"I was taught in the sixth grade that we had a standing army of just over a hundred thousand men and that the generals had nothing to say about what was done in Washington. I was taught to be proud of that and to pity Europe for having more than a million men under arms and spending all their money on airplanes and tanks. I simply never unlearned junior civics. I still believe in it. I got a very good grade."

—Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007, quoted by James Lundquist in Kurt Vonnegut (1971)


William Arkin of the Washington Post, who's great on all things war machine, wrote the following article, below, in 2005, on the U'S. military's 2006 "preparedness exercise," also dubbed Ardent Sentry; I couldn't find anything by Arkin so far on the current exercise, Ardent Sentry Northern-Edge 07, which started two days ago (and which you can read more about in Rosebud 95 and 94 below).

I guess what seems different about this current exercise is its location, of course, as well as its larger scale and increased focus on attacks by nuclear and biological weapons. The military also seems to be in a great push for cross-departmental coordination; I found a few Power Points online (what would the military do without Power Point?) which emphasize the way in which the exercise will serve as a means of testing and improving "synchronization across the government," which they seem very big on.

One Power Point, from the "Exercise Synchronization Working Group" at Camp Robinson, in Arizona, made no pretense of the exercise being about anything but a nuclear "accident," at least as far as their sector is concerned. Under "Objectives," it said, "Exercise national and operational level Command and Control during a Nuclear Weapons Accident."

What I think is most important is looking at this material is that the public become aware, through the writings of people like Arkin, who are rare, of the vast military maneuvers we have going on and of the the vast sums being spent on them. It's madness. It's a separate reality that's hiding in plain sight. In a mad, dark place, in America.

Imagine if all this time and effort and capital were going into, not doomsday scenarios, but schools and hospitals and the development of the infrastructures of the countries where terrorists are breeding. It would protect us so much more, not to mention be the right thing to do.

Also rent, if you haven't seen it already, "Why We Fight."


William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

Bird Flu, Hurricanes, the Mexico Problem
Code Name of the Week: Ardent Sentry
Despite the administration's politically motivated push for a strong federal government response to a possible influenza pandemic and the president's love affair with all things military, the Pentagon is planning to pay only perfunctory attention to bird flu in its largest 2006 homeland defense excercise.
Ardent Sentry 06 scheduled for next May, will take place under the conditions of an avian influenza epidemic in Asia, Africa, and South America, but the war game itself is centered on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction events in Maine and Michigan, and a Pneumonic Plague epidemic that leads to a border control crisis as Mexicans begin streaming north to seek treatment.
Oh, and there's a hurricane -- "Alex" -- thrown in just for good measure.
No lessons learned here. The federal government may be charged with securing the domestic needs of the American people, but it is only when it comes to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction that the administration really cares.
Ardent Sentry is a joint U.S.-Canadian homeland security war game focused on "defense support to civil authorities." It is co-sponsored by the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) under the Joint Chiefs of State national exercise program. It will be held concurrently with the Department of Homeland Security exercise Top Officials ("TOPOFF") IV, a congressionally mandated event, and will primarily be played in Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Washington states in the United States, and New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario in Canada.
According to NORTHCOM briefing materials prepared for Ardent Sentry, the exercise is primarily intended to test responses to asymmetric threats to the United States and Canada. The exercise "objectives" are to validate a new version of CONPLAN 0500, the overall domestic weapons of mass destruction response plan; and to practice the logistics and command and control for the deployment of multiple rapid response military task forces to separate parts of the country.
Typical of all large scale homeland security exercises, Ardent Sentry includes all the simultaneous boilerplate events -- Pneumonic plague, a chlorine gas terrorist attack, crash of an airplane into a bridge in Michigan, a Sulfuric Acid leak at a rail yard, multiple radiological dirty bombs going off in American cites, blocked tunnels, large numbers of casualties, "widespread panic and displacement." The early season Category IV "Alex" is thrown in to threaten the mid-Atlantic, but only to justify calling the exercise "all hazards."
It is the southern scenario that is the most compelling and the most sensitive in Ardent Sentry. The Arizona scenario includes an act of biological terrorism in Mexico, with pneumonic plague spreading throughout the northern part of the country. This results in a mass migration of Mexican nationals across the southern border into the U.S. as people seek medical assistance.
With the migration also comes "infiltration of universal adversary terrorists," according to exercise scenario briefings. The straight out of Hollywood exercise scenario posits that the epidemic is intentionally started south of the border merely so that the universal adversary can use the panic "as cover to facilitate ingress" into Arizona.
The universal adversary -- which I described earlier in a blog on exercise Northern Edge -- is a concoction used in domestic war games to represent a vaguely plausible Detroit-based Islamic al Qaeda.
In Ardent Sentry, the Mexican border becomes a war zone and not only is sealed, but the military is called upon to supplement the Arizona National Guard and Department of Homeland Security. NORTHCOM's new Joint Task Force North (JTF-N) is placed in charge of the border war. JTF-N is ostensibly the counter-drug organization on the southern border, but it is increasingly also a military command charged with all elements of "transnational" threats to the United States.
It is a new military organization charged with seeing all things Mexican as a threat.
Though NORTHCOM's area of operations includes both Canada and Mexico, the Mexico elements of the exercise scenario are particularly sensitive. Exercise materials explicitly caution players to avoid any unclassified mention of either Mexico or Sonora State opposite Arizona.
Frankly I don't know whether NORTHCOM's Mr. Magoo approach to the bird flu scare is good news or bad. It could on the one hand be insightful political recognition that President Bush is only gaga about the bird flu pandemic as a diversion, and that as soon as Plame Gate passes and annoying New Orleans is pacified, the White House will go back to fighting wars and neglecting domestic affairs, the Bush specialty.
It could just be that when it comes to domestic response, the military mindset naturally gravitates towards war, hence the sealing of the Mexican border, the attacks, the tricky logistics, the multiple commands. But it could also reflect the military's ambivalence about being given more responsibility for domestic affairs. Holding war games with federal, state and local authorities that focus on the worst possible scenarios reinforces the point that the military should only to be used under the most catastrophic circumstances at home.
On the other hand, NORTHCOM's almost exclusive focus on spectacular WMD events and terrorism reflects a debilitating crutch. The mindset, the preparations, and the assumptions associated with terrorism and WMD have the effect of suppressing the issues associated with natural disasters like Katrina or avian flu, should one in the future become so destructive that the military would have to be call upon.
I would much prefer to see the military exercise really scary natural disaster and pandemic scenarios with State officials, and to have the process be transparent enough for the public and Congress to debate the implications of President Bush's foggy plan for quarantine and martial law. But for now, while real people in Louisiana, Mississippi and New Orleans still wait for government assistance, while Floridians sit in the dark and Indiana reels after a catastrophic tornado, the military prefers to play war with Mexico.