty to pro­duce auditable finan­cial state­ments’:

‘In oth­er words, they can’t under­go an audit, much less pass one. If DoD were a pri­vate­ly-owned com­pa­ny, it would have been bank­rupt long ago. In 2004, the Depart­ment set the goal of under­go­ing a full audit by 2007. That dead­line has not been met, and in fact, has been moved to the year 2016 . . . . Amer­i­cans are being asked to wait a full 10 years before their dol­lars are tracked well enough for the Depart­ment to fail an audit. And that seems to be the new objec­tive of finan­cial man­agers at Dod—to get to a place where DoD fan actu­al­ly fail an audit. Pass­ing the audit is a pipedream for some future date beyond 2016.’ . . .”

Some exam­ples of stun­ning­ly exor­bi­tant spend­ing by DoD are chron­i­cled by Turse, topped off by dis­clo­sure that Hal­libur­ton sub­sidiary Kel­logg, Brown & Root charged the tax­pay­ers for 10,000 meals a day. alleged­ly served to troops (ahem) serv­ing over­seas: ” . . . . Sim­i­lar­ly, in 2007, it came to light that dur­ing the pre­vi­ous year the Pen­ta­gon paid anoth­er defense con­trac­tor “$998, 798 in trans­porta­tion costs for ship­ping two 19-cent wash­ers.” This was in addi­tion to, accord­ing to the Wash­ing­ton Post, a “2004 order for a sin­gle $8.75 elbow pipe that was shipped for $445,640 . . . a $10.99 machine thread plug was shipped for $492,096 . . . [and] six machine screws worth a total of $59.94 were shipped at a cost of $403,463,” in 2005. The piece de resis­tance, [a won­der­ful pun—D.E.] how­ev­er, was found in the tes­ti­mo­ny of the for­mer food pro­duc­tion man­ag­er at Halliburton’s sub­sidiary Kel­logg, Brown & Root (KBR), who told con­gressper­sons that Hal­libur­ton charged the Depart­ment of Defense for as many as ten thou­sand meals a day it nev­er served. . . .”

 Pro­gram High­lights Include: Dis­cus­sion of the pro­found links between DoD and acad­e­mia; the enor­mous fuel and fos­sil fuel con­sump­tion of the Pen­ta­gon; the mil­i­tary’s role as the world’s largest indi­vid­ual land­lord, includ­ing the acqui­si­tion of many inhab­it­ed islands, often in con­tra­ven­tion of inter­na­tion­al law.

FTR#1217 Fun with Rick, Steven and Donna

Proof that big things can, indeed, come in small pack­ages is Nick Turse’s impact­ful vol­ume The Com­plex: How The Mil­i­tary Invades Our Every­day Lives. 

Clear­ly writ­ten, brief and to the point, yet alto­geth­er rev­e­la­to­ry, the book details the many ways in which what Pres­i­dent Eisen­how­er termed “the mil­i­tary-com­plex” has come to dom­i­nate every­day life in the U.S. to an extent unre­al­ized by even rel­a­tive­ly aware cit­i­zens.

In the intro­duc­tion to the book, the author presents a fic­tion­al, three-mem­ber sub­ur­ban fam­i­ly of lib­er­al polit­i­cal per­sua­sion. Opposed to the Iraq War (the book was pub­lished in 2008), Rick, his wife Don­na and their teen-age son Steven are immersed in an envi­ron­ment every ele­ment of which is pro­duced by a con­trac­tor with the Depart­ment of Defense.

From their toi­let arti­cles to their work­out appar­el, from their elec­tron­ic media devices to their sun­glass­es, from their footwear to the auto­mo­biles they dri­ve, from the videogames Steven plays to the gaso­line to pow­er their cars, from their impend­ing selec­tions of mass tran­sit for com­mut­ing pur­pos­es to the books they read, the inven­to­ry of their lives is pro­duced by com­pa­nies that con­tract with the Pen­ta­gon.

Writer Dorothy Thomp­son observed in 1940 (writ­ing about the Ger­man indus­tri­al­ists and financiers behind the Third Reich) that, in the eyes of the Third Reich oli­garchs, “eco­nom­ic con­trol leads auto­mat­i­cal­ly to polit­i­cal con­trol.”

We are of the opin­ion that Ms. Thompson–and the Ger­man eco­nom­ic titans she quotes–are cor­rect.

It is very dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how an enti­ty as large and per­va­sive as the Pen­ta­gon and its allied inter­ests could fail to man­i­fest polit­i­cal con­trol, fol­low­ing auto­mat­i­cal­ly on their mas­sive eco­nom­ic preva­lence.