The Military-Leisure Golf Complex

By Nick Turse, Metropolitan Books. Posted April 12, 2008.

Pentagon elites and high government officials are tee-ing off at taxpayer expense at hundreds of courses all over the planet.

The following is an excerpt from Nick Turse’s new book “The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives” (Metropolitan, 2008).

Back in 1975, Senator William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) decried the fact that the Department of Defense spent nearly $14 million each year to maintain and operate 300 military-run golf courses scattered across the globe. In 1996, the weekly television series America’s Defense Monitor noted that “Pentagon elites and high government officials [were still] tee-ing off at taxpayer expense” at some “234 golf courses maintained by the U.S. armed forces worldwide.” In the intervening twenty-one years, despite a modest decrease in the number of military golf courses, not much had changed. The military was still out on the links. Today, the military claims to operate a mere 172 golf courses worldwide, suggesting that over thirty years after Proxmire’s criticisms, a modicum of reform has taken place. Don’t believe it.

In actuality, the military has cooked the books. For example, the Department of Defense reported that the U.S. Air Force operates 68 courses. A closer examination indicates that the DoD counts the 3 separate golf courses, a total of fifty-four holes, at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., as 1 course. The same is true for the navy, which claims 37 courses (including facilities in Guam, Italy, and Spain) but counts, for example, its Admiral Baker Golf Course in San Diego, which boasts 2 eighteen-hole courses, as a single unit. Similarly, while the DoD claims that the army operates 56 golf facilities, it appears that this translates into no fewer than 68 actual courses, stretching from the U.S. to Germany, Japan, and South Korea.

Moreover, some military golf facilities are mysteriously missing from all lists. In 2005, according to the Pentagon, the U.S. military operated courses on twenty-five bases overseas.

A closer look, however, indicates that the military apparently forgot about some of its golf courses — especially those in unsavory or unmentionable locales. Take the unlisted eighteen-hole golf course — where hot-pink balls are used so as not to lose them in the barren terrain — at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Also absent is the army’s Tournament Players Club, a golf course built, in 2003, by army personnel in Mosul, Iraq. Another forgotten course can be found in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, at Kwajalein, a little-discussed island filled with missile and rocket launchers and radar equipment that serves as the home of the U.S. Army’s Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site. Similarly unlisted is a nine-hole golf course located on the shadowy island of Diego Garcia, a British Indian Ocean Territory occupied by the U.S. military and long suspected as the site of one of the CIA’s post-9/11 secret “ghost” prisons. But even courses not operating on secret sites, in war zones, or near prisons and possible torture centers have been conveniently lost. For example, while the Pentagon lists the navy’s Admiral Nimitz Golf Course in Barrigada, Guam, in its inventory of overseas courses, it seems to have skipped Andersen Air Force Base’s eighteen-hole Palm Tree Golf Course, also on the island. And you’d think the Pentagon would be proud of the USAF’s island links; after all, it was the runner-up, in 2002, for the title of “Guam’s Most Beautiful Golf Course.”

Whatever the true number of the military’s courses, at least some of them are distinctly sprucing up their grounds. Take the Eaglewood Golf Courses at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. In 2004, the Pentagon paid out more than $352,000 to George Golf Design to refurbish its two courses (known as “the Raptor” and “the Eagle”). George Golf Design considerately worked on the courses one at a time, so that local duffers would not be left linkless. This was of critical importance since if both courses were out of commission, Virginia would have been left with only nine military golf facilities (navy, five; army,three; Marine Corps, one) with a total of fourteen courses.

Even though the military operates so many courses, apparently these still aren’t enough to satisfy the insatiable golfing appetites of the armed forces — at least judging by the number of golf resorts to which the Pentagon paid out American tax dollars in 2004. For instance, the Del Lago Golf Resort and Conference Center, in San Antonio, Texas, which offers an “18-hole championship golf course home to some of the region’s most challenging and beautiful holes,” received over $19,000, and the Lakeview Golf Resort and Spa in Morgantown, West Virginia, which boasts “two championship golf courses,” received $16,416 from the army in 2004. When asked what exactly the army was up to at Lakeview, a resort spokesperson declined to “disclose any information” and stated that she was “unable to confirm activities” of the military at the resort if, in fact, they occurred at all. At the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center in Mesa, Arizona, which boasts “fine accommodations, great dining and a host of amenities, including a championship golf course, surrounded by beautifully maintained grounds,” the army dropped a cool $48,620 in 2004. That resort wasn’t, however, the top recipient of military funds among Arizona golf resorts.

That year, according to DoD documents, the U.S. Army paid $71,614 to the Arizona Golf Resort — located in sunny Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A Saudi homage to the American Southwest that claims to offer the “only residential western expatriate golf resort in Riyadh with activities for all ages,” the resort actually boasts an entire entertainment complex, complete with a water-slide-enhanced megapool, gym, bowling alley, horse stables, roller hockey rink, arcade, amphitheater, restaurant, and even a cappuccino bar — not to mention the golf course and a driving range. It’s the perfect spot, in the so-called arc of instability, for military folks to play a few rounds with other Westerners. For those in the Persian Gulf who prefer their links on a smaller scale, there are also miniature golf courses at such military bases as Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base and at Camp Doha, both located in Kuwait, Balad Air Base in Iraq, and the air force’sbase at Eskan Village, near Riyadh Air Base, in Saudi Arabia. But minigolf isn’t the only activity for duffers stationed at Eskan. In 2002, the U.S. General Accounting Ofce investigated “seemingly unneeded expenditures” by the military and found that $5,333 had been spent on “golf passes” for folks from Eskan Village.

In fact, the GAO reported: “Air Force units purchased several golf items during their deployments to Southwest Asia that included a golf cart for $35,000, a corporate golf membership at $16,000 … and a golf club/bag set costing nearly $1,500.” The military’s ardent love affair with golf carts hardly ended with that $35,000 model. In 2004 alone, according to the Pentagon’s own documents, the DoD paid $6,860 to Golf Car Company, $6,900 to Golf Cars of Riverside, $9,322 to Golf Cars of Louisiana, $16,741 to Southern Golf Cars, and a whopping $37,964 to Golf Car Specialties. Similarly, in 2006, two golf cart concerns were paid a combined $58,644 by the DoD, while a German golf-equipment supplier, Continental Golf Associates, received more than $88,000 from the Pentagon.

Despite base closures and the work of committed environmental and community groups, which have thinned out some of the military’s links, the Department of Defense continues to exhibit an obsession with golf, golf carts, and, above all, golf courses. Apologists, both within and outside of the military, often counter criticisms of DoD golf expenditures by claiming that military golf courses are not simply a drain on taxpayer money but revenue earners, through greens fees.

They, however, never make mention of the fact that these facilities are located on public land and pay no taxes; that they require funds for security; and that in all likelihood the public pays for the roads, water, and electric lines that service the courses — sore points raised by former Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini in the mid-1990s when Andrews Air Force Base was sinking $5.1 million into its third course. (If the DoD really wanted to raise revenues, it would sell its courses. For example, the army’s Garmisch, Kornwestheim, and Heidelberg golf courses in Germany are worth, says the DoD, $6.6 million, $13.3 million, and $16.5 million, respectively, while the DoD’s Sungnam golf course in the Republic of Korea is reportedly valued at $26 million.)

Such a defense also fails to address why the Pentagon is in the golf course business in the first place. According to its officially stated mission, the DoD engages in war-fighting, humanitarian, peacekeeping, evacuation, and homeland-security missions and, says the Pentagon, provides “the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of the United States. Everything we do supports that primary mission.” How, exactly, golf courses ensure that primary mission is a little murky, especially since the United States has more than 8,100 public courses and over 3,500 semiprivate courses (that allow some access to nonmembers). A more apt explanation is the fact that when it comes to golf, like much else, the Pentagon does what it wants, no matter who gets tee’d off.

Source: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/82009/the_military-leisure_golf_complex/

The Project Kai e’e / UARC scandal at the University of Hawai’i was all about network centric warfare technology research, testing and development and the use of a public university as the front to channel congressionally earmarked funds to defense contractors conducting their programs at the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua’i.  This article is a sobering critique of the limits of technology in warfare.

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WIRED MAGAZINE: Wired Issue 15.12

How Technology Almost Lost the War: In Iraq, the Critical Networks Are Social – Not Electronic

By Noah Shachtman Email 11.27.07
The future of war began with an act of faith. In 1991, Navy captain Arthur Cebrowski met John Garstka, a captain in the Air Force, at a McLean, Virginia, Bible-study class. The two quickly discovered they shared more than just their conservative Catholic beliefs. They both had an interest in military strategy. And they were both geeks: Cebrowski – who’d been a math major in college, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, and an aircraft carrier commander during Desert Storm – was fascinated with how information technologies could make fighter jocks more lethal. Garstka – a Stanford-trained engineer – worked on improving algorithms used to track missiles.

Over the next several years, the two men traded ideas and compared experiences. They visited businesses embracing the information revolution, ultimately becoming convinced that the changes sweeping the corporate world had applications for the military as well. The Defense Department wasn’t blind to the power of networks, of course – the Internet began as a military project, after all, and each branch of the armed services had ongoing “digitization” programs. But no one had ever crystallized what the information age might offer the Pentagon quite like Cebrowski and Garstka did. In an article for the January 1998 issue of the naval journal Proceedings, “Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future,” they not only named the philosophy but laid out a new direction for how the US would think about war.

Their model was Wal-Mart. Here was a sprawling, bureaucratic monster of an organization – sound familiar? – that still managed to automatically order a new lightbulb every time it sold one. Warehouses were networked, but so were individual cash registers. So were the guys who sold Wal-Mart the bulbs. If that company could wire everyone together and become more efficient, then US forces could, too. “Nations make war the same way they make wealth,” Cebrowski and Garstka wrote. Computer networks and the efficient flow of information would turn America’s chain saw of a war machine into a scalpel.

The US military could use battlefield sensors to swiftly identify targets and bomb them. Tens of thousands of warfighters would act as a single, self-aware, coordinated organism. Better communications would let troops act swiftly and with accurate intelligence, skirting creaky hierarchies. It’d be “a revolution in military affairs unlike any seen since the Napoleonic Age,” they wrote. And it wouldn’t take hundreds of thousands of troops to get a job done – that kind of “massing of forces” would be replaced by information management. “For nearly 200 years, the tools and tactics of how we fight have evolved,” the pair wrote. “Now, fundamental changes are affecting the very character of war.”

Network-centric wars would be more moral, too. Cebrowski later argued that network-enabled armies kill more of the right people quicker. With fewer civilian casualties, warfare would be more ethical. And as a result, the US could use military might to create free societies without being accused of imperialist arrogance.

It had a certain geek appeal, to which Wired was not immune. Futurist Alvin Toffler talked up similar ideas – before they even had a name – in the magazine’s fifth issue, in 1993. And during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, my colleague Joshua Davis welcomed in a “new age of fighting that combined precision weapons, unprecedented surveillance of the enemy, agile ground forces, and – above all – a real-time communications network that kept the far-flung operation connected minute by minute.”

As a presidential candidate in 1999, George W. Bush embraced the philosophy, as did his eventual choice for defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instituted a massive program to “transform” the armed services. Cebrowski was installed as the head of the newly created Office of Force Transformation. When the US went to war in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, its forces achieved apparent victory with lightning speed. Analysts inside and outside the Pentagon credited the network-centric approach for that success. “The successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq took far fewer troops and were executed quicker,” Rumsfeld proclaimed, because of “advanced technology and skills.” The Army committed more than $230 billion to a network-centric makeover, on top of the billions the military had already spent on surveillance, drone aircraft, spy satellites, and thousands of GPS transceivers. General Tommy Franks, leader of both invasions, was even more effusive than Rumsfeld. All the new tech, he wrote in his 2004 memoir, American Soldier, promised “today’s commanders the kind of Olympian perspective that Homer had given his gods.”

And yet, here we are. The American military is still mired in Iraq. It’s still stuck in Afghanistan, battling a resurgent Taliban. Rumsfeld has been forced out of the Pentagon. Dan Halutz, the Israeli Defense Forces chief of general staff and net-centric advocate who led the largely unsuccessful war in Lebanon in 2006, has been fired, too. In the past six years, the world’s most technologically sophisticated militaries have gone up against three seemingly primitive foes – and haven’t won once.

How could this be? The network-centric approach had worked pretty much as advertised. Even the theory’s many critics admit net-centric combat helped make an already imposing American military even more effective at locating and killing its foes. The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Mullah Omar were broken almost instantly. But network-centric warfare, with its emphasis on fewer, faster-moving troops, turned out to be just about the last thing the US military needed when it came time to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. A small, wired force leaves generals with too few nodes on the military network to secure the peace. There aren’t enough troops to go out and find informants, build barricades, rebuild a sewage treatment plant, and patrol a marketplace.

For the first three years of the Iraq insurgency, American troops largely retreated to their fortified bases, pushed out woefully undertrained local units to do the fighting, and watched the results on feeds from spy drones flying overhead. Retired major general Robert Scales summed up the problem to Congress by way of a complaint from one division commander: “If I know where the enemy is, I can kill it. My problem is I can’t connect with the local population.” How could he? For far too many units, the war had been turned into a telecommute. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon were the first conflicts planned, launched, and executed with networked technologies and a networked ideology. They were supposed to be the wars of the future. And the future lost.

Inside the Pentagon, the term network-centric warfare is out of fashion, yet countless generals and admirals still adhere to its core principles. On the streets of Iraq, though, troops are learning to grapple with the guerrilla threat. And that means fighting in a way that couldn’t be more different from the one Donald Rumsfeld embraced. The failures of wired combat are forcing troops to improvise a new, socially networked kind of war.

Tarmiyah, located about 20 miles north of Baghdad, is an ugly town – traced with rivulets of sewage, patrolled by stray dogs, and strewn with rubble and garbage. Insurgents fleeing US military crackdowns in Baghdad and, farther north, in Baqubah, have flooded the city. The local police quit en masse almost a year ago, leaving the security of Tarmiyah’s 50,000 residents to 150 men from the US Army’s Fourth Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment – known since an early-1900s tour of duty in China as the Manchus.

Typically, soldiers spend hours of every day at war just trying to figure out where their comrades are, and how to maneuver together. But hand out GPS receivers and put everyone’s signals on a map, and those tasks become a whole lot simpler. Luckily for the Manchus, the 4/9 is arguably the most wired unit in the Army. Select troops wear an experimental electronics package, including a helmet-mounted monocle that displays a digital map of Tarmiyah with icons for each of their vehicles and troops. The unit’s commander, William Prior, rides an upgraded Stryker armored vehicle that shows the same info on one of many screens. It’s packed with battle command stations, advanced radios, remote-controlled weapons turrets, and satellite network terminals. No commander at his level has ever been able to see so many of his men so easily.

“It increases the unit’s combat power, no question,” Prior says. Trim and dark-eyed, the lieutenant colonel knows his tech. He has a master’s in physics and taught science at West Point in the late 1990s.

During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, only a fraction of the Humvees, tanks, and helicopters invading the country were equipped with these kind of readouts on the position of other US vehicles. Still, enough had them to allow the troops pushing to Baghdad to execute perilous maneuvers, like sending one unit through another’s kill zone – a move made even more hair-raising by dust storms that turned the air opaque.

Today, every three-man team in the Manchus is an icon on every other team’s monocles. Network-centric doctrine says that these plugged-in soldiers should be able to cover a bigger swath of the battlefield and take on more enemies. And, yes, the gear does let them clear neighborhoods more efficiently and respond to enemy attacks more quickly. But a handful of soldiers still can’t secure a town of more than 50,000. Half a dozen Manchus have been killed or wounded by snipers during their five months in Tarmiyah. Prior has handed out 25 Purple Hearts to the 150-man Comanche Company guarding Tarmiyah. It’s even worse outside town, where the equally small Blowtorch Company was trying to keep the peace in an area three times the size of Manhattan, until the higher-ups ordered the company onto other missions.

“A well-informed but geographically dispersed force,” Garstka and Cebrowski wrote in 1998, should be able to triumph over any foe, regardless of “mission, force size and composition, and geography.” But neither Cebrowski nor Garstka was thinking about the kind of combat where foes blend into the populace and seed any stretch of road with bombs. Lawless towns like this can be pacified only by flooding them with troops – collecting tips and knocking heads. That’s what Prior needs, not more gadgets. “They’re just tools,” he says in his flat Iowa accent.

But Prior has just caught a break: Another several hundred soldiers, Special Forces operators, and Iraqi troops have descended on the city to kick in doors, drop bombs on extremist hideouts, and drive out the insurgents. Those men will leave eventually, though, and to sustain the gains they make, Prior is supposed to recruit civilians into a kind of neighborhood watch. The idea is to have as many eyes and ears on the streets, around the shops, and in the mosques as possible. In counterinsurgency, it’s better to have a lot of nodes in your network, connecting to the population, than just a few. In fact, that’s a key tenet of the new US strategy in Iraq – hiring watchmen who’ve come to be known in other towns as “alligators” for their light-blue Izod shirts. Prior hasn’t had much luck in getting folks in Tarmiyah to sign up; even his own soldiers are reluctant to go out in the daytime.

But the extra boots on the ground have given Prior some space. If he can recruit a few alligators in a hurry, the extremists will be less likely to come back. So he has started spending quality time drinking chai with local leaders instead of fighting a shooting war.

We walk into the home of Tarmiyah’s former mayor, sheikh Sayeed Jassem. Everyone in town agrees he’d be the guy to help sign up alligators. One problem: Jassem is in jail on charges of embezzlement and funneling money to the insurgency. The Iraqi government is in no mood to let him out. That makes the several dozen tribal leaders sitting in Jassem’s 40-foot-long, lavishly carpeted living room extremely grouchy. “Sayeed, he knows every sheikh, he knows all the children. The first step is releasing him. Then we can arrange security,” says burly, balding, gravel-voiced Abu Ibrahim. Next to him, in a white headdress and wearing a pencil-thin mustache, Jassem’s cousin Abu Abbas nods. “I couldn’t make a decision until he’s free.”

Prior blinks. Abbas went to Jassem’s jail cell the day before yesterday and got the sheikh’s blessing to proceed. “But you saw him yesterday, with your own eyes, did you not?” he asks. Abbas starts saying something about his uncles. Prior turns to Ibrahim. “Yesterday, you said you’d have 100 men. All I’m asking for is 30. Five men, in eight-hour shifts, to guard the sheikh’s home, and to guard the Tarmiyah gate” – the main entrance to the town. The meeting has been going on for two hours. That’s typical. But after a few of these, Prior has finally learned that such gatherings are as much about performance as ticking off agenda items. He booms out in a Broadway-loud voice: “Are there 30 strong men in Tarmiyah who can do this?”

OK, OK, everyone answers, of course there are, don’t get so excited. They spend the next few hours drinking cup after cup of chai, hammering out exactly what the recruiting announcement will say, whether these guardians will have badges, how they’ll be vetted. Finally, they agree that 30 men will meet back at the house tomorrow morning. Prior’s soldiers print up 50 makeshift applications – better to have a few extra, just in case.

The next day, we go back to Jassem’s house. More than 500 men are braving the heat, waiting in front to sign up as alligators. A week later, that number swells to more than 1,400. In the month since, Prior has downed a lot more chai. But he hasn’t had to award a single Purple Heart.

Outside of Fallujah, on a sprawling US military base, there’s an old barracks supposedly built for Uday Hussein’s personal shock troops. Down at the dimly lit end of one hallway is a tiled bathroom that’s been converted into a tiny office. Inside, three screens sit on a desk, displaying a set of digital maps showing a God’s-eye view of the entire country. Every American tank and truck is marked with blue icons. Every recent insurgent attack is marked in red. There are more than 1,100 units like this one across the country, and the site of every major US military center in Iraq is connected to the same system. The brass calls these futuristic command posts… well, it calls them command posts of the future, or CPOF. (Grunts call them the command posts of the right now – C-PORN.) This is network-centric warfare, translated from journal theory to war-zone reality.

Fallujah isn’t more than 10 miles away, but staring at those three screens feels like observing Iraq from another continent – maybe another planet. Outside, it’s ant-under-a-magnifying-glass hot. In here I have to pull my arms inside my T-shirt, the thermostat is turned so low. Across the city, marines do their best to predict the insurgents’ next moves. But in front of the command post, we have so much information at our fingertips it makes Prior’s tech look like a beta-test version of Missile Command. “There’s a sea of information here. All you have to learn to do is fish in it,” says Jim Kanzenbach, a tan, goateed Army contractor and trainer with a southern-accented baritone.

Kanzenbach taps the mouse a few times. Red diamonds representing all of the insurgent sigacts (military-speak for “significant activities”) array themselves into a timeline. He sorts it by day of the week, then by hour of the day. White space appears during a particular hour; there don’t seem to be any sigacts then. “If I was going to run a convoy, that would be the better time.”

He clicks again, and the middle screen switches to a 3-D map of an Iraqi town from a driver’s point of view. Kanzenbach smiles, and his mile-a-minute Texas patter goes hypersonic. “Now let’s plan the route. You’ve got a mosque here. An IED happened over there two weeks ago. Here’s the one that happened yesterday. Hey, that’s too close. Let’s change my route. Change the whole damn thing.” He guides me through capability after capability of the command post – all kinds of charts, overlays, and animations. “But wait – there’s more,” he says. “You wanna see where all the Internet cafés are in Baghdad?”

It’s hard not to get caught up in Kanzenbach’s enthusiasm. But back in the US, John Nagl, one of the authors of the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, isn’t impressed. He’s a lieutenant colonel and an Iraq vet, an Army batallion commander at Fort Riley in Kansas. He’s also the author of several influential articles and books about counterinsurgency, including Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife, an analysis of Vietnam and Malaya. When I ask him about CPOF, he’s more interested in what the screens don’t show. Historical sigacts don’t actually tell you where the next one’s going to be. Or who’s going to do it. Or who’s joining them. Or why. “The police captain playing both sides, the sheikh skimming money from a construction project,” Nagl asks, “what color are they?”

CPOF was designed for planning short, decisive battles against another regular army – the Soviets, the Chinese, Saddam’s Republican Guard, whoever – as long as they had tanks to destroy, territory to seize, and leaders to kill. The counterinsurgency game has completely different rules. The goal here is to stabilize a government, not bring it down; to persuade people to cooperate, not bludgeon them into submission. In fact, many of these kinetic bombs-and-bullets activities can actually undermine a counterinsurgency, creating more enemies than they kill. “Some of the best weapons for counterinsurgency do not shoot,” Nagl’s counterinsurgency manual says. Instead, it advises troops to get to know the locals – both individually and as groups – and gain their trust. The locals generally know which of their neighbors are insurgents and which aren’t; they’re already plugged into the communal network. “Arguably,” the manual says, “the decisive battle is for the people’s minds.”

Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about a different kind of power, one that came when connected troops started to share information in ways that circumvented, and bypassed, the Industrial Age military chain of command. But that helps only if troops can connect in the first place. It can take up to a week for them to wrangle their laptops into updating the biometric databases that track who gets in and out of Fallujah. Intelligence reports can take even longer. The people best equipped to win the battle for people’s minds – US troops on the ground, local policemen, Iraqi Army officers, tribal leaders – are left out of CPOF’s network. It’s a bandwidth hog, and the soldiers and marines fighting these counterinsurgencies aren’t exactly carrying around T3 lines. Only recently did infantrymen like the ones in Fallujah even get their own radios. The Pentagon’s sluggish structure for buying new gear means it can take up to a decade to get soldiers equipped. (Though to be fair, CPOF was purchased and deployed years ahead of schedule.) In Fallujah, the marines of Fox Company, based in an abandoned train station, mostly use their CPOF terminal to generate local maps, which they export to PowerPoint. Their buddies in Fox Company’s first platoon, working out of a police precinct, have it even worse. When they want to get online, they have to drive to the station.

As for Iraqi access, while CPOF technically isn’t classified, all of the data on it is. Locals can’t see the information or update any of those databases with their own intelligence. A key tenet of network theory is that a network’s power grows with every new node. But that’s only if every node gets as good as it gives. In Iraq, the most important nodes in this fight are all but cut off.

Meanwhile, insurgent forces cherry-pick the best US tech: disposable email addresses, anonymous Internet accounts, the latest radios. They do everything online: recruiting, fundraising, trading bomb-building tips, spreading propaganda, even selling T-shirts. And every American-financed move to reinforce Iraq’s civilian infrastructure only makes it easier for the insurgents to operate. Every new Internet café is a center for insurgent operations. Every new cell tower means a hundred new nodes on the insurgent network. And, of course, the insurgents know the language and understand the local culture. Which means they plug into Iraq’s larger social web more easily than an American ever could. As John Abizaid, Franks’ successor at Central Command, told a conference earlier this year, “This enemy is better networked than we are.”

The insurgent groups are also exploiting something that US network-centric gurus seem to have missed: All of us are already connected to a global media grid. Satellite television, radio, and the Internet mean that many of the most spectacular attacks in Iraq are deliberately staged for the cameras, uploaded to YouTube, picked up by CNN, and broadcast around the world.

American forces have been trying to solve the insurgent puzzle in Fallujah since 2003. Massive battles devastated the town, damaging more than half the homes there and driving out 90 percent of the populace. The insurgents kept coming back. But in the past year, things have shifted. Today, Fallujah is calm: Shops are open, kids are in school, men are smoking their cigarettes and holding hands in outdoor cafs. “The people just decided they couldn’t take al Qaeda anymore,” says George Benson, executive officer of the marines’ Second Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team Six, which is responsible for the town. Benson believes that a beefy, blue-eyed kid raised in the Cleveland suburbs is a big part of the reason Fallujah has gone so quiet.

His name is Joe Colabuno, and he’s a sergeant who works in psychological operations – psyops, in military-speak. His job is to win the hearts-and-minds battle, and his tools are almost comically simple: posters drawn in Photoshop, loudspeaker and radio broadcasts pasted together with SonicStage and saved to MiniDiscs, the occasional newspaper article, and, above all, his own big mouth. Arab culture lives by its oral traditions; talk is often the most important weapon. “I find the right people to shape, and they shape the rest,” Colabuno says.

Just as in Tarmiyah, troops in Fallujah are looking to recruit locals to keep tabs on their neighborhoods. Yesterday, on the west side of town, an alligator helped catch one of the Americans’ top insurgent targets in Fallujah. After seeing a photograph, the watchman ID’d the guy as a neighbor, living just a few houses down the street.

But an alligator-recruiting drive yesterday in the Askeri district, in the northeastern corner of town, didn’t go so well. The marines got less than half of the 125 they were looking for. So Colabuno hops into a Humvee to find out why.

We pull up to a narrow, unpaved street alongside the Askeri recruiting station. A group of seven men sit on the gravel, beneath a set of drying sheets. In the middle of the crowd, leaning on a cane, fingering prayer beads and dressed in white, is a rotund, bearded man. He’s clearly the ringleader. Colabuno and his wire-thin interpreter, Leo, approach him. In every other district, they’ve recruited plenty of alligators. “Why not in Askeri?” Colabuno asks the ringleader.

The money’s not good enough, he answers. An alligator makes only $50 a month; day laborers get $8 a day – when there’s work, that is.

“That’s the weakest argument ever,” Colabuno says. The men looked stunned; Americans don’t normally speak this directly – they’re usually deferential to the point of looking weak, or just condescending.

“Do you remember Sheikh Hamsa?” Colabuno asks. Sure, sure, the men nod. The popular imam was killed more than a year ago by insurgents, but they’re a bit surprised that Colabuno knows who he is. Most of the US troops here have been in town for just a few months. “Well, Sheikh Hamsa told me that weak faith protects only so much.'” The ringleader stares down at the ground and fingers his beads. Colabuno has hit a nerve. “You know, I looked in the Koran. I didn’t see anything about Mohammed demanding a better salary before he’d do God’s work,” Colabuno says, jamming his forefinger into his palm.

A skinny man at the back of the pack speaks up, telling Colabuno that the Americans are just here to take Iraq’s oil. “Yeah, you’re right. We want your oil,” Colabuno answers. Again eyes grow big with surprise. “We want to buy it. So you can pay for jobs, for water, for electricity. Make you rich.” The men chuckle. Everyone shakes hands. Askeri’s alligator quota is filled by the next morning.

Colabuno joined the Army because, frankly, it sounded better than his other option: managing a local steakhouse. When his recruiter told him about psyops, Colabuno loved the idea. It sounded like something out of The X-Files. “Does the job involve LSD?” he jokingly asked. It did not. Instead, Colabuno has spent the better part of four years, and all of the past 17 months, getting comfortable with the residents of Fallujah. And now that he has cracked Fallujah’s cultural code, the brass is reluctant to let him leave.

We head back to the base. Colabuno’s office looks like a dorm room, with mountain bikes hanging on the wall next to posters of Kristin Chenoweth, Vida Guerra, the Denver Broncos cheerleaders, and Corona beer. “Theme of the week,” reads a white board, “terrorism causes CANCER… and impotence.” Colabuno’s early efforts to persuade the population were just as subtle. He shows me a collection of his early posters, tabloid-sized pages laid on a table. Against a flaming background, a terrorist holds a child. The text asks why the parents of Fallujah would let insurgents harm their kids. Wrong move. This is a culture based on shame and honor; now you’ve just called the parents inadequate. Plus, the piece is just too on the nose, too blatant. The best propaganda is sneaky.

So Colabuno started spoofing the insurgents’ posters instead. He put a logo similar to that of the terrorist Islamic Army at the top of a simple black-and-white sheet. “A young boy died while wearing a suicide vest given to him by criminals,” one flyer read. “You should remember that whoever makes lies about Allah should reserve his seat in hell.” The extremists went nuts – screaming at shopkeepers and locals who posted the flyers, blaming other insurgents for defaming their good names. All the while, Americans watched the action through high-powered surveillance cameras. Consequently the marines knew who to question, and who to capture or kill. “We know where you are and what you are doing,” another poster proclaimed. “Who will you trust now?”

American forces here set up a tip line so the locals could report on any insurgents (and get a little reward for their efforts). The extremists responded by blowing up the local cell towers, which Colabuno then turned into another psyops poster criticizing their self-destructive behavior. “Now we’ve got them making really stupid decisions,” he says, grinning. “They communicate by cell phone, too. They can’t argue that they’re just attacking the foreigners.”

General David Petraeus knows all about these mind games. The man in charge of the American military effort in Iraq helped turn soldiers’ training from tank-on-tank battles to taking on insurgents. He oversaw the writing of the new counterinsurgency manual that John Nagl worked on. The book counsels officers to reinforce the local economy and politics and build knowledge of the native culture, “an operational code’ that is valid for an entire group of people.” And the manual blasts the old, network-centric American approach in Iraq. “If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents,” it says.

So I get escorted across Baghdad’s concrete-ringed International Zone, around the manicured lawns of the Republican Palace, up its marbled stairs, past ambassadors and generals, through a seemingly endless series of gates and checkpoints, and into Petraeus’ office. But even this far inside the US war machine, I’m expecting a frontal assault on network-centric warfare.

Instead, he sings me a love song.

“It’s definitely here to stay. It’s just going to keep getting greater and greater and greater,” Petraeus says. I settle on a couch, and he shuts off the air conditioner. “I was a skeptic of network-centric warfare for years,” he confesses. But thanks to years of wartime funding, he says, the military now has the ability “to transmit data, full-motion video, still photos, images, information. So you can more effectively determine who the enemy is, find them and kill or capture, and have a sense of what’s going on in the area as you do it – where the friendlies are, and which platform you want to bring to bear.”

Of course, he adds, he doesn’t believe the Rumsfeld-era idea that you can get away with fewer, better-networked troops. Petraeus is the man behind the “surge,” after all. Anyone who thinks you don’t need massing of troops is living in an “academic world,” he says. And Petraeus believes “the most important network is still the one that is between the ears of commanders and staff officers.”

Yet he’s a believer, just like a whole lot of other Army generals. He supports the $230 billion plan to wire the Army, a gargantuan commitment to network-centric war. “We realized very quickly you could do incredible stuff with this,” he says. “It was revolutionary. It was.”

I press my hands to my forehead. What about all the cultural understanding, I ask him. What about nation-building? What about your counterinsurgency manual?

“Well,” Petraeus says, “it doesn’t say that the best weapons don’t shoot. It says sometimes the best weapons don’t shoot. Sometimes the best weapons do shoot.” A war like Iraq is a mix, he adds: In one part of the country, the military is reinforcing the society, building things; in another, it’s breaking them – waging “major combat operations” that aren’t all that different from what might have gone down in 2003. And this technology, he says, it’s pretty good at 2003-style war.

When Cebrowski and Garstka wrote about adding information technology to the military’s way of finding and wiping out enemies – the kill chain – to a certain extent, they were right. In 1991, Operation Desert Storm began with a long bombing campaign, then a ground assault. But in Afghanistan and the 2003 Iraq war, soldiers on the ground handed off coordinates to bombers and fighter planes, who attacked with laser- and satellite-guided munitions. The effect was devastating, shrinking the so-called sensor-to-shooter cycle to mere instants. During the first Gulf War, it typically took three days of paper pushing to assign a plane a target to hit. This time around, in parts of Anbar province, it took under 10 minutes. A relatively small number of Special Forces, sent to neuter Scud missile sites, took control of an area about the size of South Carolina – despite being outnumbered on the ground at least 10 to 1, and in some spots 500 to 1. The Iraqis never got off a single Scud.

But for all that, Cebrowski and Garstka weren’t really writing about network-centric warfare at all. They were writing about a single, network-enabled process: killing. In 1998, to a former fighter jock and missile defender, the two things must have seemed the same. A decade later, it’s pretty clear they aren’t – not with American troops nation-building in Afghanistan, peacekeeping in Kosovo, chasing pirates off Djibouti, delivering disaster relief to Indonesia, and fighting insurgents in Iraq.

The fact is, today we rely on our troops to perform all sort of missions that are only loosely connected with traditional combat but are vital to maintaining world security. And it’s all happening while the military is becoming less and less likely to exercise its traditional duties of fighting an old-fashioned war. When is that going to happen again? What potential enemy of the US is going to bother amassing, Saddam-style, army tanks and tens of thousands of troops when the insurgent approach obviously works so well? “The real problem with network-centric warfare is that it helps us only destroy. But in the 21st century, that’s just a sliver of what we’re trying to do,” Nagl says. “It solves a problem I don’t have – fighting some conventional enemy – and helps only a little with a problem I do have: how to build a society in the face of technology-enabled, super-empowered individuals.”

Admiral Arthur Cebrowski died of cancer in 2005. The Office of Force Transformation he headed has been disbanded. John Garstka is still at the Defense Department, working in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Forces Transformation and Resources. It reports to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities, which in turn reports to the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense (Policy). I ask Garstka if he’d like to meet up. “Sure,” he answers. “The Ritz-Carlton does a nice lunch.”

In the Ritz’s oak-paneled dining room a few minutes’ walk from the Pentagon, Garstka sits with his arms folded across his white button-down shirt and his Defense Department badge. He’s not exactly pleased with his new position – the length of his office’s name is perhaps inversely proportional to its influence. “I have to be a good soldier,” he sighs. But he takes comfort in knowing that network-centric warfare is “past the point of no return.” It’s been “demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt” – not just in traditional battles, like the invasion of Iraq, but also during so-called stability operations, like the four-plus years since “mission accomplished.” (He says he’d like to go to Iraq one day to see it all for himself.)

If network-centric warfare has flaws, he adds, don’t blame the concept. The slow-moving Defense Department bureaucracy hasn’t worked quickly enough to roll out wired gear for the troops. Insurgents seized on commercial technology quicker than anticipated. And anyway, Garstka says, people have hijacked the term network-centric warfare to mean all sorts of things, from investing in fiber optics to rejiggering an organizational chart, without really understanding what it means.

But by the time Garstka finishes his 8-ounce Angus cheeseburger, he’s willing to acknowledge some of the potential gaps in the strategy. “I’m not an expert in stability operations,” he admits. Maybe network-centric combat isn’t perfectly suited to the wars we’re fighting now. And it certainly requires a different skill set than counterinsurgency or nation-building. “Stability operations is like soccer. Major combat operations is like football. So it’s almost impossible [for one team] to win both the World Cup and the Super Bowl in the same year,” he tells me. “Not when you’re playing two different games.”

Finally, at the end of our meal, Garstka suggests that the model he helped create will have to change again. “You have to think differently about people,” he says. “You have your social networks and technological networks. You need to have both.”

So the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are updating the playbook. Technological networks like Wal-Mart’s are out. The social network warfare of Nagl, Prior, and Colabuno is in.

The Army has set aside $41 million to build what it calls Human Terrain Teams: 150 social scientists, software geeks, and experts on local culture, split up and embedded with 26 different military units in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next year. The first six HTTs are already on the ground. The idea, basically, is to give each commander a set of cultural counselors, the way he has soldiers giving him combat advice.

In western Afghanistan, for instance, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division was being targeted by rockets, over and over, from the vicinity of a nearby village. But no one from the unit had bothered to ask the townspeople why. When the Human Terrain Team finally paid a visit, villagers complained that the Taliban was around only because the Americans didn’t provide security. And oh, by the way, they really wanted a volleyball net, too. So a net was acquired. Patrols were started. There hasn’t been an attack in two months.

At the HTT’s suggestions, the brigade also invited the province’s head mullah to bless a newly restored mosque on the base. He “was so delighted that he recorded an announcement in Pashto and Dari for radio broadcast denouncing the Taliban,” an after-action report noted. In his initial evaluation, the brigade commander credits the HTT with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he has had to make. It’s a number that even some HTT members have a hard time believing. But the commander insists that 53 of 83 districts in his area now support the local government. Before the HTT arrived, it was only 19.

“We got trapped into thinking that killing/destruction mechanisms of the highest technical quality could replace true human understanding. The vote is in, and we were wrong,” says Steve Fondacaro, a cleft-chinned, chipped-toothed former Special Forces operator who now heads the HTT program. “We had been trying to take the test without doing the course work. That never works in school, and it hasn’t worked any better in war.”

The program is still new, and many questions remain about how it’ll actually operate. Will the social scientists – many of them civilian academics – carry guns? Wear uniforms? Will they be conducting fieldwork or just doing research at their desks? How will these people be trained? What kind of credentials do they need? Will commanders listen to what they have to say? And is it even ethical to use their skills in wartime?

One thing is clear: The Human Terrain Teams will eventually do more than just advise. Soon each team will get a server, a half-dozen laptops, a satellite dish, and software for social-network analysis – to diagram how all of the important players in an area are connected. Digital timelines will mark key cultural and political events. Mapmaking programs will plot out the economic, ethnic, and tribal landscape, just like the command post of the future maps the physical terrain. But those HTT diagrams can never be more than approximations, converting messy analog narratives to binary facts. Warfare will continue to center around networks. But some networks will be social, linking not computers and drones and Humvees but tribes, sects, political parties, even entire cultures. In the end, everything else is just data.

Contributing editor Noah Shachtman wrote about Darpa’s research into human enhancement in issue 15.03. To read his Iraq diary and see photos from his trip, see the Wired News blog Danger Room, which won the Online Journalism Association’s 2007 award for beat reporting.

Source: http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/magazine/15-12/ff_futurewar

Sound Effects

Activists say sonar kills whales. The Navy isn’t listening

Bree Ullman
Apr 25, 2007

The U.S. Navy’s antisubmarine warfare strategists probably wish they could emulate the way whales and dolphins navigate the ocean depths. How they can penetrate, with high-pitched clicks, what the light spectrum cannot. How they can detect without touching, see without seeing. How they can ward off predators, stalk their prey, answer their kind across the distant and dark.

The Navy has none of these talents. Instead, it relies on various types of man-made sonar to monitor key shipping channels. With the advent of the modern, ultra-quiet enemy submarine, the Navy insists its personnel must be trained in the use of certain types of active sonar-the kind of sonar that blasts a pulse thousands of miles across the water and sends a pressure wave ripping through the lungs and brains of whales and dolphins, that causes deafness, disorientation, acute stress, violent behavior and separation of mother and calf pairs. This is only for starters.

‘[Sonar] causes hemorrhaging in their brains and lungs. They’ve found them bleeding from their ears, bleeding from their eyes.’
– Marsha Green, founder of the Ocean Mammal Institute

Underwater, sound increases exponentially, says Jeff Pantukhoff, who spearheads the international Save the Whales Again campaign. ‘When a huge bomb goes off in a city, it’s the pressure wave that causes the damage. The pressure wave from a sonar blast rips and tears apart the cells of marine mammals.’

The Navy admits that in some cases, marine mammals may be sensitive to mid-frequency sonar and that, in at least one stranding case, sonar testing was part of ‘a confluence of factors acting together×that ultimately resulted in the stranding.’ The Navy’s website explains that it is working with ‘independent researchers around the world to better understand what combinations of ocean conditions, geography and sonar may lead to marine mammal disturbance.’

According to Marsha Green, founder of the Ocean Mammal Institute and the International Ocean Noise Coalition, the Navy is making the problem sound more complicated than it is. Sonar doesn’t just disturb whales, she says, ‘It kills them.’

‘It causes hemorrhaging in their brains and lungs. They’ve found them bleeding from their ears, bleeding from their eyes.’

On March 16, Green led a protest in Kahului against what she calls the Navy’s ‘lawlessness.’ Her flyers display beached whales bathed in blood. Any arguments questioning the lethality of active sonar lost their credibility in March 2000, she says, when 17 beaked whales in the Bahamas beached themselves and died after being exposed to 150 to 160 decibel sonar.

Marine Biologist Ken Balcomb, who was living in the Bahamas at the time of the beaked whale stranding, severed the heads of the whales, froze them and had them sent them back to a laboratory in Boston for dissection. He found hemorrhaging in the whales’ inner ears and brains as the result of an intense acoustic event.

‘When a huge bomb goes off in a city, it’s the pressure wave that causes the damage. The pressure wave from a sonar blast rips and tears apart the cells of marine mammals.’
-Jeff Pantukhoff of Save the Whales Again

‘Envision a football squeezed to the size of a ping-pong ball by air pressure alone. Now envision this ping-pong ball compressing and decompressing hundreds of times per second. Imagine this ping-pong ball located in your head, between your two ears,’ Balcomb wrote after he finished dissecting the whales.

Even the Navy issued a statement admitting that its own mid-range tactical sonar was the ‘most plausible cause’ of the incident.

The focus of Green’s Maui protest, which coincided with simultaneous efforts throughout the state, was a January U.S. Department of Defense decision to exempt the Navy from the requirements of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which makes it a crime to harass, kill or injure marine mammals. The two-year exemption will affect all coastal states, but Green says Hawai’i’s humpback whales will be especially hard hit.

Last fall the Navy announced that it would be expanding sonar exercises in Hawai’i. Their FONSI (Finding of No Significant Impact) on the planned exercises indicates that up to 10,000 humpbacks and 900 sperm whales may be exposed to active sonar blasts of between 173 and 195 decibels in the Hawai’i region. They do not expect that this will significantly impact marine life.

Green, an animal behaviorist who studies the impacts of boat engine noise on whales, says that expectation is illogical. The Navy plans to test sonar at an intensity that is between 100,000 and 10 million times louder than the threshold at which a whale begins to avoid noise and as much as 10,000 times louder than the sonar that killed the beaked whales in the Bahamas, she explains.

Green can list the past decade’s headline-grabbing whale strandings from memory. Canary Islands, September 2002: Four hours after military exercises commence in the area, eight beaked whales strand themselves and die. Haro Strait, Washington, May 2003: 11 harbor porpoises strand and die as the U.S.S. Shoup tests its mid-frequency sonar system. North Carolina, January 2005: 37 whales beach themselves and die after Navy vessels on a deep-water training mission off the coast used powerful sonar as part of the exercise. The list goes on.

In Hawai’i, there have been few major stranding incidents. 1n 1998, a spinner dolphin calf, a melonheaded whale calf and a humpback whale calf were found separated from their mothers after scientists hired by the Navy tested low-level low-frequency sonar in the area. In 2004, close to 200 melonheaded whales crowded into the shoreline of Kaua’i’s Hanalei Bay after the use of mid-frequency sonar during RIMPAC (Rim of the Pacific Exercise) exercises.

But most whales injured or killed by sonar will not be found, says Green-they will sink and die rather than beach themselves on shore. She notes that in the Bahamas, the entire population of beaked whales has gone missing since the stranding.

‘The whales that we observed swimming toward shore and stranding were only temporary survivors of an acoustic holocaust that can be likened to fishing with dynamite,’ wrote Balcomb in 2001.

But Green says the problem with the Navy’s FONSI is self-evident. ‘It seems to me that if you seek an exemption from an act (MMPA) that allows for the prosecution of those who kill, harass or injure marine mammals, then you’re admitting that your actions have a high probability of harassing, injuring or killing marine mammals,’ she says. ‘Why would you seek an exemption otherwise?’

The politics of acoustic trauma

According to Lindy Weilgart, a Nova Scotia-based marine biologist, financial control and sometimes overt intimidation have been the Navy’s mode of operation for years. A recent article in OnEarth Magazine calls noise pollution ‘the most contentious issue in marine mammal science today.’ Weilgart says this has less to do with any uncertainty in the data than it does with the level of control the Navy exerts on the scientific community.

The Navy funds 70 percent of the marine mammal research in the United States and 50 percent of marine mammal research in the world, says Weilgart. ‘They brag about this. It’s like they don’t understand the conflict of interest.’

She and her husband, Hal Whitehead, are both professors of marine biology at Dalhousie University. The couple has on several occasions blown the whistle on what they say is a ‘systematic unwillingness to publicly criticize defense-related projects within the U.S. marine-mammal research community,’ according to the Journal of Marine Mammal Science.

At a Navy-sponsored panel of scientists discussing the effects of noise pollution, Whitehead once commented that the situation at hand was akin to a ‘special session on lung cancer held at a professional conference of oncologists funded by the tobacco industry.’

On Weilgart’s website, she has posted an e-mail exchange between Navy officers that sheds some light on the Navy’s opinion of the role of a Navy research scientist. Released to the public as part of a National Resource Defense Council lawsuit, the document reveals a conversation between a representative of the operational branch of the U.S. Navy and an official of the Office of Naval Research (ONR), upon reading some critical public comments from ONR-sponsored marine mammal scientists.

The Navy representative describes the scientists’ findings as ‘negative and out of the box’ and remarks that ‘the proper way to bitch is via the sponsor.’ The ONR official describes making a ‘scorching phone call’ to set them straight. ‘I think they had some inkling that they might be about to take our money and make themselves look good to the enviros too,’ he wrote. ‘Scientists are sometimes like that, they’ll “give their honest, sometimes harsh critique without knowing any of the politics or circumstances”‘

But Weilgart says marine biologists actually understand the ‘politics and circumstances’ quite well. Or at least, well enough to know that scientists whose research undermines their sponsors are asking for a funding slash. ‘The Navy has a chilling effect on scientists who might otherwise be inclined to testify against their programs,’ says Weilgart. ‘What we’re really trying to address is an entire system that places scientists in a bind of conflicting loyalties.’

Will sonar make us more secure?

Many of sonar’s proponents choose not to argue the finer points of marine science, and instead insist that human lives should trump environmental concerns. In a March 13 online chat session with the public hosted by the Honolulu Advertiser, Admiral Gary Roughead, then-commander of the Pacific fleet, championed active sonar as ‘our most effective detection method,’ arguing that we ‘must be able to train using that system if we are to operate against these increasingly quiet and deadly submarines.’

In July 2006, when federal judge Florence Marie Cooper issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Navy’s exercises in Hawai’i, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a DC-based conservative think tank, was reeling.

‘Our [battlefield dominance] shouldn’t be given away to protect whales,’ he wrote in a Chicago Sun-Times editorial ‘If we forget that, someday one of our enemies-one who won’t care how many whales it kills as long as plenty of Americans die too-will eventually remind us.’

It is a potentially persuasive line of argument. If the use of active sonar can be traced to a genuine need to protect the United States against immediate security threats, then doesn’t the prospect of a few dead whales lose its shock value?

It might, says Weilgart, if the military could provide some specifics. ‘Give me something I can grasp onto here,’ she says. ‘Show me an Al-Qaeda submarine. Tell me about an instance where an enemy sub could only be detected with active sonar. They act like they can’t protect our men and women without it, but they don’t show us why.’

Pantukhoff says the Navy doesn’t provide the evidence because it simply isn’t there. ‘The Navy hasn’t faced threat of attack on a U.S. submarine since the Cold War,’ he says. In fact, the Navy doesn’t explicitly claim that we are under the threat of an attack, but rather that in shipping channels around the world, submarines ‘could be used in the future to disrupt peace and stability by interrupting transportation and commerce.’ The Navy stresses the importance of keeping the oceans open for oil tankers and merchant fleets.

Regardless of its purpose, active sonar is ‘stupid technology,’ says Pantukhoff, who backs his claim with some unlikely sources. Testifying before Congress in 2000, Charles Bernard, former director of the U.S. Naval Weapons Lab, argued that active sonar makes ‘no sense’ because it has the disadvantage of highlighting the source vessel and other U.S. ships and submarines, compromising our own security and placing our own personnel in jeopardy.’

The same year, Navy Rear Admiral Malcolm Fages testified that active sonar was simply unnecessary. ‘The Navy now has the ability to detect quiet submarines in littoral waters using passive listening systems at considerable distances,’ he said.

War games in the whale nursery again?

While the international community may finally be paying heed to environmentalist badgering, ocean noise activists say Hawai’i’s efforts to protect the state’s marine life are flagging.

In July 2006 in the channel between Maui and Big Island, the Navy scheduled a nighttime choke-point exercise as part of the month-long RIMPAC war games conducted every other year in the Hawaiian Islands. The day before the scheduled blast, researchers who were monitoring RIMPAC noticed a pod of hundreds of melonheaded whales in the blasting zone. They radioed the Navy vessel and asked them to cancel the exercises.

At night, says Green, it would have been impossible to see whether whales were within range. Green says the researchers did not detect any sonar blasts that night and assumes that the warning convinced the Navy to hold off. ‘In reality, I think [the researchers] saved their butts,’ she says, ‘because let me tell you, the whole world was watching.’

‘Show me an Al-Qaeda submarine. Tell me about an instance where an enemy sub could only be detected with active sonar.’ -Marine biologist Lindy Weilgart

RIMPAC has been subject to intense public criticism for decades. In Hawai’i, many associate the war games with the bombing of Kaho’olawe, which was for years a major component of RIMPAC. Green says the non-incident of 2006 highlights the Navy’s unwillingness to take basic precautions that would lessen the likelihood of marine mammal fatalities. That the Navy insists on testing active sonar at night is telling, she says, but more telling is the fact that they are testing sonar in the prime breeding ground for humpback whales.

Encompassing approximately 1,218 square nautical miles, the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary is the winter home to two thirds of the North Pacific’s humpbacks. The whales return each year to breed, calve and nurse their young in the warm, shallow waters of the world’s most isolated island archipelago. But in these very waters, between the islands of Maui, Lana’i, and Kaho’olawe, lies the U.S. Shallow Water Submarine Torpedo Training Range. There, the Navy has practiced antisubmarine warfare since 1988 with the aid of 52 hydrophones and eight acoustic projectors affixed to the ocean floor. Meanwhile, off Kaua’i’s north shore, NPAL has transmitted a source level sound of 195 decibels intermittently for the past 10 years. This Navy program is intended to measure the temperature of ocean waters, and the sonar travels 5,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean.

‘The Navy is really out of control,’ says Weilgart. ‘No one is saying shut down the Navy or stop all exercises altogether. We’re just saying do a better job, find a better spot. Why do they have to train in the Hawaiian Islands? Why do they have to train in a marine mammal breeding ground?

‘They could go 700 miles off- shore to conduct sonar exercises, and it would be much safer,’ adds Green.

But the military, she says, is not the sanctuary’s only threat. Every January, Green takes a group of students to Maui for an intensive fieldwork course on vehicle noise and marine life. The class has taken on a larger scope as Green has become increasingly disenchanted with the sanctuary’s failure to deliver on its goals.

In addition to the sonar exercises conducted in the sanctuary, marine mammals face boat engines and generators that produce sounds loud enough to travel for miles underwater, possibly disrupting whales ability to hear background chorusing or social sounds between mothers and calves.

The University of Hawai’i uses air guns to map the ocean floor, which produce sounds (up to 240 decibels) that are deadly to all marine mammals in proximity. Reports of boat collisions are increasing, and cruise ships still dump several hundred thousand gallons of sewage, oily bilge water, film processing and hair styling chemicals each year.

Frustrated with the sanctuary’s inaction, this year Green’s students took to the streets. Outside the national headquarters of the whale sanctuary in Maui, the students, along with about 20 other concerned citizens picketed outside the sanctuary headquarters on South Kihei Road.

Sanctuary director Alan Tom defended the organization in a Maui News article that followed the protest. When the sanctuary was established by then-Gov. Ben Cayetano, Tom explained, ‘He wanted the sanctuary to be involved in education and research. He didn’t want additional regulation on ocean activities. That was something he made very clear.’

He told reporters that he appreciated the interest but said he thought the students were in the wrong place. ‘I’m glad to see there are people who want to make changes. It doesn’t happen overnight. We would need data. If someone proposes a regulation, the [Sanctuary Advisory] Council will ask, where is the data to support that regulation?’

Green can only shake her head as she reads and rereads the article. ‘What do they mean they don’t have the data? They can contact experts. They can get the data themselves. They can.’

She shoves the newspaper away and sighs. ‘But it (the sanctuary) makes people feel that something is being done. It gives a false sense of security. In that aspect it really is quite insidious.’
Keeping up with California

Despite her frustrations with the sanctuary, Green says Tom is right about one thing: If there is to be any reprieve for Hawai’i’s marine mammals, the state will need to be involved.

How exactly does a state protect its coastal zone from a federal government program? They can start by hiring a lawyer. In California, they already have.

On March 22, the California Coastal Commission filed suit against the U.S. Navy in Federal District Court over the Navy’s decision not to comply with commission conditions that would help protect marine mammals from harmful impacts associated with use of undersea sonar during training exercises. But only the commission’s budget, explains director Peter Douglas, is subject to California state influence.

Hawai’i does not have its own coastal commission, and the Hawai’i Coastal Management Zone personnel are based in the state Office of Planning. The organization is subject to both state and federal influences; disputing the authority of either has not been their role in the past.

Still, Pantukhoff urges the state to follow California’s lead. ‘Lingle needs to take action here. If there were ever an issue that is worth distancing herself from the Bush administration on, it’s this one.’

According to Pantukhoff, even those with strictly practical concerns should realize that protecting the marine life of the nation’s only ocean state is a worthwhile enterprise.

‘People around Hawai’i need to know what’s at stake here,’ he says. Even the economy here is dependent on the health of the marine environment. We have no idea what collateral damage the sonar might do, what the long-term effects might be.’

Contact

The Whaleman Foundation [www.savethewhalesagain.com]

Ocean Mammal Institute [www.oceanmammalinst.org]