11/09/12 – Alfred W. McCoy – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, November 9, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 now, going back to 2003.
And tonight's guest is Alfred McCoy.
He is a J.R.W. Smale Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and of course he's the author of many important books, including The Politics of Heroin, A Question of Torture, Torture and Impunity, and the latest Endless Empire, Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, and America's Decline.
He's got this brand-new one at Tom Dispatch, which they're also rerunning today at antiwar.com.
It's called Beyond Bayonets and Battleships, of course running under Tom Englehardt's name today at antiwar.com.
Beyond Bayonets and Battleships, Space Warfare, and the Future of U.S. Global Power.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
Fine, Scott.
Happy to be here.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So it's the year 2025, and there's an American triple canopy of advanced surveillance.
What is a triple canopy?
You know, what the United States has been developing silently and secretly over the past decade is a triple canopy of aerospace power that's going to reach from stratosphere to exosphere.
And close to the Earth, as we all know, we have Reaper and Predator drones.
The New York Times carried a dispatch today on the front page that Iran has attacked a U.S. drone over the Persian Gulf.
So we built an armada of drones that are close to Earth, the lowest tier of a space canopy.
Higher up, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Defense Department, DARPA, the kind of experimental work inside the Pentagon, has been developing some new weapons that are going to be flying at about 20 miles up.
One of them, which has actually had two tests, is the Falcon hypersonic vehicle.
That can fly at 13,000 miles an hour.
It can carry a massive payload.
It can reach anywhere in the Earth in two hours, most places in the Earth within an hour.
Its two tests have crashed, but in the process they achieved that speed of 13,000 miles an hour, which is 20 times the speed of sound.
And they recovered sufficient electronic data, they think, to solve the aerodynamic problems.
So we're going to have the Falcon vehicle.
There's also testing for solar-powered vehicles like the Vulture, which is a riskier technology.
It's been, I guess, four generations, the last being the Helios, that reached nearly 100,000 feet elevation, which is the highest flight by any vehicle.
The Vulture, as planned, would be a 400-foot wingspan covered with solar panels allowing it to fly continuously for five miles at very high altitudes in that range from probably 70,000 to 100,000 feet elevation.
And then at the outer tier in the exosphere, about 200 to 250 miles out there in space, the X-37B has completed its successful test.
In June of this year, the second prototype of the X-37B landed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California after a successful 15-month mission.
And this is a cute little creature.
It looks like a Challenger vehicle, space vehicle, except it's only 29 feet long.
And it can fly about space like a drone.
It's a space drone.
It has a capacious cargo bay for either launching satellites or missiles to strike at enemy satellites.
In effect, the successful launch of the X-37B as a space drone represents the start of the full weaponization of space.
Well, you know, that little canopy, too, reminds me of the rainforest, right, where the sun is blocked out because there's so many leaves up there.
This could be literally a triple canopy of lethal drones over the entire planet.
It is.
It's being built, and it's real.
It's also being integrated seamlessly with the other invisible dimension of future warfare, which is cyberspace and then global biometric identification.
You may have noticed that in the third and last of the recent presidential debates, when Mitt Romney said that we have fewer Navy ships than any time since 1917, that was the one moment in the three exchanges between the two candidates in which Barack Obama turned completely dismissive and looked at Mitt Romney as if he were almost a child and with absolute condescension said to him, you know, we have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them.
We have these ships that go underwater.
They're called nuclear submarines.
He said it's not a matter of a game of battleship or counting ships.
It's a question of our capabilities.
And then later on in the debate, he hinted what those capabilities might be when he said, he called the Joint Chiefs of Staff to think about new ways of making us safe.
He said it's time to think about cyberwarfare.
It's time to talk about space.
And not a single commentator picked up on the profound significance of the president's words.
If you look at the 2012 defense budget prepared by the Obama administration, he's proposed and is affecting a 14% cutback in infantry and ground forces.
And simultaneously, a substantial expansion of cyberspace and of space warfare.
Indeed, in 2009, President Obama, as Commander-in-Chief, presided over the creation of the Cyber Command, giving cyberspace the same status as a domain, that's a military term, of conflict, along with the three traditional domains of the 20th century, air, land, and sea.
So now cyberwarfare is an official domain.
And there's a Cyber Warfare Command in Washington, D.C., and at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, there are now 7,000 employees in a cyberwarfare center.
And as we've seen, we've already fought the first U.S. battle of cyberwarfare with the attack on the Iranian centrifuge in the Stuxnet virus.
So we're there, and we've built a global biometric capacity and a global cyber surveillance capacity.
And we're now integrating that into what's called a seamless architecture, where you're going to have global biometrics of instant iris identification and facial identification technology so that as people move through any kind of populated space, moreover, you're going to have the capacity to identify, we already have the capacity to identify individuals through a variety of technologies, heat signature from satellites, and that's going to be all integrated along with this triple-tier aerospace canopy into a global system of surveillance, which means warfare is going to migrate from the conflict of soldiers and vehicles on the face of battle.
Those industrial BMS like tanks and battleships and heavy artillery will fade.
And we're moving into this advanced age of information warfare.
And that's what Obama was talking about in that debate, and that's in fact what the U.S. military is doing.
And what's surprising is that almost no American is aware of this.
And except for one or two commentators, nobody understands this.
It's still all hopeless, right?
I mean, that's the joke of all this.
There's a new story today about how outraged the people of the Pakistani borderlands are that Obama got reelected.
It's a Reuters story.
And what it says in there is that the drone war is simply helping to recruit more Taliban.
So, of course, to the American, especially to the guys at the DARPA office, to them the solution to everything is more microchips, more precision, more laser guidance, more surveillance, more iris scans, more network science.
And then, you know, like Bob McNamara, somehow the computer is going to spit out the right answer of who to kill.
But in reality, it just doesn't work.
These people are basically clowns.
I mean, they're lethal, terribly, horribly dangerous clowns, aren't they?
Well, you know, they have succeeded in creating a technology that does work.
I mean, they are building a global architecture of force projection in space and cyberspace that will have a formidable, unprecedented technological capacity for both surveillance and for information warfare.
We're not far away from being able to blind an entire army on the battlefield, take out their command, their control, their communications, so that they're just, you know, either sailing in circles.
We can knock out avionics.
Yeah, we're going to, so that the aircraft, you know, it can take off, but it can't fly because it can't navigate.
Yeah, we're going to be able to do that.
But the wrinkle in the application of technology to project force in foreign terrains is always, of course, how it impacts upon the complex source of formation where we're operating.
Technology allows you to kill, to strike, but it doesn't overwhelm, doesn't change the human equation.
And in our first development of this during Vietnam, where we applied computerization to both pacification in South Vietnam and the creation of electronic battlefield in southern Laos to stop trucks coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, both technologies, in a certain sense, generated data, you know, gave us a capacity for computerized strikes.
But in both cases, the human equation defeated those technologies.
And I think, you know, the Air Force became aware that its bold attempt at nearly a billion dollars a year to lace the Ho Chi Minh Trail with 20,000 acoustic motion ammonia sensors and then to pick up all that data in EC-121 aircraft and transfer it to the most powerful IBM mainframes and to construct a moving worm on an IBM visual display unit to give you a sense of where you thought that truck convoy was moving, the technology actually did that.
But, of course, the North Vietnamese knew exactly what the technology was, and they manipulated the situation so that the Air Force thought they were destroying 80% of enemy trucks, and the way they said they only lost 15%, and the CIA estimate was about 20%.
And in 1972, the North Vietnamese Army moved 100,000 troops with tanks, trucks, and heavy artillery right through that electronic battlefield undetected.
At that point, the U.S. Pacific Air Force proclaimed that the experiment had failed.
And the same thing happened in South Vietnam.
We built this massive Phoenix program of computerized data collection.
We had 40 provincial interrogation centers across the length and breadth of South Vietnam.
Each one was staffed by provincial reconnaissance units, which were tattooed killers, paid for and recruited by the CIA.
And we killed 41,000 South Vietnamese.
The only problem was, according to top CIA veterans, one guy, Ralph McGee, said never in the history of the Phoenix operation in South Vietnam did we get a single top Viet Cong cadre.
Okay, well, others indicate that we may have gotten a handful.
But the fact is, we killed 41,000 people, and we didn't kill any of the top cadre.
What happened?
Well, my guess is that enemy, let's just say Vietnamese counterintelligence, clogged our killing machine with either neutralists or antagonists.
And so, you know, we killed the wrong people.
We alienated the South Vietnamese population, and we lost the war.
Yeah, so with this kind of technology, you're right, Scott, it can cut both ways.
One, it gives us unprecedented and formidable capacity of a global architecture of power with bells and whistles that are just truly amazing.
On the second hand, when you insert it into a complex, dense social formation like the tribal provinces in northwestern Pakistan, you're alienating the population, people living under the constant fear and threat of death from the skies, over which they have no control.
Naturally, naturally, I mean, anybody would, are living in fear and hatred.
And so we're alienating the very population that's generating the insurgents.
So we, yeah, sure, we can swat a few flies, we can kill the guys on our list, but then we're creating an environment where many more will come forward.
And I guess why I call them clowns is because they can't seem to realize this, right?
For them, it's always just one more invention is going to save the day.
It's going to, you know, we'll be able to tie up the last of our loose ends and solve all our problems if we can just get, you know, a quad core on the job here, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it cuts both ways, okay?
What I find, you know, interesting about it, kind of extraordinary in a sense, is that from, you know, really for the past century, every defeat, every stunning, amazing defeat that this information architecture suffers, on the one hand, like the whole Vietnam War, is a stunning blow to American power that cripples the U.S. capacity to operate internationally for at least a decade after the Vietnam War.
And yet, on the other hand, there seems to be almost an inbuilt engineering that transforms every defeat into an experiment that leads to an improved version of the technology.
Let's take the drones.
Most Americans are completely unaware that because of the massive scale of the air war in South Vietnam, it's the biggest air war in human history, that the U.S. experimented with drones.
And we turned a dumb fire drone, okay, which is basically a rocket that flies along, you know, off a ship and the ships shoot at it for target practice, okay?
That's a target drone.
There's something called the Ryan Firebee target drone that we had.
By the end of the war, we had transformed that into an agile drone capable of flying 2,500 miles with low-resolution television navigation.
And we had at least 3,500 drone missions over southern China and North Vietnam collecting intelligence and engaging in electronic warfare.
It was, you know, extraordinary acceleration during the Vietnam War.
And then there was a 20-year hiatus when the technology was put on the shelf and it was revived recently.
So the Reaper and Predator really came out of the Vietnam War illustrating this kind of capacity of the engineering to keep improving, keep rationalizing, perfecting itself.
And so when you look forward into about the third decade of this century, sometime around 2025, 2030, when this technology will be coming online, what it comes with is a choice between the possibility of an information architecture of unprecedented power that is going to give the United States kind of a veto over the changing world in excess of its economic power, which is clearly declining relatively in the world economy.
Or alternatively, it's going to give us an instrument that, to the limitations of the technology to the complex human equation worldwide, is going to incline us to another disaster like Vietnam.
So it's really kind of a question which is going to come first, technological power or the imperial hubris of a sense of technological omniscience and omnipotence that will incline us to disaster.
Isn't it ironic too?
They feel their economic hegemony slipping and so then they just double down on the militarism, which is of course the cause of all what ails us.
America would still be the richest, not necessarily most powerful nation, but the richest nation in the world if we would quit trying to be so powerful all the time and give up all our militarism and just be a normal country in a normal time and then, you know, make things and sell them for a living, you know?
Even in the realm of technology, the overemphasis with two wars in the Middle East and the rest on militarism has meant we've been kind of eating the economic seed corn.
We have not been tending to the fundamentals of the educational intellectual infrastructure that sustains this.
Right now, we are the world's preeminent aerospace power and Russia's kind of faded.
They were a very effective competitor, but we have a kind of older generation of engineers and scientists that are running our aerospace technology.
And in 2009, there's an international test, quite objective, of the capacity of 15-year-old high school students and the world was shocked when a group of 15-year-old Shanghai high school students placed number one in this test and U.S. cohorts placed number 24 in math and number 31 in science.
So you might say, okay, so who cares?
A bunch of 15-year-old kids didn't really perform very well in a test, but, you know, the problem is around 2025 when this technology is coming online, those Shanghai kids, those Chinese kids of which the Shanghai group is a representative, they're going to be in there about 25 and 30 years old and they're going to be China's generation of super smart, highly educated, aerospace scientists and engineers.
Meanwhile, the generation, the current generation of aging scientists and engineers in the United States, they will have long been retired and they will not have been replaced by their equals.
And this technology requires constant research, constant correction and invention.
So even as we're building it and launching it, we're losing the educational infrastructure needed to sustain and perfect it.
And China is coming online as a competitor in these same two realms, cyberspace and space.
By 2020, China is going to become the first nation other than the United States to have an operational system of global satellites for telecommunications, intelligence, weather, and then, of course, command and control.
And in 2007, China shot down one of its own satellites with a surface-to-air missile, indicating that the age of space warfare is upon us.
So even as we're building this architecture, we're losing the scientific capacity to maintain and perfect it in competition with our likely rival, China.
And the decline is, I think, manifest in another realm, worldwide patents.
There's actually a reasonably objective worldwide patent registry.
From 2002 to 2008, the United States remained number two in worldwide patents, but we had a 40% increase in our number of patents.
China came up to number three with an 800% increase in its patents.
And in a couple of years, they're going to be surpassing us in that important index of scientific and technological innovation.
So, in effect, eating the sea corn, neglecting the infrastructure of communications in the United States, neglecting the infrastructure of education, drawing down our basic scientific research, beggaring our universities and our K-12 education system, as we've been building these amazing platforms of military power, that produces short-term power and long-term decline.
Well, you mentioned earlier on the show about the American people just kind of not being even conscious of it.
Things are proceeding so rapidly, and I thought there was one very important phrase in your article about, you're quoting one of these guys from the Pentagon saying, you know, the Reaper drone that we have now, which is the improvement on the Predator, I guess, that's just a Ford Model T.
In other words, we are only just getting started.
And I just wonder, like, how much fire are we playing with here?
Does anybody really imagine they're going to be in control of tens or hundreds of thousands of armed drones around the world?
The system is moving to robotic controls.
Because the architecture is so complex, the amount of information coming in is so massive.
It's coming in from data mining on the Internet, visual information, all the images from the drones.
Right now we have a geospatial center in Washington, D.C., that has a budget of about 10,000 employees in one of the largest federal buildings in the United States that's trying to control this information flow.
And it's becoming very clear that robotics, in terms of repairing, repositioning, maneuvering satellites, right now every drone is flown by a pilot remotely.
We're now training more drone pilots than we are fighter and bomber pilots combined.
So we're moving in that direction.
But we're eventually, particularly if we move to the solar-powered drones that are flying for five years at a time, that will probably require robotic controls to keep that drone flying on course.
So you're right.
I mean, we are building a system of incredible complexity with robotic controls, which, of course, has the threat and the risk of malfunctioning and machine error, potentially compounded by human error, for the kind of disaster scenario that you've constructed.
We haven't yet built that architecture.
We're building it, and we don't know quite what the shape is going to be.
It's amazing, back to the part about how there's not really a public discussion about this at all.
I mean, we're talking about, for real, turning the page of human history here from the era before we had killer robots in the sky, always and forever, and then after.
I've lectured on this on a couple of occasions, and I've asked for a show of hands.
How many people have ever heard of the X-37B?
Nobody.
Nobody's ever heard of it.
Unlike, let's say, the space launches of the past, which were highly televised and enormously publicized, the two launches of the X-37B over the past two years, the two prototypes, were done very quietly, almost secretly.
Their successful completion of those missions was the subject of very terse press releases.
There's no discussion of this and the implications of it for U.S. global power.
But the X-37B, to me, represents the dawn of the space age, the space warfare age.
And as a national conversation, we need to be having this, because along with this incredible power, which is now in excess of the restraints of international law, we need to be having a conversation.
For example, President Obama and his successors now have decided that we have the right, because we're the sole-drawn power, to decide if somebody's going to live or die.
We arrogate to ourselves the right to kill somebody from the sky, to fire a lethal shot.
And there's no admission so far that there's, first of all, collateral damage, and there's no admission that the review procedure on the individual who's been judged, convicted, and executed was worthy of that, and that this is, in fact, a legally justifiable procedure for doing so.
So here we are, exercising the most extreme act of the state, the death penalty, without any discussion, without any judicial oversight, without an apparatus of control.
We're into two domains in which there is no law.
Okay, cyberspace, what constitutes aggression in cyberspace?
If a foreign power crashes the Pentagon's computers or downs a U.S. aircraft by hacking into the navigation system, is that an act of war?
Okay, we don't have a rubric for that.
Whereas if you cross a boundary, a physical boundary, that's an invasion of a country.
That's a violation of a nation's sovereignty.
Similarly, there is no treaty determining how high is sovereign airspace.
In 1910, there was an aviation conference in Paris, the dawn of the aviation age, in which the powers expressly discussed, okay, how high is sovereignty?
How far up does a nation's sovereignty go?
Clearly it must have some limit.
Nobody could agree, and so therefore there is no limit.
So I think at this point, if you ask the Pentagon, some lawyer in the Pentagon, I think a puckish Pentagon lawyer might reply, you know, sovereignty is only as high as you can enforce it.
Right now, when we have, you know, a rocket that comes down, okay, and it comes down from, you know, 250, 300 miles out, and it enters the atmosphere, and then it approaches Earth, as we all know, it's crossing dozens of countries.
We don't ask for prior permission from those countries to do that, okay?
With the Challenger, when they landed, they crossed the, you know, above the extent of the, in theory, the vertical sovereignty of dozens.
We didn't bother to ask permission.
There is no agreement on how high is sovereignty.
So our architecture of this triple aerospace canopy, at this point, has no international legal restraint, just like cyber warfare.
So we're, once again, in military domains beyond the rubric and reach of law.
Okay, Dr. McCoy, I've already kept you way over time.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
As always.
Bye-bye now.
Okay, everybody, that is the great Alfred McCoy.
He's a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
McCoy is also the author of The Politics of Heroin, A Question of Torture, which, that book is just devastating, and Torture and Impunity, which I haven't read yet.
And then the brand newest one is Endless Empire, Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, and America's Decline.
All right, y'all, that's anti-war radio for this evening.
My full interview archives are available at scotthorton.org, and we'll see you back here next Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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