Post by Watchman on Apr 19, 2007 9:52:58 GMT -5
Hollywood know-how is helping to create new kinds of military weapons that target the brain—but not with a bullet.
by Jake MacDonald
Nearly four years after the destruction of the World Trade Center, I surrendered to a long-held curiosity and joined the United States Army. There’s a popular misconception that you can walk into a recruiting station and sign up. But the American army is the most sophisticated fighting force in history and it doesn’t accept just anyone. After a rigorous interview process and several hours studying the materials, I climbed onto the recruiting bus and headed off to basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.
At boot camp I learned to handle the m16, the fearsome saw, and other modern weapons. After qualifying on the shooting range, I donned night-vision goggles and stalked through the spooky corridors of the urban-warfare facility, firing by instinct at pop-up targets of swarthy enemy soldiers or sometimes a shopkeeper armed only with a bagel. After twelve weeks of training, my outfit, the 22nd Infantry Regiment, shipped out to Iraq. Two days later, I got my first taste of combat. I was on patrol near Baji when my Bradley Fighting Vehicle came under sniper fire. I pursued the gunman into a village before realizing we’d been drawn into an ambush. Bullets whizzed by; a rocket-propelled grenade struck me in the chest, transforming my upper body into a mushroom cloud of pink mist and ricocheting my head off a nearby wall. At this point it occurred to me that fighting the war on terror was going to be more challenging than I expected. With a click of the mouse, I went back to reboot camp and started over, humbled but not discouraged. In this man’s army—a computer game called America’s Army—getting killed in action is nothing more than a temporary embarrassment.
America’s Army is financed and produced by the United States Department of Defense and is designed to lure young men into the forces. But the technology used to create the video game is at the centre of a much larger question that many Americans are beginning to ask themselves: like the teenage boys seduced into playing America’s Army, are they too going to be corrupted just as subtly by the Pentagon’s growing use of digital technology to create false realities? Digital technology has enabled military scientists working at the intersection of fantasy and reality to develop radical new weapons that will target the brain not with a bullet, but through the creation of a seamless fabricated reality. This tactic will, according to psychological war experts, help the American military not only exert behavioural control over the enemy on the battlefield, but, more ominously, over American public opinion.
The US Army used to call this sort of strategy “psyops” (psychological operations) and it even maintains a department of psychological warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Once dismissed as an idiot uncle of the military establishment, the Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command has mutated into a hydra with tentacles in every level of the military. Psyops can now manufacture eerie simulacra of reality, meaning that in the future it will become increasingly difficult to separate real news from combat footage, communiqués, and hostage videos fabricated by all sides for their own purposes. After all, why influence the news when you can invent it and have a digitally created Dan Rather present it? Thomas X. Hammes, a counter-insurgency expert with the US Marine Corps, says these weapons are being employed today to fight the war on terror and will be used even more in the future. “The notion that we can win this fight with a lot of [conventional] war toys is a fantasy,” he says. “It’s really important for people to understand that we’re no longer fighting foreign wars with guns and bombs. We’re fighting with ideas.”
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan increased defence spending by 35 percent, to more than $400 billion (US) a year, and promoted the idea of a futuristic missile shield over North America—a notion some scholars believe was inspired by the Paul Newman movie Torn Curtain. The Soviet Union, burdened by an increasingly inefficient economy, couldn’t keep up with US military spending and by 1991 had collapsed. Many hoped that the demise of communism would usher in a new era of global co-operation, but, with the Soviets vanquished, the United States launched its plan to remake the world in its own image.
In 1997, a number of people who are now top officials in the current US administration, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and national security strategists Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, launched a think tank called the Project for the New American Century. The group argued that it was time to take pre-emptive action to enforce US interests abroad, including removing unfriendly governments. “As the twentieth century draws to a close,” according to the project’s statement of principles, “the United States stands as the world’s pre-eminent power. Having led the West to victory in the Cold War, America faces an opportunity and a challenge. Does the United States have the resolve to shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests?”
Reshaping the world in America’s image would not only involve massive funding to produce new futuristic weapons, it would also require the Pentagon to enlist the support of Hollywood, where the arsenal of digital technology is advancing almost daily. Soon after coming to power in 2001, President George W. Bush acted on the first leg of this strategy when he announced that he was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into such organizations as darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which grants research money to weapons developers. Since then, development has begun on dozens of weapons that close the gap between old-fashioned military hardware and the virtual future. One of the most promising, in the Pentagon’s view, is the Brain Machine Interface, a system of embedded neural transmitters and computer software that bridges thought and action. It is being developed by Duke University scientists, who have already created a computerized system in which a lab monkey can move a robotic arm in a laboratory 1,000 kilometres away just by thinking about it. In the future, military commanders with brain implants will use more advanced versions of this technology to deploy unmanned gun ships and robotic tanks in battlefields half a world away.
Bush has also revived plans to develop new real-world weapons systems, including fighter jets that do not require pilots and a new generation of smart bombs. And he agreed to spend billions on the missile-defence program envisioned by Reagan twenty years earlier. In support of the plan, defence contractor Lockheed Martin is building an airship twenty-five times larger than the Goodyear blimp. The airship will serve as a communications platform where attacks on enemy missiles will be coordinated.
The military is also planning unmanned spaceships that will carry huge tungsten bolts, nicknamed “rods from God,” that can be dropped with devastating impact on even the smallest target anywhere on the planet. Recently, retired Air Force Secretary James G. Roche described these space weapons as mandatory for any twenty-first-century arsenal. “Space capabilities in today’s world are no longer nice to have,” he said. “They’ve become indispensable at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. Space capabilities are integrated with and affect every link in the kill chain.”
As futuristic and powerful as this new generation of weapons will be, Bush, perhaps more than any other recent president, is guided by an idea once espoused by Napoleon: “There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind.” According to many strategists, even if the United States wins on the battlefield, it must ultimately win over the minds of the citizens of a country it is invading with propaganda in order to remake the world in its own image. Hammes, who has trained insurgents around the world, believes it was precisely the military’s failure to win over the hearts and minds of its enemies that led to the United States’s defeat in a number of conflicts over the past thirty years. Today, it is no closer to winning over Iraq than it was when it invaded in 2003. “We were defeated in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia, and we’ll lose in Iraq the same way,” says Hammes. “We’ll win the battles, but we’ll lose the war [of ideas].”
With the United States engaged in a protracted war against terrorism and bogged down in Iraq, the Pentagon is keenly aware of these past failures. William Arkin, an author and former military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times, says that the military is growing frustrated with its inability to stay ahead of the terrorist threat, and is anxious to enlist Hollywood and its digital expertise in its fight. “Traditionally, the military has been an innovative force in technological development,” he says. “But about ten years ago, with the digital revolution, the civilian world really began pulling ahead of the military. The army just can’t compete with Hollywood or Microsoft when it comes to digital wizardry.” Microsoft alone spent $2 billion (US) developing its Xbox game technology. It is that kind of muscular research spending and product development that has convinced the Pentagon that it must break down the walls between the military and the entertainment industry.
The first of several recent high-profile Pentagon initiatives in Hollywood came in 1996, when top military officers travelled to Los Angeles to brainstorm with executives from Industrial Light & Magic, Intel, and Paramount about storylines for their combat simulators. This wasn’t the first time the military had gone to Hollywood. During the 1960s, the cia was intrigued by the emergence of television and by experiments indicating that moving images produce a shift from left-brain to right-brain neural activity, which in turn induces a sort of chemical trance that suppresses judgment and heightens suggestibility. The researchers learned that once viewers “suspend their disbelief,” they become vulnerable to the values and messages embedded in the drama.
So it wasn’t surprising that soon after the meeting in 1996, the Pentagon proposed a working partnership with Hollywood. Three years later, it announced that it would build a new $45-million (US) production house in Los Angeles and that it intended to hire many of the screenwriters and producers who had attended the meeting. The new facility was designed by Herman Zimmerman, the award-winning designer of a number of Star Trek episodes, and dubbed the Institute for Creative Technologies. The institute soon became a sandbox for forty-five writers, directors, and special-effects technicians, many of them Academy Award nominees.
Their first project was the development of a total-immersion simulator that gives soldiers a preview of real-life combat situations. The simulator consists of a virtual-reality theatre with a 150-degree screen and a Dolby sound system. Inside, young soldiers-in-training can pick their way through a number of spooky combat environments. A typical program recreates a blown-up building strewn with garbage, jagged rebar, concrete, and splintered furniture. Through a hole in the virtual wall the young trainee can peer out at a wasted city, where sparrows dart through the smoke, Arabic music filters up from the street, and a helicopter gunship thunders overhead.
After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the military returned to Hollywood—this time with new urgency—to again meet with studio heads and producers. Their goal: to enlist the entertainment industry in a sweeping campaign to rally public support for the military and the war in Iraq.
According to the entertainment trade paper Variety, those attending the meeting at the Pentagon’s studio included the presidents of cbs, hbo Films, Warner Brothers Television, and prominent producers and writers such as Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard), Joseph Zito (Delta Force One), and Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich). One of the producers at that October 2001 meeting was Lionel Chetwynd (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). “There was a feeling around the table,” he later recalled, “that something is wrong if half the world thinks we’re the Great Satan. Americans are failing to get our message across to the world.”
The meeting was off-limits to the media, and Chetwynd revealed little else. But a White House spokesperson later said that the government was asking movie moguls for their help in selling America’s image to audiences around the world. Said the spokesperson: “The administration will share with studio executives the themes we’re communicating at home and abroad, of patriotism, tolerance, and courage.” Military officials also reminded the producers of certain “resources we might have in government [that would] be helpful to them.”
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