Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Graham Stephen

Author:Graham, Stephen [Graham, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781844677627
Publisher: Norton
Published: 2011-11-01T05:00:00+00:00

BAGHDAD IS EVERYWHERE

Twenty-first century urban-warfare training cities have a different relationship to political violence than do the atom-bombed suburban homes or fire-bombed tenements and rice-paper structures of the twentieth century. No longer is the simulation designed to explore outright urban annihilation through total war. Now the purpose is to hone skills of occupation, counterinsurgency warfare, and urban remodelling via expeditionary, colonial war.

A bizarre, reverse urban beauty contest emerges here – a mirror image to the more familiar marketing campaigns through which real cities parade themselves through gentrification, cultural planning, and boosterism. For the new training cities, the marks of success are decay, collapse, and squalor. A US squadron commander named Colonel James Cashwell reported recently, after an exercise in one such city within George Air Force base in California, that ‘the advantage of the base is that it is ugly, torn up, all the windows are broken [and trees] have fallen down in the street. It’s perfect for the replication of a war-torn city’.10 Ted Leza, who runs the US Baumholder training site in Germany, reflects that soldiers using his site have repeatedly asked that it be populated by various dead and living animals to help simulate life in Iraqi cities. So, along with realistic Baghdad-style orange-and-white taxis, a simulated taxi stand, and a market, Baumholder‘s operators are ‘trying to get that for them. I don’t know if we’ll get a camel. Maybe a donkey, goats … stuff like that’.11 Urban-warfare training sites also integrate multi-sensory systems for projecting warlike special effects into the ersatz buildings, streets and structures. ‘We have a wide variety of special effects smells we can do’, says Manuel Chaves, who runs the special-effects suite built into the site at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. ‘For instance: coffee, apple pie, dead bodies, burning rubber, diesel fumes. I can do nine different buildings, nine different smells. Generally, if it’s a burning building, we put something really nasty in there like burning bodies’.12

A rather different complex, built (with unintended irony) from some twenty-three thousand cluster-bomb containers discarded during the Vietnam War, is emerging at Yodaville, in the Arizona desert (Figure 6.1) This site, which opened in 1998, is the first simulated global South city created specifically for live urban bombing and close support training.13 The complex is said to have 178 ‘buildings’, 131 personnel targets, thirty-one vehicle targets, and streetlights. According to a RAND report, from the ground it looks ‘like stacks of shot-up shipping containers’; from the viewpoint of the fighter pilots who continually target it with cluster and precision munitions, however, it is ‘convincingly urban’.14 Mark Shaffer, a reporter with the Arizona Republic, notes that the site has a ‘decidedly Third World’ feel: ‘A mock soccer field is painted green on the edge of town. Streets are narrow. There’s a large shantytown. And talk about ambience. The searingly hot desert teems with sidewinders and an occasional scrub creosote bush or cactus’.15

Apparently, local right-wing militia groups – never slow to jump to conspiratorial conclusions – are convinced that the

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