ALEC Exposed
Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025
Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people’s health
A NATIONAL STRATEGIC NARRATIVE
The Kill Team
The Man Who Poisoned Us All
CONCLUSIONS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION
The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy
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ALEC Exposed
A collaboration between The Nation and the Center For Media and Democracy exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Introduction by John Nichols – The Nation – July 12, 2011
The Koch Connection by Lisa Graves – The Nation – July 12, 2011
Introduction
“Never has the time been so right,” Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta—control of both legislative chambers and the governorship—in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a “States and Nation Policy Summit,” featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—“the nation’s largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators,” as the spin-savvy group describes itself—the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC’s elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.
Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and other conservative activists frustrated by recent electoral setbacks, ALEC is a critical arm of the right-wing network of policy shops that, with infusions of corporate cash, has evolved to shape American politics. Inspired by Milton Friedman’s call for conservatives to “develop alternatives to existing policies [and] keep them alive and available,” ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals: downsizing government, removing regulations on corporations and making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more. In states across the country they succeeded, with stacks of new laws signed by GOP governors like Ohio’s John Kasich and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, both ALEC alums.
The details of ALEC’s model bills have been available only to the group’s 2,000 legislative and 300 corporate members. But thanks to a leak to Aliya Rahman, an Ohio-based activist who helped organize protests at ALEC’s Spring Task Force meeting in Cincinnati, The Nation has obtained more than 800 documents representing decades of model legislation. Teaming up with the Center for Media and Democracy, The Nation asked policy experts to analyze this never-before-seen archive.
The articles that follow are the first products of that examination. They provide an inside view of the priorities of ALEC’s corporate board and billionaire benefactors (including Tea Party funders Charles and David Koch). “Dozens of corporations are investing millions of dollars a year to write business-friendly legislation that is being made into law in statehouses coast to coast, with no regard for the public interest,” says Bob Edgar of Common Cause. “This is proof positive of the depth and scope of the corporate reach into our democratic processes.” The full archive of ALEC documents is available at a new website, ALEC Exposed, thanks to the Center for Media and Democracy, which has provided powerful tools for progressives to turn this knowledge into power. The data tell us that the time has come to refocus on the battle to loosen the grip of corporate America and renew democracy in the states.
“The Koch Connection” by Lisa Graves
“Business Domination Inc.” by Joel Rogers and Laura Dresser
“Sabotaging Healthcare” by Wendell Potter
“Starving Public Schools” by Julie Underwood
“Rigging Elections” by John Nichols
http://www.thenation.com/article/161978/alec-exposed
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The Koch Connection
Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.
No one knows how much the Kochs have given ALEC in total, but the amount likely exceeds $1 million—not including a half-million loaned to ALEC when the group was floundering. ALEC gave the Kochs its Adam Smith Free Enterprise Award, and Koch Industries has been one of the select members of ALEC’s corporate board for almost twenty years. The company’s top lobbyist was once ALEC’s chairman. As a result, the Kochs have shaped legislation touching every state in the country. Like ideological venture capitalists, the Kochs have used ALEC as a way to invest in radical ideas and fertilize them with tons of cash.
Take environmental protections. The Kochs have a penchant for paying their way out of serious violations and coming out ahead. Helped by Koch Industries’ lobbying efforts, one of the first measures George W. Bush signed into law as governor of Texas was an ALEC model bill giving corporations immunity from penalties if they tell regulators about their own violation of environmental rules. Dozens of other ALEC bills would limit environmental regulations or litigation in ways that would benefit Koch.
ALEC’s model legislation reflects parts of the Kochs’ agenda that have little to do with oil profits. Long before ALEC started pushing taxpayer-subsidized school vouchers, for example, the Koch fortune was already underwriting attacks on public education. David Koch helped inject the idea of privatizing public schools into the national debate as a candidate for vice president in 1980. A cornerstone of the Libertarian Party platform, which he bankrolled, was the call for “educational tax credits to encourage alternatives to public education,” a plan to the right of Ronald Reagan. Several pieces of ALEC’s model legislation echo this plan.
The Kochs’ mistrust of public education can be traced to their father, Fred, who ranted and raved that the National Education Association was a communist group and public-school books were filled with “communist propaganda,” paranoia that extended to all unions, President Eisenhower and the “pro-communist” Supreme Court. Such redbaiting might be ancient history if fifty years later David were not calling President Obama a “hard-core socialist” who is “scary.”
The Kochs have not just multiplied the wealth of their dad; they’ve repackaged and amplified his worldview. David’s latest venture, Americans for Prosperity, subsidizes the Tea Party movement, which repeats this “socialist” smear. Charles is a member of the exclusive Mount Pelerin Society, inspired by Frederic von Hayek’s antisocialist polemic The Road to Serfdom. Through the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the Institute for Humane Studies administers the Hayek Fund for Scholars and sister programs to fund academics and staffers for like-minded groups across the country. “Charles G. Koch Fellows” and interns stock ALEC, and have gone on to direct ALEC task forces.
Another David Koch project, Citizens for a Sound Economy—which launched the effort to repeal Glass-Steagall protections keeping banks from gambling in securities—helped fuel the fight for “free trade,” an unpopular policy in the 1980s. The North American Free Trade Agreement passed with help from CSE and its corporate allies. ALEC resolutions for state legislators have long supported such trade agreements in the face of local concerns about job losses, and today the Koch free-market fantasy is reflected in ALEC’s support for free trade pacts with Korea, Georgia, Colombia and other countries. On just about every issue taken on by Koch’s CSE, ALEC has provided legislative tools to carry them through to state legislatures, from privatizing “federal and state services and assets,” as CSE put it, to blocking common-sense caps on unlimited credit card interest rates.
ALEC and the Kochs often pursue parallel tracks. Just as ALEC “educates” legislators, Koch funding has helped “tutor” hundreds of judges with all-expenses-paid junkets at fancy resorts, where they learn about the “free market” impact of their rulings. But ALEC also operates like an arm of the Koch agenda, circulating bills that make their vision of the world concrete. For a mere $25,000 a year, Koch Industries sits as an “equal” board member with state legislators, influencing bills that serve as a wish list for its financial or ideological interests.
It’s a pittance for the Kochs but far out of the reach of working Americans. Ordinary citizens rely on our elected representatives’ efforts to restore what’s left of the American Dream. But through ALEC, billionaire industrialists are purchasing a version that seems like a real nightmare for most Americans.
http://www.thenation.com/article/161973/alec-exposed-koch-connection
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Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025
A Research Paper Presented To Air Force 2025
“The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives…”
“A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom.”
“From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary.”
by
Col Tamzy J. House
Lt Col James B. Near, Jr.
LTC William B. Shields (USA)
Maj Ronald J. Celentano
Maj David M. Husband
Maj Ann E. Mercer
Maj James E. Pugh
August 1996
Disclaimer
2025 is a study designed to comply with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future. Presented on 17 June 1996, this report was produced in the Department of Defense school environment of academic freedom and in the interest of advancing concepts related to national defense. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the United States government.
This report contains fictional representations of future situations/scenarios. Any similarities to real people or events, other than those specifically cited, are unintentional and are for purposes of illustration only.
This publication has been reviewed by security and policy review authorities, is unclassified, and is cleared for public release.
Contents
Chapter
Disclaimer
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Introduction
Required Capability
Why Would We Want to Mess with the Weather?
What Do We Mean by “Weather-modification”?
System Description
The Global Weather Network
Applying Weather-modification to Military Operations
Concept of Operations
Precipitation
Fog
Storms
Exploitation of “NearSpace” for Space Control
Opportunities Afforded by Space Weather-modification
Communications Dominance via Ionospheric Modification
Artificial Weather
Concept of Operations Summary
Investigation Recommendations
How Do We Get There From Here?
Conclusions
Appendix
A Why Is the Ionosphere Important?
B Research to Better Understand and Predict Ionospheric Effects
C Acronyms and Definitions
Bibliography
Notes
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Illustrations
Figure
3-1. Global Weather Network
3-2. The Military System for Weather-Modification Operations
4-1. Crossed-Beam Approach for Generating an Artificial Ionospheric Mirror
4-2. Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors Point-to-Point Communications
4-3. Artificial Ionospheric Mirror Over-the-Horizon Surveillance Concept
4-4. Scenarios for Telecommunications Degradation
5-1. A Core Competency Road Map to Weather Modification in 2025
5-2. A Systems Development Road Map to Weather Modification in 2025
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Tables
Table
1 – Operational Capabilities Matrix
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Acknowledgments
We express our appreciation to Mr Mike McKim of Air War College who provided a wealth of technical expertise and innovative ideas that significantly contributed to our paper. We are also especially grateful for the devoted support of our families during this research project. Their understanding and patience during the demanding research period were crucial to the project’s success.
Executive Summary
In 2025, US aerospace forces can “own the weather” by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weather-modification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical road map.
A high-risk, high-reward endeavor, weather-modification offers a dilemma not unlike the splitting of the atom. While some segments of society will always be reluctant to examine controversial issues such as weather-modification, the tremendous military capabilities that could result from this field are ignored at our own peril. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counterspace control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. Some of the potential capabilities a weather-modification system could provide to a war-fighting commander in chief (CINC) are listed in table 1.
Technology advancements in five major areas are necessary for an integrated weather-modification capability: (1) advanced nonlinear modeling techniques, (2) computational capability, (3) information gathering and transmission, (4) a global sensor array, and (5) weather intervention techniques. Some intervention tools exist today and others may be developed and refined in the future.
Table 1
Operational Capabilities Matrix
DEGRADE ENEMY FORCES
Precipitation Enhancement
- Flood Lines of Communication
- Reduce PGM/Recce Effectiveness
- Decrease Comfort Level/Morale
Storm Enhancement
- Deny Operations
Precipitation Denial
- Deny Fresh Water
- Induce Drought
Space Weather
- Disrupt Communications/Radar
- Disable/Destroy Space Assets
Fog and Cloud Removal
- Deny Concealment
- Increase Vulnerability to PGM/Recce
Detect Hostile Weather Activities
ENHANCE FRIENDLY FORCES
Precipitation Avoidance
- Maintain/Improve LOC
- Maintain Visibility
- Maintain Comfort Level/Morale
Storm Modification
- Choose Battlespace Environment
Space Weather
- Improve Communication Reliability
- Intercept Enemy Transmissions
- Revitalize Space Assets
Fog and Cloud Generation
- Increase Concealment
Fog and Cloud Removal
- Maintain Airfield Operations
- Enhance PGM Effectiveness
Defend against Enemy Capabilities
Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale. Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.
In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels. These levels could include unilateral actions, participation in a security framework such as NATO, membership in an international organization such as the UN, or participation in a coalition. Assuming that in 2025 our national security strategy includes weather-modification, its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow. Besides the significant benefits an operational capability would provide, another motivation to pursue weather-modification is to deter and counter potential adversaries.
In this paper we show that appropriate application of weather-modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined. In the future, such operations will enhance air and space superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping and battlespace awareness.1 “The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together;”2 in 2025 we can “Own the Weather.”
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Chapter 1
Introduction
Scenario: Imagine that in 2025 the US is fighting a rich, but now consolidated, politically powerful drug cartel in South America. The cartel has purchased hundreds of Russian-and Chinese-built fighters that have successfully thwarted our attempts to attack their production facilities. With their local numerical superiority and interior lines, the cartel is launching more than 10 aircraft for every one of ours. In addition, the cartel is using the French system probatoire d’ observation de la terre (SPOT) positioning and tracking imagery systems, which in 2025 are capable of transmitting near-real-time, multispectral imagery with 1 meter resolution. The US wishes to engage the enemy on an uneven playing field in order to exploit the full potential of our aircraft and munitions.
Meteorological analysis reveals that equatorial South America typically has afternoon thunderstorms on a daily basis throughout the year. Our intelligence has confirmed that cartel pilots are reluctant to fly in or near thunderstorms. Therefore, our weather force support element (WFSE), which is a part of the commander in chief’s (CINC) air operations center (AOC), is tasked to forecast storm paths and trigger or intensify thunderstorm cells over critical target areas that the enemy must defend with their aircraft. Since our aircraft in 2025 have all-weather capability, the thunderstorm threat is minimal to our forces, and we can effectively and decisively control the sky over the target.
The WFSE has the necessary sensor and communication capabilities to observe, detect, and act on weather-modification requirements to support US military objectives. These capabilities are part of an advanced battle area system that supports the war-fighting CINC. In our scenario, the CINC tasks the WFSE to conduct storm intensification and concealment operations. The WFSE models the atmospheric conditions to forecast, with 90 percent confidence, the likelihood of successful modification using airborne cloud generation and seeding.
In 2025, uninhabited aerospace vehicles (UAV) are routinely used for weather-modification operations. By cross-referencing desired attack times with wind and thunderstorm forecasts and the SPOT satellite’s projected orbit, the WFSE generates mission profiles for each UAV. The WFSE guides each UAV using near-real-time information from a networked sensor array.
Prior to the attack, which is coordinated with forecasted weather conditions, the UAVs begin cloud generation and seeding operations. UAVs disperse a cirrus shield to deny enemy visual and infrared (IR) surveillance. Simultaneously, microwave heaters create localized scintillation to disrupt active sensing via synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems such as the commercially available Canadian search and rescue satellite-aided tracking (SARSAT) that will be widely available in 2025. Other cloud seeding operations cause a developing thunderstorm to intensify over the target, severely limiting the enemy’s capability to defend. The WFSE monitors the entire operation in real-time and notes the successful completion of another very important but routine weather-modification mission.
This scenario may seem far-fetched, but by 2025 it is within the realm of possibility. The next chapter explores the reasons for weather-modification, defines the scope, and examines trends that will make it possible in the next 30 years.
Chapter 2
Required Capability
Why Would We Want to Mess with the Weather?
According to Gen Gordon Sullivan, former Army chief of staff, “As we leap technology into the 21st century, we will be able to see the enemy day or night, in any weather- and go after him relentlessly.”3 A global, precise, real-time, robust, systematic weather-modification capability would provide war-fighting CINCs with a powerful force multiplier to achieve military objectives. Since weather will be common to all possible futures, a weather-modification capability would be universally applicable and have utility across the entire spectrum of conflict. The capability of influencing the weather even on a small scale could change it from a force degrader to a force multiplier.
People have always wanted to be able to do something about the weather. In the US, as early as 1839, newspaper archives tell of people with serious and creative ideas on how to make rain.4 In 1957, the president’s advisory committee on weather control explicitly recognized the military potential of weather-modification, warning in their report that it could become a more important weapon than the atom bomb.5
However, controversy since 1947 concerning the possible legal consequences arising from the deliberate alteration of large storm systems meant that little future experimentation could be conducted on storms which had the potential to reach land.6 In 1977, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution prohibiting the hostile use of environmental modification techniques. The resulting “Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Technique (ENMOD)” committed the signatories to refrain from any military or other hostile use of weather-modification which could result in widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects.7 While these two events have not halted the pursuit of weather-modification research, they have significantly inhibited its pace and the development of associated technologies, while producing a primary focus on suppressive versus intensification activities.
The influence of the weather on military operations has long been recognized. During World War II, Eisenhower said,
[i]n Europe bad weather is the worst enemy of the air [operations]. Some soldier once said, “The weather is always neutral.” Nothing could be more untrue. Bad weather is obviously the enemy of the side that seeks to launch projects requiring good weather, or of the side possessing great assets, such as strong air forces, which depend upon good weather for effective operations. If really bad weather should endure permanently, the Nazi would need nothing else to defend the Normandy coast!8
The impact of weather has also been important in more recent military operations. A significant number of the air sorties into Tuzla during the initial deployment supporting the Bosnian peace operation aborted due to weather. During Operation Desert Storm, Gen Buster C. Glosson asked his weather officer to tell him which targets would be clear in 48 hours for inclusion in the air tasking order (ATO).9 But current forecasting capability is only 85 percent accurate for no more than 24 hours, which doesn’t adequately meet the needs of the ATO planning cycle. Over 50 percent of the F-117 sorties weather aborted over their targets and A-10s only flew 75 of 200 scheduled close air support (CAS) missions due to low cloud cover during the first two days of the campaign.10 The application of weather-modification technology to clear a hole over the targets long enough for F-117s to attack and place bombs on target or clear the fog from the runway at Tuzla would have been a very effective force multiplier. Weather-modification clearly has potential for military use at the operational level to reduce the elements of fog and friction for friendly operations and to significantly increase them for the enemy.
What Do We Mean by “Weather-modification”?
Today, weather-modification is the alteration of weather phenomena over a limited area for a limited period of time.11 Within the next three decades, the concept of weather-modification could expand to include the ability to shape weather patterns by influencing their determining factors.12 Achieving such a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability in the next 30 years will require overcoming some challenging but not insurmountable technological and legal hurdles.
Technologically, we must have a solid understanding of the variables that affect weather. We must be able to model the dynamics of their relationships, map the possible results of their interactions, measure their actual real-time values, and influence their values to achieve a desired outcome. Society will have to provide the resources and legal basis for a mature capability to develop. How could all of this happen? The following notional scenario postulates how weather-modification might become both technically feasible and socially desirable by 2025.
Between now and 2005, technological advances in meteorology and the demand for more precise weather information by global businesses will lead to the successful identification and parameterization of the major variables that affect weather. By 2015, advances in computational capability, modeling techniques, and atmospheric information tracking will produce a highly accurate and reliable weather prediction capability, validated against real-world weather. In the following decade, population densities put pressure on the worldwide availability and cost of food and usable water. Massive life and property losses associated with natural weather disasters become increasingly unacceptable. These pressures prompt governments and/or other organizations who are able to capitalize on the technological advances of the previous 20 years to pursue a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability. The increasing urgency to realize the benefits of this capability stimulates laws and treaties, and some unilateral actions, making the risks required to validate and refine it acceptable. By 2025, the world, or parts of it, are able to shape local weather patterns by influencing the factors that affect climate, precipitation, storms and their effects, fog, and near space. These highly accurate and reasonably precise civil applications of weather-modification technology have obvious military implications. This is particularly true for aerospace forces, for while weather may affect all mediums of operation, it operates in ours.
The term weather-modification may have negative connotations for many people, civilians and military members alike. It is thus important to define the scope to be considered in this paper so that potential critics or proponents of further research have a common basis for discussion.
In the broadest sense, weather-modification can be divided into two major categories: suppression and intensification of weather patterns. In extreme cases, it might involve the creation of completely new weather patterns, attenuation or control of severe storms, or even alteration of global climate on a far-reaching and/or long-lasting scale. In the mildest and least controversial cases it may consist of inducing or suppressing precipitation, clouds, or fog for short times over a small-scale region. Other low-intensity applications might include the alteration and/or use of near space as a medium to enhance communications, disrupt active or passive sensing, or other purposes. In conducting the research for this study, the broadest possible interpretation of weather-modification was initially embraced, so that the widest range of opportunities available for our military in 2025 were thoughtfully considered. However, for several reasons described below, this paper focuses primarily on localized and short-term forms of weather-modification and how these could be incorporated into war-fighting capability. The primary areas discussed include generation and dissipation of precipitation, clouds, and fog; modification of localized storm systems; and the use of the ionosphere and near space for space control and communications dominance. These applications are consistent with CJCSI 3810.01, “Meteorological and Oceanographic Operations.”13
Extreme and controversial examples of weather modification-creation of made-to-order weather, large-scale climate modification, creation and/or control (or “steering”) of severe storms, etc.-were researched as part of this study but receive only brief mention here because, in the authors’ judgment, the technical obstacles preventing their application appear insurmountable within 30 years.14 If this were not the case, such applications would have been included in this report as potential military options, despite their controversial and potentially malevolent nature and their inconsistency with standing UN agreements to which the US is a signatory.
On the other hand, the weather-modification applications proposed in this report range from technically proven to potentially feasible. They are similar, however, in that none are currently employed or envisioned for employment by our operational forces. They are also similar in their potential value for the war fighter of the future, as we hope to convey in the following chapters. A notional integrated system that incorporates weather-modification tools will be described in the next chapter; how those tools might be applied are then discussed within the framework of the Concept of Operations in chapter 4.
Chapter 3
System Description
Our vision is that by 2025 the military could influence the weather on a mesoscale (<200 km2) or microscale (immediate local area) to achieve operational capabilities such as those listed in Table 1. The capability would be the synergistic result of a system consisting of (1) highly trained weather force specialists (WFS) who are members of the CINC’s weather force support element (WFSE); (2) access ports to the global weather network (GWN), where worldwide weather observations and forecasts are obtained near-real-time from civilian and military sources; (3) a dense, highly accurate local area weather sensing and communication system; (4) an advanced computer local area weather-modification modeling and prediction capability within the area of responsibility (AOR); (5) proven weather-modification intervention technologies; and (6) a feedback capability.
The Global Weather Network
The GWN is envisioned to be an evolutionary expansion of the current military and civilian worldwide weather data network. By 2025, it will be a super high-speed, expanded bandwidth, communication network filled with near-real-time weather observations taken from a denser and more accurate worldwide observation network resulting from highly improved ground, air, maritime, and space sensors. The network will also provide access to forecast centers around the world where sophisticated, tailored forecast and data products, generated from weather prediction models (global, regional, local, specialized, etc.) based on the latest nonlinear mathematical techniques are made available to GWN customers for near-real-time use.
By 2025, we envision that weather prediction models, in general, and mesoscale weather-modification models, in particular, will be able to emulate all-weather producing variables, along with their interrelated dynamics, and prove to be highly accurate in stringent measurement trials against empirical data. The brains of these models will be advanced software and hardware capabilities which can rapidly ingest trillions of environmental data points, merge them into usable data bases, process the data through the weather prediction models, and disseminate the weather information over the GWN in near-real-time.15 This network is depicted schematically in figure 3-1.
Figure 3-1. Global Weather Network
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
Evidence of the evolving future weather modeling and prediction capability as well as the GWN can be seen in the national oceanic and atmospheric administration’s (NOAA) 1995-2005 strategic plan. It includes program elements to “advance short-term warning and forecast services, implement seasonal to inter-annual climate forecasts, and predict and assess decadal to centennial change;”16 it does not, however, include plans for weather-modification modeling or modification technology development. NOAA’s plans include extensive data gathering programs such as Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD) and Doppler weather surveillance systems deployed throughout the US. Data from these sensing systems feed into over 100 forecast centers for processing by the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), which will provide data communication, processing, and display capabilities for extensive forecasting. In addition, NOAA has leased a Cray C90 supercomputer capable of performing over 1.5×1010 operations per second that has already been used to run a Hurricane Prediction System.17
Applying Weather-modification to Military Operations
How will the military, in general, and the USAF, in particular, manage and employ a weather-modification capability? We envision this will be done by the weather force support element (WFSE), whose primary mission would be to support the war-fighting CINCs with weather-modification options, in addition to current forecasting support. Although the WFSE could operate anywhere as long as it has access to the GWN and the system components already discussed, it will more than likely be a component within the AOC or its 2025-equivalent. With the CINC’s intent as guidance, the WFSE formulates weather-modification options using information provided by the GWN, local weather data network, and weather-modification forecast model. The options include range of effect, probability of success, resources to be expended, the enemy’s vulnerability, and risks involved. The CINC chooses an effect based on these inputs, and the WFSE then implements the chosen course, selecting the right modification tools and employing them to achieve the desired effect. Sensors detect the change and feed data on the new weather pattern to the modeling system which updates its forecast accordingly. The WFSE checks the effectiveness of its efforts by pulling down the updated current conditions and new forecast(s) from the GWN and local weather data network, and plans follow-on missions as needed. This concept is illustrated in figure 3-2.
Figure 3-2. The Military System for Weather-Modification Operations.
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
WFSE personnel will need to be experts in information systems and well schooled in the arts of both offensive and defensive information warfare. They would also have an in-depth understanding of the GWN and an appreciation for how weather-modification could be employed to meet a CINC’s needs.
Because of the nodal web nature of the GWN, this concept would be very flexible. For instance, a WFSE could be assigned to each theater to provide direct support to the CINC. The system would also be survivable, with multiple nodes connected to the GWN.
A product of the information age, this system would be most vulnerable to information warfare. Each WFSE would need the most current defensive and offensive information capabilities available. Defensive abilities would be necessary for survival. Offensive abilities could provide spoofing options to create virtual weather in the enemy’s sensory and information systems, making it more likely for them to make decisions producing results of our choosing rather than theirs. It would also allow for the capability to mask or disguise our weather-modification activities.
Two key technologies are necessary to meld an integrated, comprehensive, responsive, precise, and effective weather-modification system. Advances in the science of chaos are critical to this endeavor. Also key to the feasibility of such a system is the ability to model the extremely complex nonlinear system of global weather in ways that can accurately predict the outcome of changes in the influencing variables. Researchers have already successfully controlled single variable nonlinear systems in the lab and hypothesize that current mathematical techniques and computer capacity could handle systems with up to five variables. Advances in these two areas would make it feasible to affect regional weather patterns by making small, continuous nudges to one or more influencing factors. Conceivably, with enough lead time and the right conditions, you could get “made-to-order” weather.18
Developing a true weather-modification capability will require various intervention tools to adjust the appropriate meteorological parameters in predictable ways. It is this area that must be developed by the military based on specific required capabilities such as those listed in table 1, table 1 is located in the Executive Summary. Such a system would contain a sensor array and localized battle area data net to provide the fine level of resolution required to detect intervention effects and provide feedback. This net would include ground, air, maritime, and space sensors as well as human observations in order to ensure the reliability and responsiveness of the system, even in the event of enemy countermeasures. It would also include specific intervention tools and technologies, some of which already exist and others which must be developed. Some of these proposed tools are described in the following chapter titled Concept of Operations. The total weather-modification process would be a real-time loop of continuous, appropriate, measured interventions, and feedback capable of producing desired weather behavior.
Chapter 4
Concept of Operations
The essential ingredient of the weather-modification system is the set of intervention techniques used to modify the weather. The number of specific intervention methodologies is limited only by the imagination, but with few exceptions they involve infusing either energy or chemicals into the meteorological process in the right way, at the right place and time. The intervention could be designed to modify the weather in a number of ways, such as influencing clouds and precipitation, storm intensity, climate, space, or fog.
Precipitation
For centuries man has desired the ability to influence precipitation at the time and place of his choosing. Until recently, success in achieving this goal has been minimal; however, a new window of opportunity may exist resulting from development of new technologies and an increasing world interest in relieving water shortages through precipitation enhancement. Consequently, we advocate that the DOD explore the many opportunities (and also the ramifications) resulting from development of a capability to influence precipitation or conducting “selective precipitation modification.” Although the capability to influence precipitation over the long term (i.e., for more than several days) is still not fully understood. By 2025 we will certainly be capable of increasing or decreasing precipitation over the short term in a localized area.
Before discussing research in this area, it is important to describe the benefits of such a capability. While many military operations may be influenced by precipitation, ground mobility is most affected. Influencing precipitation could prove useful in two ways. First, enhancing precipitation could decrease the enemy’s trafficability by muddying terrain, while also affecting their morale. Second, suppressing precipitation could increase friendly trafficability by drying out an otherwise muddied area.
What is the possibility of developing this capability and applying it to tactical operations by 2025? Closer than one might think. Research has been conducted in precipitation modification for many years, and an aspect of the resulting technology was applied to operations during the Vietnam War.19 These initial attempts provide a foundation for further development of a true capability for selective precipitation modification.
Interestingly enough, the US government made a conscious decision to stop building upon this foundation. As mentioned earlier, international agreements have prevented the US from investigating weather-modification operations that could have widespread, long-lasting, or severe effects. However, possibilities do exist (within the boundaries of established treaties) for using localized precipitation modification over the short term, with limited and potentially positive results.
These possibilities date back to our own previous experimentation with precipitation modification. As stated in an article appearing in the Journal of Applied Meteorology,
[n]early all the weather-modification efforts over the last quarter century have been aimed at producing changes on the cloud scale through exploitation of the saturated vapor pressure difference between ice and water. This is not to be criticized but it is time we also consider the feasibility of weather-modification on other time-space scales and with other physical hypotheses.20
This study by William M. Gray, et al., investigated the hypothesis that “significant beneficial influences can be derived through judicious exploitation of the solar absorption potential of carbon black dust.”21 The study ultimately found that this technology could be used to enhance rainfall on the mesoscale, generate cirrus clouds, and enhance cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds in otherwise dry areas.
The technology can be described as follows. Just as a black tar roof easily absorbs solar energy and subsequently radiates heat during a sunny day, carbon black also readily absorbs solar energy. When dispersed in microscopic or “dust” form in the air over a large body of water, the carbon becomes hot and heats the surrounding air, thereby increasing the amount of evaporation from the body of water below. As the surrounding air heats up, parcels of air will rise and the water vapor contained in the rising air parcel will eventually condense to form clouds. Over time the cloud droplets increase in size as more and more water vapor condenses, and eventually they become too large and heavy to stay suspended and will fall as rain or other forms of precipitation.22 The study points out that this precipitation enhancement technology would work best “upwind from coastlines with onshore flow.” Lake-effect snow along the southern edge of the Great Lakes is a naturally occurring phenomenon based on similar dynamics.
Can this type of precipitation enhancement technology have military applications? Yes, if the right conditions exist. For example, if we are fortunate enough to have a fairly large body of water available upwind from the targeted battlefield, carbon dust could be placed in the atmosphere over that water. Assuming the dynamics are supportive in the atmosphere, the rising saturated air will eventually form clouds and rainshowers downwind over the land.23 While the likelihood of having a body of water located upwind of the battlefield is unpredictable, the technology could prove enormously useful under the right conditions. Only further experimentation will determine to what degree precipitation enhancement can be controlled.
If precipitation enhancement techniques are successfully developed and the right natural conditions also exist, we must also be able to disperse carbon dust into the desired location. Transporting it in a completely controlled, safe, cost-effective, and reliable manner requires innovation. Numerous dispersal techniques have already been studied, but the most convenient, safe, and cost-effective method discussed is the use of afterburner-type jet engines to generate carbon particles while flying through the targeted air. This method is based on injection of liquid hydrocarbon fuel into the afterburner’s combustion gases. This direct generation method was found to be more desirable than another plausible method (i.e., the transport of large quantities of previously produced and properly sized carbon dust to the desired altitude).
The carbon dust study demonstrated that small-scale precipitation enhancement is possible and has been successfully verified under certain atmospheric conditions. Since the study was conducted, no known military applications of this technology have been realized. However, we can postulate how this technology might be used in the future by examining some of the delivery platforms conceivably available for effective dispersal of carbon dust or other effective modification agents in the year 2025.
One method we propose would further maximize the technology’s safety and reliability, by virtually eliminating the human element. To date, much work has been done on UAVs which can closely (if not completely) match the capabilities of piloted aircraft. If this UAV technology were combined with stealth and carbon dust technologies, the result could be a UAV aircraft invisible to radar while en route to the targeted area, which could spontaneously create carbon dust in any location. However, minimizing the number of UAVs required to complete the mission would depend upon the development of a new and more efficient system to produce carbon dust by a follow-on technology to the afterburner-type jet engines previously mentioned. In order to effectively use stealth technology, this system must also have the ability to disperse carbon dust while minimizing (or eliminating) the UAV’s infrared heat source.
In addition to using stealth UAV and carbon dust absorption technology for precipitation enhancement, this delivery method could also be used for precipitation suppression. Although the previously mentioned study did not significantly explore the possibility of cloud seeding for precipitation suppression, this possibility does exist. If clouds were seeded (using chemical nuclei similar to those used today or perhaps a more effective agent discovered through continued research) before their downwind arrival to a desired location, the result could be a suppression of precipitation. In other words, precipitation could be “forced” to fall before its arrival in the desired territory, thereby making the desired territory “dry.” The strategic and operational benefits of doing this have previously been discussed.
Fog
In general, successful fog dissipation requires some type of heating or seeding process. Which technique works best depends on the type of fog encountered. In simplest terms, there are two basic types of fog-cold and warm. Cold fog occurs at temperatures below 32oF. The best-known dissipation technique for cold fog is to seed it from the air with agents that promote the growth of ice crystals.24
Warm fog occurs at temperatures above 32oF and accounts for 90 percent of the fog-related problems encountered by flight operations.25 The best-known dissipation technique is heating because a small temperature increase is usually sufficient to evaporate the fog. Since heating usually isn’t practical, the next most effective technique is hygroscopic seeding.26 Hygroscopic seeding uses agents that absorb water vapor. This technique is most effective when accomplished from the air but can also be accomplished from the ground.27 Optimal results require advance information on fog depth, liquid water content, and wind.28
Decades of research show that fog dissipation is an effective application of weather-modification technology with demonstrated savings of huge proportions for both military and civil aviation.29 Local municipalities have also shown an interest in applying these techniques to improve the safety of high-speed highways transiting areas of frequently occurring dense fog.30
There are some emerging technologies which may have important applications for fog dispersal. As discussed earlier, heating is the most effective dispersal method for the most commonly occurring type of fog. Unfortunately, it has proved impractical for most situations and would be difficult at best for contingency operations. However, the development of directed radiant energy technologies, such as microwaves and lasers, could provide new possibilities.
Lab experiments have shown microwaves to be effective for the heat dissipation of fog. However, results also indicate that the energy levels required exceed the US large power density exposure limit of 100 watt/m2 and would be very expensive.31 Field experiments with lasers have demonstrated the capability to dissipate warm fog at an airfield with zero visibility. Generating 1 watt/cm2, which is approximately the US large power density exposure limit, the system raised visibility to one quarter of a mile in 20 seconds.32 Laser systems described in the Space Operations portion of this AF 2025 study could certainly provide this capability as one of their many possible uses.
With regard to seeding techniques, improvements in the materials and delivery methods are not only plausible but likely. Smart materials based on nanotechnology are currently being developed with gigaops computer capability at their core. They could adjust their size to optimal dimensions for a given fog seeding situation and even make adjustments throughout the process. They might also enhance their dispersal qualities by adjusting their buoyancy, by communicating with each other, and by steering themselves within the fog. They will be able to provide immediate and continuous effectiveness feedback by integrating with a larger sensor network and can also change their temperature and polarity to improve their seeding effects.33 As mentioned above, UAVs could be used to deliver and distribute these smart materials.
Recent army research lab experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of generating fog. They used commercial equipment to generate thick fog in an area 100 meters long. Further study has shown fogs to be effective at blocking much of the UV/IR/visible spectrum, effectively masking emitters of such radiation from IR weapons.34 This technology would enable a small military unit to avoid detection in the IR spectrum. Fog could be generated to quickly, conceal the movement of tanks or infantry, or it could conceal military operations, facilities, or equipment. Such systems may also be useful in inhibiting observations of sensitive rear-area operations by electro-optical reconnaissance platforms.35
Storms
The desirability to modify storms to support military objectives is the most aggressive and controversial type of weather-modification. The damage caused by storms is indeed horrendous. For instance, a tropical storm has an energy equal to 10,000 one-megaton hydrogen bombs,36 and in 1992 Hurricane Andrew totally destroyed Homestead AFB, Florida, caused the evacuation of most military aircraft in the southeastern US, and resulted in $15.5 billion of damage.37 However, as one would expect based on a storm’s energy level, current scientific literature indicates that there are definite physical limits on mankind’s ability to modify storm systems. By taking this into account along with political, environmental, economic, legal, and moral considerations, we will confine our analysis of storms to localized thunderstorms and thus do not consider major storm systems such as hurricanes or intense low-pressure systems.
At any instant there are approximately 2,000 thunderstorms taking place. In fact 45,000 thunderstorms, which contain heavy rain, hail, microbursts, wind shear, and lightning form daily.38 Anyone who has flown frequently on commercial aircraft has probably noticed the extremes that pilots will go to avoid thunderstorms. The danger of thunderstorms was clearly shown in August 1985 when a jumbo jet crashed killing 137 people after encountering microburst wind shears during a rain squall.39 These forces of nature impact all aircraft and even the most advanced fighters of 1996 make every attempt to avoid a thunderstorm.
Will bad weather remain an aviation hazard in 2025? The answer, unfortunately, is “yes,” but projected advances in technology over the next 30 years will diminish the hazard potential. Computer-controlled flight systems will be able to “autopilot” aircraft through rapidly changing winds. Aircraft will also have highly accurate, onboard sensing systems that can instantaneously “map” and automatically guide the aircraft through the safest portion of a storm cell. Aircraft are envisioned to have hardened electronics that can withstand the effects of lightning strikes and may also have the capability to generate a surrounding electropotential field that will neutralize or repel lightning strikes.
Assuming that the US achieves some or all of the above outlined aircraft technical advances and maintains the technological “weather edge” over its potential adversaries, we can next look at how we could modify the battlespace weather to make the best use of our technical advantage.
Weather-modification technologies might involve techniques that would increase latent heat release in the atmosphere, provide additional water vapor for cloud cell development, and provide additional surface and lower atmospheric heating to increase atmospheric instability. Critical to the success of any attempt to trigger a storm cell is the pre-existing atmospheric conditions locally and regionally. The atmosphere must already be conditionally unstable and the large-scale dynamics must be supportive of vertical cloud development. The focus of the weather-modification effort would be to provide additional “conditions” that would make the atmosphere unstable enough to generate cloud and eventually storm cell development. The path of storm cells once developed or enhanced is dependent not only on the mesoscale dynamics of the storm but the regional and synoptic (global) scale atmospheric wind flow patterns in the area which are currently not subject to human control.
As indicated, the technical hurdles for storm development in support of military operations are obviously greater than enhancing precipitation or dispersing fog as described earlier. One area of storm research that would significantly benefit military operations is lightning modification. Most research efforts are being conducted to develop techniques to lessen the occurrence or hazards associated with lightning. This is important research for military operations and resource protection, but some offensive military benefit could be obtained by doing research on increasing the potential and intensity of lightning. Concepts to explore include increasing the basic efficiency of the thunderstorm, stimulating the triggering mechanism that initiates the bolt, and triggering lightning such as that which struck Apollo 12 in 1968.40 Possible mechanisms to investigate would be ways to modify the electropotential characteristics over certain targets to induce lightning strikes on the desired targets as the storm passes over their location.
In summary, the ability to modify battlespace weather through storm cell triggering or enhancement would allow us to exploit the technological “weather” advances of our 2025 aircraft; this area has tremendous potential and should be addressed by future research and concept development programs.
Exploitation of “NearSpace” for Space Control
This section discusses opportunities for control and modification of the ionosphere and near-space environment for force enhancement; specifically to enhance our own communications, sensing, and navigation capabilities and/or impair those of our enemy. A brief technical description of the ionosphere and its importance in current communications systems is provided in appendix A.
By 2025, it may be possible to modify the ionosphere and near space, creating a variety of potential applications, as discussed below. However, before ionospheric modification becomes possible, a number of evolutionary advances in space weather forecasting and observation are needed. Many of these needs were described in a Spacecast 2020 study, Space Weather Support for Communications.41 Some of the suggestions from this study are included in appendix B; it is important to note that our ability to exploit near space via active modification is dependent on successfully achieving reliable observation and prediction capabilities.
Opportunities Afforded by Space Weather-modification
Modification of the near-space environment is crucial to battlespace dominance. General Charles Horner, former commander in chief, United States space command, described his worst nightmare as “seeing an entire Marine battalion wiped out on some foreign landing zone because he was unable to deny the enemy intelligence and imagery generated from space.”42 Active modification could provide a “technological fix” to jam the enemy’s active and passive surveillance and reconnaissance systems. In short, an operational capability to modify the near-space environment would ensure space superiority in 2025; this capability would allow us to shape and control the battlespace via enhanced communication, sensing, navigation, and precision engagement systems.
While we recognize that technological advances may negate the importance of certain electromagnetic frequencies for US aerospace forces in 2025 (such as radio frequency (RF), high-frequency (HF) and very high-frequency (VHF) bands), the capabilities described below are nevertheless relevant. Our nonpeer adversaries will most likely still depend on such frequencies for communications, sensing, and navigation and would thus be extremely vulnerable to disruption via space weather-modification.
Communications Dominance via Ionospheric Modification
Modification of the ionosphere to enhance or disrupt communications has recently become the subject of active research. According to Lewis M. Duncan, and Robert L. Showen, the Former Soviet Union (FSU) conducted theoretical and experimental research in this area at a level considerably greater than comparable programs in the West.43 There is a strong motivation for this research, because induced ionospheric modifications may influence, or even disrupt, the operation of radio systems relying on propagation through the modified region. The controlled generation or accelerated dissipation of ionospheric disturbances may be used to produce new propagation paths, otherwise unavailable, appropriate for selected RF missions.44
A number of methods have been explored or proposed to modify the ionosphere, including injection of chemical vapors and heating or charging via electromagnetic radiation or particle beams (such as ions, neutral particles, x-rays, MeV particles, and energetic electrons).45 It is important to note that many techniques to modify the upper atmosphere have been successfully demonstrated experimentally. Ground-based modification techniques employed by the FSU include vertical HF heating, oblique HF heating, microwave heating, and magnetospheric modification.46 Significant military applications of such operations include low frequency (LF) communication production, HF ducted communications, and creation of an artificial ionosphere (discussed in detail below). Moreover, developing countries also recognize the benefit of ionospheric modification: “in the early 1980′s, Brazil conducted an experiment to modify the ionosphere by chemical injection.”47
Several high-payoff capabilities that could result from the modification of the ionosphere or near space are described briefly below. It should be emphasized that this list is not comprehensive; modification of the ionosphere is an area rich with potential applications and there are also likely spin-off applications that have yet to be envisioned.
Ionospheric mirrors for pinpoint communication or over-the-horizon (OTH) radar transmission. The properties and limitations of the ionosphere as a reflecting medium for high-frequency radiation are described in appendix A. The major disadvantage in depending on the ionosphere to reflect radio waves is its variability, which is due to normal space weather and events such as solar flares and geomagnetic storms. The ionosphere has been described as a crinkled sheet of wax paper whose relative position rises and sinks depending on weather conditions. The surface topography of the crinkled paper also constantly changes, leading to variability in its reflective, refractive, and transmissive properties.
Creation of an artificial uniform ionosphere was first proposed by Soviet researcher A. V. Gurevich in the mid-1970s. An artificial ionospheric mirror (AIM) would serve as a precise mirror for electromagnetic radiation of a selected frequency or a range of frequencies. It would thereby be useful for both pinpoint control of friendly communications and interception of enemy transmissions.
This concept has been described in detail by Paul A. Kossey, et al. in a paper entitled “Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors (AIM).”48 The authors describe how one could precisely control the location and height of the region of artificially produced ionization using crossed microwave (MW) beams, which produce atmospheric breakdown (ionization) of neutral species. The implications of such control are enormous: one would no longer be subject to the vagaries of the natural ionosphere but would instead have direct control of the propagation environment. Ideally, the AIM could be rapidly created and then would be maintained only for a brief operational period. A schematic depicting the crossed-beam approach for generation of an AIM is shown in figure 4-1.49
An AIM could theoretically reflect radio waves with frequencies up to 2 GHz, which is nearly two orders of magnitude higher than those waves reflected by the natural ionosphere. The MW radiator power requirements for such a system are roughly an order of magnitude greater than 1992 state-of-the-art systems; however, by 2025 such a power capability is expected to be easily achievable.
Figure 4-1. Crossed-Beam Approach for Generating an Artificial Ionospheric Mirror
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
Besides providing pinpoint communication control and potential interception capability, this technology would also provide communication capability at specified frequencies, as desired. Figure 4-2 shows how a ground-based radiator might generate a series of AIMs, each of which would be tailored to reflect a selected transmission frequency. Such an arrangement would greatly expand the available bandwidth for communications and also eliminate the problem of interference and crosstalk (by allowing one to use the requisite power level).
Figure 4-2. Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors Point-to-Point Communications
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
Kossey et al. also describe how AIMs could be used to improve the capability of OTH radar:
AIM based radar could be operated at a frequency chosen to optimize target detection, rather than be limited by prevailing ionospheric conditions. This, combined with the possibility of controlling the radar’s wave polarization to mitigate clutter effects, could result in reliable detection of cruise missiles and other low observable targets.50
A schematic depicting this concept is shown in figure 4-3. Potential advantages over conventional OTH radars include frequency control, mitigation of auroral effects, short range operation, and detection of a smaller cross-section target.
Figure 4-3. Artificial Ionospheric Mirror Over-the-Horizon Surveillance Concept.
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
Disruption of communications and radar via ionospheric control. A variation of the capability proposed above is ionospheric modification to disrupt an enemy’s communication or radar transmissions. Because HF communications are controlled directly by the ionosphere’s properties, an artificially created ionization region could conceivably disrupt an enemy’s electromagnetic transmissions. Even in the absence of an artificial ionization patch, high-frequency modification produces large-scale ionospheric variations which alter HF propagation characteristics. The payoff of research aimed at understanding how to control these variations could be high as both HF communication enhancement and degradation are possible. Offensive interference of this kind would likely be indistinguishable from naturally occurring space weather. This capability could also be employed to precisely locate the source of enemy electromagnetic transmissions.
VHF, UHF, and super-high frequency (SHF) satellite communications could be disrupted by creating artificial ionospheric scintillation. This phenomenon causes fluctuations in the phase and amplitude of radio waves over a very wide band (30 MHz to 30 GHz). HF modification produces electron density irregularities that cause scintillation over a wide-range of frequencies. The size of the irregularities determines which frequency band will be affected. Understanding how to control the spectrum of the artificial irregularities generated in the HF modification process should be a primary goal of research in this area. Additionally, it may be possible to suppress the growth of natural irregularities resulting in reduced levels of natural scintillation. Creating artificial scintillation would allow us to disrupt satellite transmissions over selected regions. Like the HF disruption described above, such actions would likely be indistinguishable from naturally occurring environmental events. Figure 4-4 shows how artificially ionized regions might be used to disrupt HF communications via attenuation, scatter, or absorption (fig. 4.4a) or degrade satellite communications via scintillation or energy loss (fig. 4-4b) (from Ref. 25).
Figure 4-4 (a) and (b). Scenarios for Telecommunications Degradation
Source: Microsoft Clipart Gallery © 1995 with courtesy from Microsoft.
Exploding/disabling space assets traversing near-space. The ionosphere could potentially be artificially charged or injected with radiation at a certain point so that it becomes inhospitable to satellites or other space structures. The result could range from temporarily disabling the target to its complete destruction via an induced explosion. Of course, effectively employing such a capability depends on the ability to apply it selectively to chosen regions in space.
Charging space assets by near-space energy transfer. In contrast to the injurious capability described above, regions of the ionosphere could potentially be modified or used as-is to revitalize space assets, for instance by charging their power systems. The natural charge of the ionosphere may serve to provide most or all of the energy input to the satellite. There have been a number of papers in the last decade on electrical charging of space vehicles; however, according to one author, “in spite of the significant effort made in the field both theoretically and experimentally, the vehicle charging problem is far from being completely understood.”51 While the technical challenge is considerable, the potential to harness electrostatic energy to fuel the satellite’s power cells would have a high payoff, enabling service life extension of space assets at a relatively low cost. Additionally, exploiting the capability of powerful HF radio waves to accelerate electrons to relatively high energies may also facilitate the degradation of enemy space assets through directed bombardment with the HF-induced electron beams. As with artificial HF communication disruptions and induced scintillation, the degradation of enemy spacecraft with such techniques would be effectively indistinguishable from natural environment effects. The investigation and optimization of HF acceleration mechanisms for both friendly and hostile purposes is an important area for future research efforts.
Artificial Weather
While most weather-modification efforts rely on the existence of certain preexisting conditions, it may be possible to produce some weather effects artificially, regardless of preexisting conditions. For instance, virtual weather could be created by influencing the weather information received by an end user. Their perception of parameter values or images from global or local meteorological information systems would differ from reality. This difference in perception would lead the end user to make degraded operational decisions.
Nanotechnology also offers possibilities for creating simulated weather. A cloud, or several clouds, of microscopic computer particles, all communicating with each other and with a larger control system could provide tremendous capability. Interconnected, atmospherically buoyant, and having navigation capability in three dimensions, such clouds could be designed to have a wide-range of properties. They might exclusively block optical sensors or could adjust to become impermeable to other surveillance methods. They could also provide an atmospheric electrical potential difference, which otherwise might not exist, to achieve precisely aimed and timed lightning strikes. Even if power levels achieved were insufficient to be an effective strike weapon, the potential for psychological operations in many situations could be fantastic.
One major advantage of using simulated weather to achieve a desired effect is that unlike other approaches, it makes what are otherwise the results of deliberate actions appear to be the consequences of natural weather phenomena. In addition, it is potentially relatively inexpensive to do. According to J. Storrs Hall, a scientist at Rutgers University conducting research on nanotechnology, production costs of these nanoparticles could be about the same price per pound as potatoes.52 This of course discounts research and development costs, which will be primarily borne by the private sector and be considered a sunk cost by 2025 and probably earlier.
Concept of Operations Summary
Weather affects everything we do, and weather-modification can enhance our ability to dominate the aerospace environment. It gives the commander tools to shape the battlespace. It gives the logistician tools to optimize the process. It gives the warriors in the cockpit an operating environment literally crafted to their needs. Some of the potential capabilities a weather-modification system could provide to a war-fighting CINC are summarized in table 1, of the executive summary).
Chapter 5
Investigation Recommendations
How Do We Get There From Here?
To fully appreciate the development of the specific operational capabilities weather-modification could deliver to the war fighter, we must examine and understand their relationship to associated core competencies and the development of their requisite technologies. Figure 5-1 combines the specific operational capabilities of Table 1 into six core capabilities and depicts their relative importance over time. For example, fog and cloud modification are currently important and will remain so for some time to come to conceal our assets from surveillance or improve landing visibility at airfields. However, as surveillance assets become less optically dependent and aircraft achieve a truly global all-weather landing capability, fog and cloud modification applications become less important.
In contrast, artificial weather technologies do not currently exist. But as they are developed, the importance of their potential applications rises rapidly. For example, the anticipated proliferation of surveillance technologies in the future will make the ability to deny surveillance increasingly valuable. In such an environment, clouds made of smart particles such as described in chapter 4 could provide a premium capability.
Figure 5-1. A Core Competency Road Map to Weather Modification in 2025.
Legend for Figure 5-1
PM Precipitation Modification (F&C)M Fog and Cloud Modification
SM Storm Modification CW Counter Weather
SWM Space Weather-modification AW Artificial Weather
Even today’s most technologically advanced militaries would usually prefer to fight in clear weather and blue skies. But as war-fighting technologies proliferate, the side with the technological advantage will prefer to fight in weather that gives them an edge. The US Army has already alluded to this approach in their concept of “owning the weather.”53 Accordingly, storm modification will become more valuable over time. The importance of precipitation modification is also likely to increase as usable water sources become more scarce in volatile parts of the world.
As more countries pursue, develop, and exploit increasing types and degrees of weather-modification technologies, we must be able to detect their efforts and counter their activities when necessary. As depicted, the technologies and capabilities associated with such a counter weather role will become increasingly important.
The importance of space weather-modification will grow with time. Its rise will be more rapid at first as the technologies it can best support or negate proliferate at their fastest rates. Later, as those technologies mature or become obsolete, the importance of space weather-modification will continue to rise but not as rapidly.
To achieve the core capabilities depicted in figure 5-1, the necessary technologies and systems might be developed according to the process depicted in figure 5-2. This figure illustrates the systems development timing and sequence necessary to realize a weather-modification capability for the battlespace by 2025. The horizontal axis represents time. The vertical axis indicates the degree to which a given technology will be applied toward weather-modification. As the primary users, the military will be the main developer for the technologies designated with an asterisk. The civil sector will be the main source for the remaining technologies.
Figure 5-2. A Systems Development Road Map to Weather Modification in 2025.
Legend for Figure 5-2
ADV Aerospace Delivery Vehicles DE Directed Energy
AIM Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors GWN Global Weather Network
CHEM Chemicals SC Smart Clouds (nanotech)
CBD Carbon Black Dust SENSORS Sensors
COMM Communications VR WX Virtual Weather
COMP Computer Modeling *Technologies to be developed by DOD
MOD
WFSE Weather Force Support Element
Conclusions
The world’s finite resources and continued needs will drive the desire to protect people and property and more efficiently use our crop lands, forests, and range lands. The ability to modify the weather may be desirable both for economic and defense reasons. The global weather system has been described as a series of spheres or bubbles. Pushing down on one causes another to pop up.54 We need to know when another power “pushes” on a sphere in their region, and how that will affect either our own territory or areas of economic and political interest to the US.
Efforts are already under way to create more comprehensive weather models primarily to improve forecasts, but researchers are also trying to influence the results of these models by adding small amounts of energy at just the right time and space. These programs are extremely limited at the moment and are not yet validated, but there is great potential to improve them in the next 30 years.55
The lessons of history indicate a real weather-modification capability will eventually exist despite the risk. The drive exists. People have always wanted to control the weather and their desire will compel them to collectively and continuously pursue their goal. The motivation exists. The potential benefits and power are extremely lucrative and alluring for those who have the resources to develop it. This combination of drive, motivation, and resources will eventually produce the technology. History also teaches that we cannot afford to be without a weather-modification capability once the technology is developed and used by others. Even if we have no intention of using it, others will. To call upon the atomic weapon analogy again, we need to be able to deter or counter their capability with our own. Therefore, the weather and intelligence communities must keep abreast of the actions of others.
As the preceding chapters have shown, weather-modification is a force multiplier with tremendous power that could be exploited across the full spectrum of war-fighting environments. From enhancing friendly operations or disrupting those of the enemy via small-scale tailoring of natural weather patterns to complete dominance of global communications and counter-space control, weather-modification offers the war fighter a wide-range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary. But, while offensive weather-modification efforts would certainly be undertaken by US forces with great caution and trepidation, it is clear that we cannot afford to allow an adversary to obtain an exclusive weather-modification capability.
Appendix A
Why Is the Ionosphere Important?
The ionosphere is the part of the earth’s atmosphere beginning at an altitude of about 30 miles and extending outward 1,200 miles or more. This region consists of layers of free electrically charged particles that transmit, refract, and reflect radio waves, allowing those waves to be transmitted great distances around the earth. The interaction of the ionosphere on impinging electromagnetic radiation depends on the properties of the ionospheric layer, the geometry of transmission, and the frequency of the radiation. For any given signal path through the atmosphere, a range of workable frequency bands exists. This range, between the maximum usable frequency (MUF) and the lowest usable frequency (LUF), is where radio waves are reflected and refracted by the ionosphere much as a partial mirror may reflect or refract visible light.56 The reflective and refractive properties of the ionosphere provide a means to transmit radio signals beyond direct “line-of-sight” transmission between a transmitter and receiver. Ionospheric reflection and refraction has therefore been used almost exclusively for long-range HF (from 3 to 30 MHz) communications. Radio waves with frequencies ranging from above 30 MHz to 300 GHz are usually used for communications requiring line-of-sight transmissions, such as satellite communications. At these higher frequencies, radio waves propagate through the ionosphere with only a small fraction of the wave scattering back in a pattern analogous to a sky wave. Communicators receive significant benefit from using these frequencies since they provide considerably greater bandwidths and thus have greater data-carrying capacity; they are also less prone to natural interference (noise).
Although the ionosphere acts as a natural “mirror” for HF radio waves, it is in a constant state of flux, and thus, its “mirror property” can be limited at times. Like terrestrial weather, ionospheric properties change from year to year, from day to day, and even from hour to hour. This ionospheric variability, called space weather, can cause unreliability in ground- and space-based communications that depend on ionospheric reflection or transmission. Space weather variability affects how the ionosphere attenuates, absorbs, reflects, refracts, and changes the propagation, phase, and amplitude characteristics of radio waves. These weather dependent changes may arise from certain space weather conditions such as: (1) variability of solar radiation entering the upper atmosphere; (2) the solar plasma entering the earth’s magnetic field; (3) the gravitational atmospheric tides produced by the sun and moon; and (4) the vertical swelling of the atmosphere due to daytime heating of the sun.57 Space weather is also significantly affected by solar flare activity, the tilt of the earth’s geomagnetic field, and abrupt ionospheric changes resulting from events such as geomagnetic storms.
In summary, the ionosphere’s inherent reflectivity is a natural gift that humans have used to create long-range communications connecting distant points on the globe. However, natural variability in the ionosphere reduces the reliability of our communication systems that depend on ionospheric reflection and refraction (primarily HF). For the most part, higher frequency communications such as UHF, SHF, and EHF bands are transmitted through the ionosphere without distortion. However, these bands are also subject to degradation caused by ionospheric scintillation, a phenomenon induced by abrupt variations in electron density along the signal path, resulting in signal fade caused by rapid signal path variations and defocusing of the signal’s amplitude and/or phase.
Understanding and predicting ionospheric variability and its influence on the transmission and reflection of electromagnetic radiation has been a much studied field of scientific inquiry. Improving our ability to observe, model, and forecast space weather will substantially improve our communication systems, both ground and space-based. Considerable work is being conducted, both within the DOD and the commercial sector, on improving observation, modeling, and forecasting of space weather. While considerable technical challenges remain, we assume for the purposes of this study that dramatic improvements will occur in these areas over the next several decades.
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Appendix B
Research to Better Understand and Predict Ionospheric Effects
According to a SPACECAST 2020 study titled, “Space Weather Support for Communications,” the major factors limiting our ability to observe and accurately forecast space weather are (1) current ionospheric sensing capability; (2) density and frequency of ionospheric observations; (3) sophistication and accuracy of ionospheric models; and (4) current scientific understanding of the physics of ionosphere-thermosphere-magnetosphere coupling mechanisms.58 The report recommends that improvements be realized in our ability to measure the ionosphere vertically and spatially; to this end an architecture for ionospheric mapping was proposed. Such a system would consist of ionospheric sounders and other sensing devices installed on DoD and commercial satellite constellations (taking advantage in particular of the proposed IRIDIUM system and replenishment of the GPS) and an expanded ground-based network of ionospheric vertical sounders in the US and other nations. Understanding and predicting ionospheric scintillation would also require launching of an equatorial remote sensing satellite in addition to the currently planned or deployed DOD and commercial constellations.
The payoff of such a system is an improvement in ionospheric forecasting accuracy from the current range of 40-60 percent to an anticipated 80-100 percent accuracy. Daily worldwide ionospheric mapping would provide the data required to accurately forecast diurnal, worldwide terrestrial propagation characteristics of electromagnetic energy from 3-300 MHz. This improved forecasting would assist satellite operators and users, resulting in enhanced operational efficiency of space systems. It would also provide an order of magnitude improvement in locating the sources of tactical radio communications, allowing for location and tracking of enemy and friendly platforms.59 Improved capability to forecast ionospheric scintillation would provide a means to improve communications reliability by the use of alternate ray paths or relay to undisturbed regions. It would also enable operational users to ascertain whether outages were due to naturally occurring ionospheric variability as opposed to enemy action or hardware problems.
These advances in ionospheric observation, modeling, and prediction would enhance the reliability and robustness of our military communications network. In addition to their significant benefits for our existing communications network, such advances are also requisite to further exploitation of the ionosphere via active modification.
Appendix C
Acronyms and Definitions
AOC air operations center
AOR area of responsibility
ATO air tasking order
EHF extra high frequency
GWN global weather network
HF high frequency
IR infared
LF low frequency
LUF lowest usable frequency
Mesoscale less than 200 km2
Microscale immediate local area
MUF maximum usable frequency
MW microwave
OTH over-the-horizon
PGM precision-guided munitions
RF radio frequency
SAR synthetic aperture radar
SARSAT search and rescue satellite-aided tracking
SHF super high frequency
SPOT satellite positioning and tracking
UAV uninhabited aerospace vehicle
UV ultraviolet
VHF very high frequency
WFS weather force specialist
WFSE weather force support element
WX weather
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Notes
1. The weather-modification capabilities described in this paper are consistent with the operating environments and missions relevant for aerospace forces in 2025 as defined by AF/LR, a long-range planning office reporting to the CSAF [based on AF/LR PowerPoint briefing "Air and Space Power Framework for Strategy Development (jda-2lr.ppt)].”
2. General Gordon R. Sullivan, “Moving into the 21st Century: America’s Army and Modernization,” Military Review (July 1993) quoted in Mary Ann Seagraves and Richard Szymber, “Weather a Force Multiplier,” Military Review, November/December 1995, 75.
3. Gen Gordon R. Sullivan, “Moving into the 21st Century: America’s Army and Modernization,” Military Review (July 1993) quoted in Mary Ann Seagraves and Richard Szymber, “Weather a Force Multiplier,” Military Review, November/December 1995, 75.
4. Horace R. Byers, “History of Weather-modification,” in Wilmot N. Hess, ed. Weather and Climate Modification, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 4.
5. William B. Meyer, “The Life and Times of US Weather: What Can We Do About It?” American Heritage 37, no. 4 (June/July 1986), 48.
6. Byers, 13.
7. US Department of State, The Department of State Bulletin. 74, no. 1981 (13 June 1977): 10.
8. Dwight D Eisenhower. “Crusade in Europe,” quoted in John F. Fuller, Thor’s Legions (Boston: American Meterology Society, 1990), 67.
9. Interview of Lt Col Gerald F. Riley, Staff Weather Officer to CENTCOM OIC of CENTAF Weather Support Force and Commander of 3rd Weather Squadron, in “Desert Shield/Desert Storm Interview Series,” by Dr William E. Narwyn, AWS Historian, 29 May 1991.
10. Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen. Gulf War Air Power Survey Summary Report (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993), 172.
11. Herbert S. Appleman, An Introduction to Weather-modification (Scott AFB, Ill.: Air Weather Service/MAC, September 1969), 1.
12. William Bown, “Mathematicians Learn How to Tame Chaos,” New Scientist, 30 May 1992, 16.
13. CJCSI 3810.01, Meteorological and Oceanographic Operations, 10 January 95. This CJCS Instruction establishes policy and assigns responsibilities for conducting meteorological and oceanographic operations. It also defines the terms widespread, long-lasting, and severe, in order to identify those activities that US forces are prohibited from conducting under the terms of the UN Environmental Modification Convention. Widespread is defined as encompassing an area on the scale of several hundred km; long-lasting means lasting for a period of months, or approximately a season; and severe involves serious or significant disruption or harm to human life, natural and economic resources, or other assets.
14. Concern about the unintended consequences of attempting to “control” the weather is well justified. Weather is a classic example of a chaotic system (i.e., a system that never exactly repeats itself). A chaotic system is also extremely sensitive: minuscule differences in conditions greatly affect outcomes. According to Dr. Glenn James, a widely published chaos expert, technical advances may provide a means to predict when weather transitions will occur and the magnitude of the inputs required to cause those transitions; however, it will never be possible to precisely predict changes that occur as a result of our inputs. The chaotic nature of weather also limits our ability to make accurate long-range forecasts. The renowned physicist Edward Teller recently presented calculations he performed to determine the long-range weather forecasting improvement that would result from a satellite constellation providing continuous atmospheric measurements over a 1 km2 grid worldwide. Such a system, which is currently cost-prohibitive, would only improve long-range forecasts from the current five days to approximately 14 days. Clearly, there are definite physical limits to mankind’s ability to control nature, but the extent of those physical limits remains an open question. Sources: G. E. James, “Chaos Theory: The Essentials for Military Applications,” in ACSC Theater Air Campaign Studies Coursebook, AY96, 8 (Maxwell AFB, Ala: Air University Press, 1995), 1-64. The Teller calculations are cited in Reference 49 of this source.
15. SPACECAST 2020, Space Weather Support for Communications, white paper G (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air War College/2020, 1994).
16. Rear Adm Sigmund Petersen, “NOAA Moves Toward The 21st Century,” The Military Engineer 20, no. 571 (June-July 1995): 44.
17. Ibid.
18. William Brown, “Mathematicians Learn How to Tame Chaos,” New Scientist (30 May 1992): 16.
19. A pilot program known as Project Popeye conducted in 1966 attempted to extend the monsoon season in order to increase the amount of mud on the Ho Chi Minh trail thereby reducing enemy movements. A silver iodide nuclei agent was dispersed from WC-130, F4 and A-1E aircraft into the clouds over portions of the trail winding from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Positive results during this initial program led to continued operations from 1967 to 1972. While the effects of this program remain disputed, some scientists believe it resulted in a significant reduction in the enemy’s ability to bring supplies into South Vietnam along the trail. E. M. Frisby, “Weather-modification in Southeast Asia, 1966-1972,” The Journal of Weather-modification 14, no. 1 (April 1982): 1-3.
20. William M. Gray et al., “Weather-modification by Carbon Dust Absorption of Solar Energy,” Journal of Applied Meteorology 15 (April 1976): 355.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 367.
24. AWS PLAN 813 Appendix I Annex Alfa (Scott AFB, Ill.: Air Weather Service/(MAC) 14 January 1972), 11. Hereafter cited as Annex Alfa.
25. Capt Frank G. Coons, “Warm Fog Dispersal-A Different Story,” Aerospace Safety 25, no. 10 (October 1969): 16.
26. Annex Alfa, 14.
27. Warren C. Kocmond, “Dissipation of Natural Fog in the Atmosphere,” Progress of NASA Research on Warm Fog Properties and Modification Concepts, NASA SP-212 (Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Division of the Office of Technology Utilization of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1969), 74.
28. James E. Jiusto, “Some Principles of Fog Modification with Hygrosopic Nuclei,” Progress of NASA Research on Warm Fog Properties and Modification Concepts, NASA SP-212 (Washington, D.C.: Scientific and Technical Information Division of the Office of Technology Utilization of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1969), 37.
29. Maj Roy Dwyer, Category III or Fog Dispersal, M-U 35582-7 D993a c.1 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, May 1972), 51.
30. James McLare, Pulp & Paper 68, no. 8 (August 1994): 79.
31. Milton M. Klein, A Feasibility Study of the Use of Radiant Energy for Fog Dispersal, Abstract (Hanscom AFB, Mass.: Air Force Material Command, October 1978).
32. Edward M. Tomlinson, Kenneth C. Young, and Duane D. Smith, Laser Technology Applications for Dissipation of Warm Fog at Airfields, PL-TR-92-2087 (Hanscom AFB, Mass.: Air Force Material Command, 1992).
33. J. Storrs Hall, “Overview of Nanotechnology,” adapted from papers by Ralph C. Merkle and K. Eric Drexler, Internet address: http://nanotech.rutgers.edu/nanotech-/intro.html, Rutgers University, November 1995.
34. Robert A. Sutherland, “Results of Man-Made Fog Experiment,” Proceedings of the 1991 Battlefield Atmospherics Conference (Fort Bliss, Tex.: Hinman Hall, 3-6 December 1991).
35. Christopher Centner et al., “Environmental Warfare: Implications for Policymakers and War Planners” (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air Command and Staff College, May 1995), 39.
36. Louis J. Battan, Harvesting the Clouds (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1960), 120.
37. Facts on File 55, no. 2866 (2 November 95).
38. Gene S. Stuart, “Whirlwinds and Thunderbolts,” Nature on the Rampage (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1986), 130.
39. Ibid., 140.
40. Heinz W. Kasemir, “Lightning Suppression by Chaff Seeding and Triggered Lightning,” in Wilmot N. Hess, ed., Weather and Climate Modification (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), 623-628.
41. SPACECAST 2020, Space Weather Support for Communications, white paper G, (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air War College/2020, 1994).
42. Gen Charles Horner, “Space Seen as Challenge, Military’s Final Frontier,” Defense Issues, (Prepared Statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee), 22 April 1993, 7.
43. Lewis M. Duncan and Robert L. Showen, “Review of Soviet Ionospheric Modification Research,” in Ionospheric Modification and Its Potential to Enhance or Degrade the Performance of Military Systems,(AGARD Conference Proceedings 485, October, 1990), 2-1.
44. Ibid.
45. Peter M. Banks, “Overview of Ionospheric Modification from Space Platforms,” in Ionospheric Modification and Its Potential to Enhance or Degrade the Performance of Military Systems (AGARD Conference Proceedings 485, October 1990) 19-1.
46. Capt Mike Johnson, Upper Atmospheric Research and Modification-Former Soviet Union (U), DST-18205-475-92 (Foreign Aerospace Science and Technology Center, AF Intelligence Command, 24 September 1992), 3. (Secret) Information extracted is unclassified.
47. Capt Edward E. Hume, Jr., Atmospheric and Space Environmental Research Programs in Brazil (U) (Foreign Aerospace Science and Technology Center, AF Intelligence Command, March 1993), 12. (Secret) Information extracted is unclassified.
48. Paul A. Kossey et al. “Artificial Ionospheric Mirrors (AIM),” in Ionospheric Modification and Its Potential to Enhance or Degrade the Performance of Military Systems (AGARD Conference Proceedings 485, October 1990), 17A-1.
49. Ibid., 17A-7.
50. Ibid., 17A-10.
51. B. N. Maehlum and J. Troim, “Vehicle Charging in Low Density Plasmas,” in Ionospheric Modification and Its Potential to Enhance or Degrade the Performance of Military Systems (AGARD Conference Proceedings 485, October 1990), 24-1.
52. Hall.
53. Mary Ann Seagraves and Richard Szymber, “Weather a Force Multiplier,” Military Review, November/December 1995, 69.
54. Daniel S. Halacy, The Weather Changers (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 202.
55. William Brown, “Mathematicians Learn How to Tame Chaos,” New Scientist, 30 May 1992, 16.
56. AU-18, Space Handbook, An Analyst’s Guide Vol. II. (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, December 1993), 196.
57. Thomas F. Tascione, Introduction to the Space Environment (Colorado Springs: USAF Academy Department of Physics, 1984), 175.
58. SPACECAST 2020, Space Weather Support for Communications, white paper G, (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air War College/2020, 1994).
59. Referenced in ibid.
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/docops/usaf/2025/v3c15/v3c15-1.htm#Contents
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Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people’s health
GRAIN.org
May 2011
School children in the US were served 200,000 kilos of meat contaminated with a deadly antibiotic-resistant bacteria before the nation’s second largest meat packer issued a recall in 2009. A year earlier, six babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems in China when one of the country’s top dairy producers knowingly allowed an industrial chemical into its milk supply. Across the world, people are getting sick and dying from food like never before. Governments and corporations are responding with all kinds of rules and regulations, but few have anything to do with public health. The trade agreements, laws and private standards used to impose their version of “food safety” only entrench corporate food systems that make us sick and devastate those that truly feed and care for people, those based on biodiversity, traditional knowledge, and local markets. People are resisting, whether its movements against GMOs in Benin and “mad cow” beef in Korea or campaigns to defend street hawkers in India and raw milk in Colombia. The question of who defines “food safety” is increasingly central to the struggle over the future of food and agriculture.
Read the synopsis of this report here.
View some additional [url=http://www.grain.org/photos/?t=15photos[/url] here that didn’t make it onto this page (photos also available in the PDF).
The growing global menace
Food should be a source of health, not harm. But food can maim, cripple, and kill. The leading cause of food poisoning in the United Kingdom today is Campylobacter, a tiny bacterium, rife throughout the country’s chicken supply, that causes in humans diarrhoea, fever, abdominal pain and cramping, and in some cases chronic, even life-threatening, conditions. People get it from touching raw poultry or eating undercooked birds. Some 85% of the chicken population in the UK may be infected. In the United States, the top culprits these days are Norovirus, mostly transmitted from dirty hands, and Salmonella, contracted from eating food with faeces on it. Norovirus will give you acute vomiting and diarrhoea, while Salmonella causes vomiting, fever and cramps.
Graph: Data compiled by GRAIN from government and UN sources, 2008-2010 (except Australia=2005)
Among the more notorious food safety incidents in recent years was the melamine scandal in China in 2008. Six babies died and 300,000 others got horribly sick with kidney problems when the industrial chemical melamine got into the commercial milk distribution circuit. There was also a dioxin scandal in Germany in January 2011, where the German authorities shut down more than 4,000 farms after it was discovered that a German company had sold 200,000 tonnes of dioxin-tainted animal feed, which had subsequently entered the food chain. Dioxins are cancer-causing poisons formed in the burning of waste and other industrial processes. 1
How bad is the problem globally? Believe it or not, there are no global statistics or tracking mechanisms on food safety incidents worldwide; reliable data on their frequency and impact are grossly inadequate. Nevertheless, the available data do show that food poisoning is quite common in most countries (see Graph 1). 2 According to the Singaporean authorities, who run a pretty tight food hygiene system, roughly 1.5 billion people worldwide are affected by food-borne disease outbreaks each year, resulting in 3 million deaths. 3
The price of this food safety mess is huge. The UK puts the annual costs to the British economy at US$1.92 billion, which its Food Standards Agency bluntly calls “too much”. Australia’s annual bill is US$1.23 billion. The World Health Organisation says that the annual cost to Vietnam is US$210 million. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has long given the figure of US$35 million per year, but a new study released by the Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University in 2010 puts the figure astronomically higher, at US$152 billion. 4
What makes food unsafe?
What constitutes safe or unsafe food is a controversial question. A range of things can make food unsafe: bad practices (poor hygiene, animal abuse, reliance on antibiotics and pesticides), unproven or risky technologies (genetic modification, nanotechnology, irradiation, cloning), deliberate contamination (such as tampering), or just poor supervision. One thing is clear though: the industrial food system is – in and of itself – the biggest source of food safety problems, because of its intensive practices, its sheer size, and the level of concentration and power that it has accumulated.
A small farm that produces some bad meat will have a relatively small impact. Networks of small and mid-sized farms producing food for regional consumption spread risk widely, diluting it. A global system built around geographically concentrated factory-sized farms does the opposite: it accumulates and magnifies risk, subjecting particular areas to industrial-style pollution and consumers globally to poisoned products (see Box: Superbugs and megafarms).
Both large- and small-scale systems are capable of producing tainted foods, but the potential impact is inherently different. There is simply bigger risk attached to bigger scale. In addition, the corporate food industry – as opposed to small farms and food operators – is highly integrated. This also generates higher risk, because it relies on combining and handling foods through a range of manufacturing, processing and distribution activities. Of course, people can get food poisoning anywhere, in school canteens or in their own homes. But the industrial food system has itself more and more become the problem, given the type of practices and the issue of scale and concentration (see Box: Food safety in the fast food nation).
Food safety in the Fast Food Nation
Does US-style production represent the future of global food? Possibly. Certainly, elite Western opinion shapers and policymakers – the editors of The Economist, the directors of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, certain key elements in the Obama administration – think it should. So it is worthwhile to consider how the US food safety regime has responded to the dilemmas of scale in recent years.
In an industrialised, highly consolidated food system geared to maximising profit by selling vast volumes of cheap food, pressure exists at every phase of the production chain to cut costs by cutting corners, including safe food practices. Moreover, the very scale of modern food production means that seemingly isolated lapses can become quite grave, subjecting millions of people to danger based on the actions of a single production facility.
The case of Peanut Corp. of America demonstrates the perils of scale. Until recently, the company ran two plants: one in Texas, one in Georgia. These two facilities processed 2.5% of the peanuts produced in the United States, and sold “peanut paste” to the entire US processed food industry. By late 2007, the company had evidently given up trying to maintain hygienic conditions at its facilities. In late 2008, people started coming down with salmonella from a dizzying array of products containing Peanut Corp.’s paste, prompting the FDA to initiate a “voluntary recall”. By the time all was said and done, the recall affected no fewer than 1,800 supermarket brands. The tainted products killed nine people and officially sickened around 700 – half of them children – in 46 US states. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reckons that for every reported case of salmonella, another 38 cases go unreported – so the real number of people made ill from the output of just two facilities may be up to 26,000. In the wake of the fiasco, US journalists showed that the FDA had “outsourced” inspection of the Georgia plant to state authorities, and then ignored the state inspectors’ findings of atrocious hygiene practices. Moreover, it turned out that the company’s own testing had found salmonella in huge batches of peanut paste, which it proceeded to send out anyway. i
In another incident in 2009, a company called Beef Packers, owned by transnational agribusiness giant Cargill, had to declare two “voluntary recalls” involving over 500 tonnes of ground beef infected with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. ii The USDA announced that consuming the suspect meat could cause “treatment failure” iii – that is, death – because of its ability to withstand drugs. At least 39 people in 11 states reported getting sick, and more than 200,000 thousand kilos of the tainted meat was served to school children through the National School Lunch program. iv
The official response to such incidents has been minimal. In January 2011, a hotly debated piece of legislation called the Food Safety Modernisation Act was signed into being. The intention of the original Bill was to update and inject some resources into the US food safety system. It basically called for more inspections, gave the government authority to mandate food recalls, and provided some traceability to an otherwise fairly unregulated industrial sector. Who would oppose such a move? The fat cats from the food industry, you might think – the Cargills and the Tysons, who don’t want to be controlled. But you would be wrong. The new rules would hardly affect them.
According to an analysis by the US NGO Food & Water Watch, nothing in the Act would have prevented the Peanut Company of America from sending out its tainted paste. Worse, the rules would not even touch the meat sector, the biggest source of food-borne illness in the United States. v The main opponents of the bill throughout the debate were small family farm activists who, because of the way the bill was framed, saw themselves falling under these controls when they are not the problem. So instead of instigating real food safety reform in a country where one out of four people gets sick and 5,000 people die from eating contaminated food each year, the law might do next to nothing.
In the absence of stricter public action around food safety, corporations have moved to fill the void — sometimes to tragicomic effect. A case in point: in the mid-2000s, a company called Beef Products Inc. had an ingenious idea: it would buy slaughterhouse scraps – which are extremely likely to be infected by bacterial pathogens – from large-scale beef processors at cut-rate prices. It would purée those parts into a paste, which it would then mix with ammonia to kill bacterial pathogens. It would sell the product back the the beef industry as a cheap filler for ground beef, with the added feature that the ammonia in the paste would sterilise the ground beef it was mixed with. The beef industry had found a “solution” to the problem of bacterial pathogens in ground beef! The product, known in the industry as “pink slime” for its distinctive look, could be found in 70% of hamburgers consumed in the United States by the end of the decade. The USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service, which oversees meat safety, applauded — it recognised “pink slime” as safe without requiring testing, on the grounds that it had been sterilised by ammonia. But in 2009, a New York Times exposé found that pink slime in fact tended to be ridden with pathogens — and was actively adding to the pathogen load of the ground beef it was mixed with. Beef Products Inc. responded by merely upping the ammonia dose for its mix. To this day, the product remains widely used in the vast US ground beef market, including at fast-food chains nationwide. vi
If the official US response to highly visible manifestations of food poisoning, like Salmonella-tainted meat and peanut butter, has been underwhelming and industry-friendly, then the response to low-level exposure to pathogens that cause cumulative damage has been virtually non-existent. The first kind causes spectacular, impossible-to-ignore symptoms like vomiting and diarrhoea; the second entails subtle, easy-to-ignore ones that can cause significant long-term damage. Corporate-led food safety regimes like the one in the United States have to at least gesture at the first kind; the second kind, not so much.
It turns out that the USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS), which oversees the safety of the US meat supply, routinely endorses meat that it knows to be tainted with residues of “veterinary drugs, pesticides, and heavy metals”, the USDA Inspector General revealed in a 2010 report. vii The damning report was met with silence by the US media – probably because small amounts of substances like heavy metals don’t cause dramatic immediate symptoms, but rather hard-to-trace, slow-to-develop conditions like cancer. As the report puts it, the “effects of residue are generally chronic as opposed to acute, which means that they will occur over time, as an individual consumes small traces of the residue”. In its report, the USDA Inspector General’s office expressed confidence that the FSIS would redouble efforts to keep heavy metals and antibiotic traces out of the meat supply going forward. Yet it had expressed the same thing, after exposing the same problem, in its report two years earlier. viii
Another example is the US Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to act on mounting evidence that Bisphenol A, an industrial compound found in many food containers, is an endocrine disrupter. If the food safety regime for spectacular pathogens could be described as porous, that for the second, more subtle, kind barely exists at all.
Written with contributions from Tom Philpott, senior writer on food and agriculture for Grist magazine.
i “Peanut Corp. Shipped Product After Finding Salmonella”, Bloomberg News, 27 January 2009, http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aeXwqlMnIWU0; and “Peanut Plant Had History of Health Lapses”, New York Times, 26 January 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27peanuts.html?_r=1&ref=health
ii “Antibiotic-resistant salmonella, school lunches, and Cargill’s dodgy California beef plant”, Grist, 10 December 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-10-meat-wagon-cargill-salmonella/
iii “California Firm Recalls Ground Beef Products Due to Possible Salmonella Contamination”, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, 9 December 2009, http://www.fsis.usda.gov/ News_&_Events/Recall_065_2009_Release/index.asp
iv “Why a recall of tainted beef didn’t include school lunches”, USA Today, 2 December 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-12-01-beef-recall-lunches_N.htm
v Responsibility for food safety in the US is divided between two agencies. The US Department of Agriculture is responsible for meat, poultry and egg products, which accounts for 20% of the US food supply. The Food and Drug Administration, within the US Department of Health, takes care of the rest. The Food Safety Modernisation Act addresses only the work of the FDA. The top sources of food poisoning in the United States are, however, poultry, beef and leafy vegetables (in that order, 2007). See: “Can Congress make a food-safety omelette without breaking the wrong eggs? “, Grist, 25 October 2010.
vi “Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned”, New York Times, 30 December 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us/31meat.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all; See also, “Lessons on the food system from the ammonia-hamburger fiasco”, Grist, 5 January 2010, http://www.grist.org/article/2010-01-05-cheap-food-ammonia-burgers
vii “FSIS National Residue Program for Cattle”, Office of the Inspector General, US Department of Agriculture, http://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/24601-08-KC.pdf
viii “USDA Inspector General: meat supply routinely tainted with harmful residues”, Grist, 15 April 2010: http://www.grist.org
This is “food safety”?
Government and industry action on food safety gives little indication that they recognise any fundamental problem with industrial food production. Rarely do their regulations or standards hinder corporate practices in any significant way. On the contrary, they tend to reinforce the power of large industry while undermining, or even criminalising, small-scale production and local food cultures. Colombia, for instance, is in the process of implementing legislation to prevent the sale of raw milk in urban areas. Well over two million farmers and vendors depend for their livelihoods on these sales of raw milk, and around 20 million Colombians, most of them poor, depend on raw milk as an affordable and essential source of nutrition, easily made safe by boiling it at home. Hard pressed to justify its moves on public health grounds, the government says that the legislation is part of its commitment to the WTO, and that it will help to “modernise” the dairy sector, making it better able to compete with imports when a looming free trade agreement with the EU kicks in. 5
These days, in Colombia and elsewhere, “food safety” policy has little to do with public health or consumers. It has become a battleground among contesting interests, the site of power struggles for control over food and agriculture, with decisions being increasingly taken far from producers and consumers, in the obscure world of trade negotiations and multilateral agencies, where politics and commerce, not science and public health, are what drive things.
Consider the case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the fatal brain-wasting condition popularly known as mad cow disease. People get the human strain of it by eating the meat of cows that have been fed diseased animals as a cheap source of protein – a practice common in industrial feedlots since the 1970s. The US and Canada lost Japan, Korea and several other major export markets for beef when BSE was found in their herds in 2003, and have had a tough time regaining those markets because risks remain from their industries’ feeding practices. 6 Indeed, in March 2011, a new case of BSE was identified in a Canadian cow. 7 But through constant pressure, particularly at the trade negotiating table, both countries have secured some concessions to allow certain parts of the cow, or the meat of younger animals, to cross borders freely. Both countries also went to the Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) in Paris, which has a similar role to Codex Alimentarius Commission in Rome but for the animal kingdom, to get their beef declared generally safe for consumption. Where does that leave Japan? Unmoved. It says that its standards are higher than those of the OIE or the US, and have to be given priority.
And then there’s the case of ractopamine, a growth promoter added to pig feed. China and the European Union, which together produce 70% of the world’s pork, say that it is not safe for humans and have banned its use in meat production. The same is true for more than 150 other countries. In the United States, however, home to Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant that produces ractopamine by way of its subsidiary Elanco, the drug is fed every day to pigs, cows, and turkeys and Washington fights tooth and nail to defend the interests of US corporations and prevent countries from rejecting US pork for containing residues of the stuff. The US and Eil Lilly are working hard to try to convince Codex to declare it safe for human consumption.
Beijing, for its part, has so far refused to budge. But that doesn’t mean that Chinese consumers are getting ractopamine-free pork. The same government fighting off ractopamine-laced US pork, is aggressively pushing, in the name of “food safety”, a consolidation and modernisation of the country’s pig production based on the US factory farm model. China’s two largest, vertically-integrated pork producers, Yurun and Shineway, both of whom have been heavily funded by the US bank Goldman Sachs, were implicated in recent food safety incidents involving ractopamine and clenbuterol (another banned drug added to pig feed for the same purposes). 8 In March 2011, Chinese consumers were shocked when a CCTV television report uncovered how ractopamine and clenbuterol are widely used in the farms supplying Shineway in Henan Province. 9 The report found that Shineway was actually offering farmers higher prices for pigs fed ractopamine. 10
Superbugs and megafarms
“Superbug” is a term used to describe bacteria that have acquired the ability to resist commonly used antibiotics. One of the most notorious is Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which emerged in the 1960s in the UK and has since spread around the world, with deadly consequences. In the US alone, 17,000 people died from MRSA infection in 2005. i
MRSA is typically associated with hospitals, where the superbug has a tendency to get into open wounds and cause difficult-to-heal infections. But in recent years these superbugs have found another place to thrive: industrial pig farms. ii
In 2004, Dutch researchers identified a new strain of MRSA, later labelled ST398 or “pig MRSA”, which they found in people in close contact with Dutch pig farms. Within two years ST398 become a leading source of human MRSA infection in the country, accounting for more than one in five human MRSA cases. Studies showed that these cases were closely related with pigs, and further research revealed that ST398 was running rampant in pigs on Dutch farms. A 2007 survey found ST398 in 39% of pigs and 81% of local piggeries. iii
New surveys of farms outside of the Netherlands have turned up similar numbers. iv The first ever EU-wide survey for MRSA on pig farms in 2009, using a method that “largely underestimates MRSA prevalence”, found ST398 in more than two-thirds of EU member states. Spain and Germany had the highest incidence, with over 40% of pig holdings testing positive for MRSA. v Not surprisingly, given the European pig industry’s heavy exports overseas, ST398 is turning up in pigs beyond Europe’s borders, too. A study of pigs in the Canadian province of Ontario, for instance, found ST398 in a quarter of local pigs, as well as in one-fifth of the pig farmers tested. vi Only one study has been conducted in the US so far: it was a pilot study of two large hog operations in the midwest that found ST398 in 49% of the pigs and 45% of the workers. vii
MRSA has the potential to evolve in very dangerous ways in its new home on pig farms. The density of animals in factory farms allows the bacteria to evolve rapidly and in diverse ways. Also, the use of antibiotics on factory farms is ubiquitous. Pigs are routinely fed antibiotics in their feed and water, often as a preventive measure against disease outbreaks and even simply to increase growth rates.
In the US, 80% of all antibiotics consumed annually are consumed by livestock. viii In China, the figure is nearly 50%. ix Even in the EU, where the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics for animals is banned and where the types of antibiotics allowed for livestock are controlled, the use of antibiotics for animals still exceeds their use for humans. In Germany, for example, three times as many antibiotics are given to animals as to humans. x Such widespread use of antibiotics in factory farms speeds up the development of antibiotic resistance among bacteria. Unlike other strains of MRSA, ST398 can already withstand tetracyclines, a group of antibiotics that is given heavily and regularly to pigs in factory farms. The medical profession is getting increasingly worried about what this will mean for the future of human health care, as antibiotics may become useless. The WHO now calls it “the greatest threat to human health”. xi
The good news, however, is that ST398 still hasn’t shown much virulence in humans, nor is it easily transmitted between people. Not yet, at least.
In 2010, a 14-year-old girl in France, recovering in hospital from pneumonia, was infected with a superbug. She soon began having serious respiratory problems, her lungs started bleeding, and within six days she died. The superbug that killed her was a clone of MRSA ST398 that is known to circulate in humans. The most alarming issue for the French doctors studying the case was that this was the first incident on record in which this strain of MRSA had acquired the capacity to produce a lethal toxin in humans, something that certain other strains of superbugs are able to do. They reasoned that if the clone of MRSA ST398 could do it, then surely “pig MRSA” has the same capacity. xii
It is not much of a stretch to imagine a situation where “pig MRSA” passes from a pig to a farm worker carrying another MRSA strain with virulence to humans, mixes with that strain, and acquires its capacity for virulence. The new virulent strain of ST398 could then easily pass back into the pigs, where it would rapidly amplify and spread. ST398 is transmitted to humans not only through contact with live pigs: the bacteria is also present on meat sold in supermarkets and can be carried over large distances by the insects that pass in and out of farms. xiii
The EU is slowly starting to take action to defend against such a possibility. It has implemented several measures to restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock production and, at national and at EU level, some surveillance of farms is being carried out. In 2009, a panel of the European Food Safety Authority recommended that the EU move towards “systematic surveillance and monitoring of MRSA in intensively reared animals”. South Korea, for its part, banned the use of seven antibiotics in animal feed in 2008, and implemented a national programme to reduce the use of antibiotics on livestock farms. But such restrictions on the use of antibiotics for livestock hardly exist in the US, although proposed legislation restricting the non-therapeutic use of certain antibiotics in feed is currently before Congress. As for surveillance, the US National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System doesn’t even test for MRSA. xiv Outside the industrialised countries, where the meat industry is expanding most rapidly, there is an almost complete absence of controls on the use of antibiotics in agriculture and of surveillance for pathogens such as MRSA.
Enhancing surveillance and cutting back on the use of antibiotics in factory farms are important measures. But they aren’t enough to deal effectively with the threat posed by MRSA and the myriad other pathogens that thrive in factory farms. A staggering 61% of all human pathogens, and 75% of new human pathogens, are transmitted by animals, with many of the most dangerous – such as bird flu, BSE, swine flu and the Nypah virus – having emerged from intensive livestock farms. xv It is the way that animals are farmed that is fundamentally at issue. xvi
i E. Klein, D.L. Smith, R. Laxminarayan, “Hospitalizations and Deaths Caused by Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, United States, 1999–2005″, Emerg. Infect. Dis. Vol. 13, No. 12, 2007, pp. 1840–46.
ii Ed Yong, “MRSA in pigs and pig farmers”, 23 January 2009, http://scienceblogs.com/ notrocketscience/2009/01/mrsa_in_pigs_and_pig_farmers.php
iii X.W. Huijsdens et al., “Community-acquired MRSA and pig-farming”, Ann. Clin. Microbiol. Antimicrob., Vol. 5, No. 26, 2006; A.J. de Neeling et al., “High prevalence of methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus in pigs”, Vet. Microbiol., Vol. 122, No. 3–4, 21 June 2007, pp. 366–72; I. van Loo et al., “Emergence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus of animal origin in humans”, Emerg. Infect. Dis., Vol. 13, No. 12, 2007, pp. 1834–9.
iv Danish Integrated Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring and Research Programme, http://www.danmap.org/pdfFiles/Danmap_2009.pdf
v “Pig MRSA widespread in Europe”, Ecologist, 25 November 2009; Broens et al., “Diagnostic validity of pooling environmental samples to determine the status of sow-herds for the presence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)”, Poster presented at the ASM–ESCMID Conference on Methicillin-resistant Staphylococci, in Animals: Veterinary and Public Health Implications, London, 2009.
vi “Guelph Researchers Find MRSA in Pigs”, University of Guelph, 8 November 2007, http://www.uoguelph.ca/news/2007/11/post_75.html.
vii T.C. Smith, M.J. Male, A.L. Harper, J.S. Kroeger, G.P. Tinkler et al., (2009) “Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Strain ST398 Is Present in Midwestern US Swine and Swine Workers”, PLoS ONE, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2009.
viii See “New FDA Numbers Reveal Food Animals Consume Lion’s Share of Antibiotics”, Center for a Liveable Future, Johns Hopkins University, 23 December 2010,. http://www.livablefutureblog.com/2010/12/new-fda-numbers-reveal-food-animals-consume-lion%E2%80%99s-share-of-antibiotics
See also Margaret Mellon, Charles Benbrook, Karen Lutz Benbrook, “Hogging it!: Estimates of antimicrobial abuse in Livestock”, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2001, http://www.ucsusa.org
ix “Half of China’s antibiotics fed to animals: expert”, Xinhua, 26 November 2010.
x Kristen Kerksiek, “Farming out Antibiotics: The fast track to the post-antibiotic era”, Infection Research, Germany, 22 March 2010, http://www.infection-research.de/perspectives/ detail/pressrelease/ farming_out_antibiotics_the_fast_track_to_the_post_antibiotic_era/
xi AAP, “Greatest threat to human health”, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 February 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/greatest-threat-to-human-health-20110216-1awai.html
xii Frédéric Laurent, “Les souches de staphylococcus aureus ST398 sont-elles virulents”, Bull. Acad. Vét. France, Vol. 163, No. 3, May 2010.
xiii See Aqeel Ahmad et al., “Insects in confined swine operations carry a large antibiotic resistant and potentially virulent enterococcal community”, BMC Microbiology, 2011, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2180/11/23/abstract
xiv Maryn McKenna, “Alarm over ‘pig MRSA’ – but not in the US”, Wired, 30 October 2010, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/alarm-over-pig-mrsa-%E2%80%94-but-not-in-the-us/
xv John McDermott and Delia Grace, “Agriculture-Associated diseases: Adapting Agriculture to improve Human Health”, ILRI, February 2011.
xvi GRAIN, “Germ warfare: Livestock disease, public health and the military-industrial complex”, Seedling, January 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=533
Food safety and global trade: Europe and the US impose their standards
As the two examples above help to show, trade agreements have become the core mechanism to expand and enforce food safety standards around the world. Since the 1980s and the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations, which gave rise to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), agricultural markets have been profoundly liberalised, with tariffs and quotas coming down, particularly in developing countries. 11 This has led to a boom in global food trade, with few countries free to impose tariffs or take similar measures to regulate the flow of imports and exports any more. As a result, governments and corporations have turned to other measures to manipulate market access and control. In agriculture, food safety is the major method.
In essence, as quantitative restrictions no longer exist (as a tool to open and close markets), qualitative ones have been invented to take their place. The WTO has played a direct role in this shift. (See Annex: Who does what?) But today, it is mainly through so-called free trade agreements, negotiated at the bilateral or regional level, that governments recalibrate the rules of food safety. Too often, the food safety rules that emerge from trade negotiations become mechanisms to force open markets, or backdoor ways to limit market access; they do little to protect public health, serving only corporate growth imperatives and profit margins.
Take the EU, which has become expert at defending some of the most ridiculous standards. In the late 1990s, the EU banned fishery products from India because of unacceptable sanitation risks supposedly found there. But the EU’s definition of “sanitary” can be absurd. It demanded, for instance, that the floors and ceilings of fish landing units be washed with potable water 12 –this in a country where a sizeable fraction of the population lacks access to potable water. For Indian fishers and processors, the point of such rules is not to protect the end consumer; it is to discourage access to the EU market for Indian companies, by imposing conditions that only EU companies can comply with.
Experiences in Africa bear this out. According to the United Nations, Tanzanian fishermen dependent on exports to the EU lost 80% of their income under a ban similar to the one placed on India. 13 Uganda, in the same situation, lost almost US$40 million. Did the Europeans stop eating fish? No. In fact, while these bans were conveniently in place, EU firms, such as the Spanish group Pescanova, aggressively expanded their fishing activities in African waters to serve the lucrative European market by buying up quotas and licenses. 14 Today, with Brussels pursuing a flurry of new generation trade deals, things are getting worse (see Box: EU–India FTA).
Consider peanuts. The EU has long posed problems to the rest of the world with its excessively high standards related to aflatoxins. Aflatoxins are mycotoxins produced from certain kinds of fungus or mould. In humans they can attack or even shut down the liver, as well as cause cancer. While adults have a high tolerance to aflatoxin poisoning, children do not, and can be exposed to it through grains, nuts, fruit, or cheese. With the growing prominence of food safety as a concern for EU authorities, Brussels has set tolerance limits for aflatoxins grossly out of proportion to the risks. 15 This has hit Iranian pistachio producers, Gabonese peanut exporters, Bolivian brazil nut harvesters and Filipino coconut farmers. The World Bank calculates that the exaggerated aflatoxin tolerance level imposed by the EU costs African countries US$670 million a year in export losses. 16 For many observers, it is hard to square those losses against the benefit of preventing the potential death of 0.7 people in a population of 500 million per year. 17 In fact, there are cases where the overzealous aflatoxin restrictions have only led to bidding wars to drive peanut prices down – for the benefit of European importers, of course. 18
The United States is slightly different in its demands. To begin with, the US is generally seen to have lower standards than Europe with regard to pesticide and chemical residues. In fact, Brussels seems constantly to be engaged in some spat with Washington DC. For instance, US poultry destined for export is routinely dunked in chlorine just before it is shipped. This is to kill the bacteria that have accumulated in the birds’ carcasses through the quintessentially American “factory farming” production process. 19 The Europeans do not allow the import of chickens bathed in chlorine, so no US poultry enters the EU market. The US also carries out fewer physical checks on its own food imports. It examines only 2% of all incoming fish shipments, for instance, even though some 80% of fish consumed in the US is imported. This laxity exemplifies a US food safety system which has long relied on self-regulation by the industry, particularly through Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) checks, rather than public oversight and accountability. 20
At the trade negotiating table, the US government is well known –and feared– for pushing lax standards on genetically modified foods. Indeed, a diplomatic cable uncovered by Wikileaks shows that the George W. Bush administration pressured the French government to ease its stance against GMOs. In a 2007 cable, the US ambassador to France went so far as to suggest that “we calibrate a target retaliation list that causes some pain across the EU since this [acceptance of GMOs] is a collective responsibility, but that also focuses in part on the worst culprits “. He added: “The list should be measured rather than vicious and must be sustainable over the long term, since we should not expect an early victory”. 21
Such “diplomacy” is for the clear and direct benefit of Monsanto, DuPont and other agricultural biotechnology corporations that do not like foreign countries banning GM seeds or foods, much less requiring labels that inform consumers of the presence of GM ingredients. US firms, especially the members of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation, religiously use FTA talks by Washington officials as a platform to secure market access for GMOs through aggressive regulatory reforms. 22 Besides GMOs, US trade policy is also seen as destabilising other countries’ sovereignty over food safety and health matters, insofar as Washington regularly demands relaxation of rules against the import of US farm products that others deem risky, such as beef (BSE, hormones), veal (hormones), chicken (chlorine) and pork (swine flu).
The US and the EU have much in common, though (see Box: How EU and US use free trade deals to twist other people’s taste buds). Both are attached to the process of inspecting and accrediting specific farms, fisheries or manufacturers as matching or surpassing US or EU standards for exporting food to them (see Box: “Falling through the GAP”). While this might seem extraordinarily protective of EU or US consumers, it also invites corporate takeover and concentration. For example, when the EU lifted a six-year import ban on Chinese poultry in 2008, in reality it gave the nod to only a handful of meat factories in Shandong Province certified to export to the EU, one of which had been taken over just two weeks before by Tyson, the world’s second-largest meat company. 23 Both the US and the EU also create bilateral committees with their trade partners to continue the conversation on “harmonisation”, in order to develop further not only mutually agreed food safety practices but also standards, including new international standards. The EU is using these mechanisms to pursue its agenda of introducing “animal welfare” into the pool of world food trade norms.
Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are used to fight food safety battles not only by the US and the EU, of course. Countries like India or Australia or Brazil are not just on the receiving end of US or EU pressures. They have their own sanitary standards, agendas and needs. India, for instance, through a gradually maturing FTA strategy, is fighting an uphill battle to increase foreign inward investment and yet still control agricultural markets. During US President Obama’s visit to India in November 2010, Indian Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar made it clear that the United States can produce all the scientific studies it wants, and they will be respectfully reviewed, but India will not import US dairy products that offend domestic religious sensitivities. 24 The Japanese government, in its zeal to sign FTAs, especially with Australia and the US, also has a difficult tightrope to walk on the issue of GMOs, as it needs to respect its own electorate’s preference for GM-free foods. Southern African states such as Namibia have raised serious questions about how to be proactive in pushing their own “development” strategies and needs in trade negotiations with the EU, where Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS) requirements – which are very costly to comply with – can undermine local benefits. The difference is that these countries are not out to change others’ food safety standards. The US and the EU most clearly are.
EU-India FTA: Bad news for small fishers and fishmongers
An excellent report from Focus on the Global South in collaboration with Intercultural Resources shows how the EU’s upcoming free trade agreement with India will affect small-scale fisherfolk and fish vendors, particularly women, in the subcontinent. The findings can be summarised thus: i
What the EU will get from the EU–India FTA
* Tariff cuts (for EU fish going to India).
* Traceability requirements (fish going to the EU must comply with EU certification – not the FAO’s – against illegal fishing), thereby cutting out competition from Indian operators.
* The right to sell Indian fish in the Indian market (probably through supermarkets).
* General investment protections (the right for EU firms to go to India and set up shop).
* National treatment (though it is still to be seen whether India will exempt access to its Exclusive Economic Zone, as Chile did in its EU FTA, or to its coastal lands, both of which are crucial for local fishers).
What India will get
* Slightly greater market access (EU tariffs not being high to begin with) but at the cost of very high food safety standards (barriers to entry), which is of no use to small fishers or traders.
i See “Economic liberalisation and gender dynamics in traditional small-scale fisheries: Reflections on the proposed EU–India free trade agreement”, Focus on the Global South Occasional Paper 8, New Delhi, August 2010, http://www.focusweb.org/ content/occasional-paper-8- economic-liberalisation-and- gender-dynamics-traditional- small-scale-fishe
New standards open new markets
Food safety, strictly speaking, is a matter of preventing illness. But the boundaries of what we bundle under this concept can be stretched to include broader issues of food quality. Halal, GM-free, cruelty-free and organic foods are all examples of growing markets that are generally handled, for practical purposes, by the current food safety regime (standards, audits, certification, traceability and dispute mechanisms). Similarly, at the policy level these considerations are regulated by food safety authorities, and in trade talks they form part of sanitary and phytosanitary chapters or agreements. 25 Many of these broader food quality concerns are not necessarily about product standards, but processes. Therefore they tend to get defined and controlled through schemes rather than standards per se. And if care is not taken, they can be quite arbitrarily defined to suit the needs of transnationals like Cargill or Carrefour, rather than the needs of local communities or of public health generally.
While demands for GM labelling and organic foods are relatively more integrated into food safety or food marketing regimes, a shake-out is needed soon with regard to halal foods and animal welfare issues. 26
The halal food market, currently valued at around US$600 billion, or 16% of the global food retail market, is expanding fast, and will continue to grow in the coming years. 27 But what constitutes halal food is a highly contested issue. There is no global standard, and within any given country there may be different or even competing standards. 28 At the international level, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference is the forum that needs to come to terms with this. In 2008, Malaysia and Turkey agreed to develop jointly some harmonised or common standards, for adoption by the OIC at large, but this is unlikely to pass uncontested (see Box: Religion as a racket).
Religion as a racket i
For some, the very idea of formalising norms and standards for halal food production reeks of a racket to make money out of people’s spiritual sensitivities. In a Muslim country like Algeria, why would there be any need to legislate on what constitutes halal food when the food produced in Algeria is halal? The push to define, and communicate to consumers, official halal food is really aimed at denting the pockets of Muslim consumers in Christian and other non-Muslim countries.
Even in the Philippines, if you listen to media reports of what the political class is up to, you could hardly be blamed for understanding that the momentum to develop domestic halal standards and guarantees is primarily aimed at facilitating the export of Philippine mangoes and other such foods to Saudi Arabia and neighbouring Gulf states. Any benefit for the Philippines’ Muslim population would seem secondary. If Islamic states and organisations now push for harmonisation of halal food standards, it is to serve purely commercial interests.
Isla Délice poster, France (“Proudly Halal”)
iThis commentary is based on an interview with Meriem Louanchi of AREA-ED in Algeria.
Animal welfare is another issue altogether. It seems to be a predominantly European regulatory concern, but this alone means that it is fast becoming a responsibility for the rest of the world. By 2013, the EU will implement new standards on animal slaughter, including stunning, and these new norms will have to be followed by anyone planning to export meat to the EU. As already noted, the EU increasingly includes animal welfare in its bilateral trade agreements, making explicit demands on partners to work with the EU to draw up international standards in this area. So far, Chile, Korea, Colombia, Peru, and Central America have accepted the EU’s demands, particularly working with the Europeans to draw up global legal standards. 29
Internationally, the OIE is expected to adopt, very soon, some recommended set of principles for animal welfare in international trade. 30 But who defines these principles, and who enforces them as international norms? There are no international legal standards for animal welfare. At OIE, the debate is divided along North–South lines. The major complaint from the South is that OIE’s proposed animal welfare framework is based on private standards. Developing countries already have bad experience with private standards on animal health and expect more of this if the task of drawing up animal welfare norms falls to non-public entities. 31
In these emerging fields, the question truly is: whose norms are we talking about — and for whose benefit?
Recap: How EU and US use free trade deals to twist other people’s taste buds
* Get GMOs accepted (US).
* Wrest space for GM policy-making outside the United Nations system (US).
* Impose high standards to keep competition down (EU).
* Require market openings for banned or unwanted foods (US).
* Create bilateral committees to continue shaping policy, away from public scrutiny (both).
* Impose farm-based accreditation systems, creating vulnerability to corporate takeover (both).
* Require bilateral cooperation on international standard setting, including the development of new standards (both).
Food safety, now on offer at Walmart
It would be wrong to take diplomatic or legislative wrangling as evidence that governments are getting serious about food safety. While they spare no expense in ensuring that regulations do not harm export markets for their food companies, when it comes to managing the risks generated by the industrial food system, deregulation and hands-off attitudes are very much the order of the day. Governments may define and administer the legal framework of food safety and similar standards, but the action and the agenda are very much left in the hands of the private sector. One could even say that food safety is hardly a matter of public policy at all any more, as so much revolves around private standards, voluntary controls and obscure industry bodies, all under the thumb of the largest food corporations.
Consider beef. The US government insists that US beef is the safest in the world, but buyers know better. “If you look at food recalls over the past two years, there’s been a significant increase”, says Frank Yianna, vice-president for food safety at Walmart, one of the country’s largest beef retailers. The US government’s response to this alarming rise in meat recalls: no new measures. Walmart’s response: a set of its own new standards to which its US beef suppliers will have to conform by June 2012. Walmart says that its standards will provide its customers with an “additional layer” of protection beyond the tests for Escherichia coli and other pathogens that the meat industry already conducts. “This is really a response to long-term trends in beef recalls”, says Yianna. 32
Supermarkets: Setting their own standards
US beef regulations, and even the regulations that the Japanese government imposes on US beef imports, aren’t good enough for Japan’s food service sector. Although Tokyo lifted, in 2006, its ban on US cattle aged 20 months or younger, Zensho, Japan’s largest food service company, wants US beef suppliers to provide it with special safeguards, particularly concerning BSE. In December 2010, Zensho announced that it had struck a deal with JBS, a Brazilian company that is one of the largest beef producers in the US, to provide Zensho with beef from cattle certified to have been raised without feed containing “BSE-responsible material”. Under the terms of the agreement, JBS must segregate “Zensho cattle” during the transportation, finishing and processing stages. JBS must also ensure that “Zensho cattle” are processed only at the beginning of a production shift and only after the equipment and facilities have been specially sanitised. Zensho inspectors will be physically present to monitor the process, and the final product will be marketed in Japan as “Zensho SFC beef”. 33
Along the same lines, French supermarket behemoth Carrefour announced in November 2010 that it will start labelling 300 of its own-brand, animal-based products sold in its stores as “Fed GM-free” (“Nourri sans OGM”).
The customers of these companies may appreciate such measures. But what about everyone else? The only accountability in such a system is to shareholders, not the public; private standards are all about the bottom line. To give one example of how this can play out, poultry companies in South Africa regularly take frozen chicken that is past its best-before date from supermarkets in wealthy neighbourhoods, recycle it by thawing, washing and injecting it with flavouring, and then sell it to shops in black townships. The poultry companies deny that the practice is racist, and claim that they are actually following standards higher than those required by the Department of Health. 34
Walmart in Central America
Traditional markets are disappearing fast in Central America. Already at least one in four quetzales spent by Guatemalans on food is spent in a Walmart-owned supermarket, while Costa Ricans spend 1 in 3 colones there. And yet, nearly all the horticultural products sourced from the region by Walmart’s Central American operations come from its own subsidiary, Hortifruti, which sources from a mere 1,800 growers. In Honduras, Hortifruti accepts supplies from 395 horticultural growers out of a total of 18,000 in the country, with most of the produce coming from a core of 45 preferred producers, who have at least 4 ha under drip irrigation and their own trucks –all trained by Bayer in “good agricultural practices”. i Moreover, half of the produce sold by Walmart stores in Central America is imported, much of it from big farms in Chile. ii
i For more on Hortifruti, see Madelon Meijer, Ivan Rodriguez, Mark Lundy and Jon Hellin, “Supermarkets and small farmers: the case of Fresh Vegetables in Honduras”, in E.B. McCullough et al., The Transformation of Agri-Food Systems, Earthscan, 2008; Alvarado and Charmel, “The Rapid Rise of Supermarkets in Costa Rica”, 2002; Berdegué et al., “The Rise of Supermarkets in Central America”, 2003.
ii Thomas Reardon, Spencer Hensen and Julio Berdegué, “‘Proactive fast-tracking’ diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: Implications for market institutions and trade”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2007.
Small farmers at the losing end
More and more of the food that people buy is delivered to them through the supply chains of transnational supermarkets and food service corporations (see Box Supermarket tsunami). These companies now wield enormous power in deciding where food is produced and where it is sold, and they increasingly want to dictate exactly how it is produced and handled. Food standards have become a central way for them to organise global markets.
Supermarket tsunami
Thomas Reardon and fellow economists Spencer Henson and Julio Berdegué have tracked the rise of supermarkets in the South. They find that supermarket development moved along very slowly outside industrialised countries between the 1950s and the 1980s. During those years, supermarkets remained confined to small pockets of wealthy consumers in large cities, who could afford the higher prices. But things changed “abruptly and spectacularly” in the 1990s.
Reardon and his colleagues divide this supermarket take-off in the South into three waves.
The first wave occurred in the early1990s in much of South America, East Asia (outside China and Japan), northern Central Europe and South Africa. In these countries, supermarkets quickly moved from a 10% share of the overall retail food market to a 50–60% share. In Brazil the current figure is 70%, and in Argentina Carrefour alone has 25%.
The second wave began in the mid-1990s, in Central America, Mexico, much of South-east Asia and southern Central Europe. In these countries, the supermarkets’ share of overall food retail moved from 5–10% in 1990 to 30–50% by the early 2000s. Today, one out of three pesos spent on food in Mexico goes to Walmart.
The third wave started in the late 1990s and early 2000s in some countries in Africa, such as Kenya, in Latin America, such as Peru and Bolivia, and in Asia, such as Vietnam, China, India and Russia. This third wave is now in full swing, with multinationals pouring into these countries alongside domestic competitors. Even in Africa, supermarket expansion is taking off, led by African-based companies like Nakumatt and Shoprite. TNCs are now also moving in. In December 2010, Walmart put forward an offer to buy 51% of South African retailer Massmart, one of the largest distributors of consumer goods in the region, with some 290 outlets across 13 countries in Africa. The deal is being hotly contested by South African unions and still needs to be approved by the country’s regulatory authorities.
Overall, supermarket expansion is happening five times as fast in developing countries as it did in the US or the UK. What accounts for this sudden take-off? Reardon and his colleagues say the main factor was the liberalisation of foreign investment policy during the 1990s, which opened the door to investment from large foreign retailers. They also point to the “proactive fast-tracking” strategy of supermarkets to create the “enabling conditions” for their expansion, mainly by setting up direct, standardised procurement systems, which can keep costs down. They say that municipal policies favouring supermarkets also played an important role. i
i Thomas Reardon, Spencer Hensen and Julio Berdegué, “‘Proactive fast-tracking’ diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: Implications for market institutions and trade”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2007.
Supermarket standards for fresh fruit and vegetables reveal much about who wins and loses within the corporate regulatory apparatus. Fresh fruit and vegetables are extremely important to retailers because they bring shoppers into their stores on a more regular basis, keeping overall sales up. Supermarkets have tried to capture this market by offering low costs and quality assurances. Their main strategy in this regard has been to source from “preferred suppliers” that can provide large volumes from low-cost production areas, assure traceability of the produce all the way back to the farm, and ensure that it was grown according to the standards stipulated by the supermarkets.
Today, big food retailers such as Tesco, Walmart, Carrefour and Lotte are focusing on expanding their operations in the South, where markets are growing. India, China, Brazil and Indonesia are among the prime targets. In these and other developing countries, however, produce markets are still dominated by informal supply chains, from peasants and small co-operatives to local wholesalers and street vendors. So the supermarkets impose their own procurement models, using a common set of standards as a basis for restructuring. They also have to deal with the competition from local and regional elites, such as the Matahari chain in Indonesia, or Big C in Thailand.
The basic picture of these global supply chains is arranged as follows. At the top stand the big retailers – the word “big” here being an understatement. Walmart, the globe’s largest food retailer, rings up annual food sales of US$405 billion – more than the annual GDP of Austria, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Greece, Venezuela, Denmark, or Argentina. The four largest global food retailers – Walmart, Carrefour, Metro, and Tesco – have combined annual food sales of US$705 billion. That’s more turnover than the annual output of Turkey or Switzerland. Their sheer size and buying power gives them tremendous leverage over the entire global food system: they are able to dictate terms to all their suppliers, from farmers to food processors. 35
They work together, with input from the biggest food companies and agribusiness firms, to develop common standards for foods (from farming to packaging) that their suppliers have to follow. An example is GlobalGAP. In the context of a largely laissez-faire – or at least industry-friendly – global food safety policy regime, these standards are emerging as the shadow food safety structure for much of the world (See Annex: Who does what?). And to emphasise a key point, these gigantic companies are accountable to their shareholders – and to a small extent their customers – but to no one else.
Below the supermarket giants are the suppliers. These are large companies that source and ship from around the globe, and increasingly from their own farms or from contract production schemes that they manage. Then there are the producers. More and more, production is centralised in “hubs” or “zones” where production of specific fruits or vegetables is cheap and organised according to the standards dictated by the supermarkets. Some well-known examples are grapes in Chile, green beans in Kenya, and apples in China.
Much has been said about how countries can position themselves to benefit from this global supermarket expansion. To gain access to supermarket shelves, local governments and donors devote huge resources to trying to build production capacity in poor countries. Supermarket growth is even portrayed as an “opportunity” for small growers. The reality is quite different (see Box: Walmart in Central America).
First, foreign retailers moving into southern countries compete directly with local and traditional markets. As they expand, they capture space from small vendors, traders and farmers’ markets, which are served primarily by small-scale growers and vendors. Developing countries are not merely sites for export production to Western supermarket supply chains. They are increasingly becoming the consumers of these markets as well (see Box: The supermarket tsunami).
Second, supermarkets have access to global procurement networks through which they can access cheap produce and force down prices. If local oranges are too costly for its Indonesian stores, Carrefour can bring in oranges from its suppliers in Pakistan or China. A whopping 70–80% of the fruits sold in supermarkets in Indonesia are imported, mostly from regional supermarket supply hubs in Thailand and China. 36
Third, the suppliers that serve supermarkets, and the standards that they are obliged to follow, leave no room for traditional farming (see Box: Falling through the GAP). The only window of opportunity for a small-scale grower who wants to sell to supermarkets is tightly controlled contract production, where the company dictates everything, from the seeds to the pesticides used. Such contract farming schemes erode biodiversity and local food systems and cultures. But even this option is usually not possible, as compliance is generally too costly and impractical for small-scale growers. So more and more of the actual farming is being carried out and managed by the “preferred suppliers” themselves, with heavy involvement from the supermarkets (see Box: Cold shoulder for Ugandan farmers).
Of course, many domestic supermarkets and supply chains – from ShopRite of South Africa to DMA of Brazil – are implementing this model as well. And while some will surely grow and become regional giants, they are easy prey for buyout by Northern cousins.
US-based Fresh Del Monte Produce is one such “preferred supplier” of fresh fruit and vegetables to global supermarket chains. According to the company’s CEO, Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, “Retailers today are more inclined to work with someone who can assure them that his product has come from his own farm, has been packed under his own packing plant, with shipping under his control and delivering it to his customer, also under his control”. His company produces 39% of its bananas, 84% of its pineapples, and 81% of its melons on its own plantations, mainly in Central America, and runs a vertically integrated poultry business in Jordan that supplies retailers and transnational corporations (TNCs) in the Middle East. In 2009, 13% of the its total sales were to Walmart.
Peru is described as a success in penetrating supermarket supply channels. It was prodded into the business under Washington’s so-called “war on drugs” 20 years ago. Since then, exports of asparagus to the EU and North America have taken off. But this has dramatically transformed local agriculture. Asparagus used to be produced by small-scale farmers, but today they account for less than 10% of the country’s production, which is now dominated by large-scale export-oriented firms. Just two companies – Del Monte and Green Giant, both of the US – today control a quarter of Peru’s asparagus exports. 37
In 2000, Ghana tried a similar programme, but with a focus on the production of pineapples for European supermarkets. In the first four years, exports of pineapples to Europe surged, from around 20,000 tonnes to around 50,000 tonnes, and much of it was supplied by small Ghanian farmers and mid-sized traders. 38 But in 2005, Ghana’s market crumbled. Without warning, European retailers, lobbied by Del Monte, unilaterally decided to begin purchasing only the MD2 variety of pineapple, and no longer to accept the Sweet Cayenne variety produced in Ghana. They also began requiring the EurepGAP certification from their suppliers, especially on pesticide residues. The sudden shift was too much for Ghana’s pineapple farmers and exporters. Both EurepGAP certification and the MD2 variety, due to the high costs of plantlets and the extra logistics required, were beyond their reach. They were forced to shut down, and TNCs moved in. In 2004 there were 65 pineapple exporters in Ghana. Today, just two companies control nearly 100% of Ghana’s pineapple exports: Dole of the US, which sources mainly from its own farms, and HPW Services of Switzerland, which sources from three large growers. 39
In Vietnam, small fish breeders and businesses trying to ride the wave of popularity of Tra –or catfish, as it is now being marketed (as a cheap family food) in Europe and North America – have had to jump a number of hurdles. In the US, a massive campaign run by domestic catfish producers, who cannot compete with the low priced Tra, tries to paint Vietnamese fish as “filthy”. In Europe, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) put Tra on its “red list” of products that conscientious consumers should avoid. The boom in intensive Tra farming for these lucrative new export markets has indeed attracted the worst of practices and people. But to be fair, a number of businesses have been trying to meet the global standards. The problem is, precisely, these standards. One Tra fish farmer, Nguyen Huu Nghia, bitterly called it a “labyrinth”. 40 He and other small fish breeders were told first to follow the Safe Quality Food (SQF) standards, run by a private certification outfit in the US. Then they were told to follow something called SQF-1000. Then it was recommended that they adopt GlobalGAP standards. And now, in order to shake off the bad name given to Vietnamese fish by WWF, they are told to comply with the WWF’s criteria through the Aquatic Stewardship Council (ASC). If all Tra producers followed, say, the GlobalGAP and the ASC standards for a squeaky clean product that is safe for international consumption, it would cost the Vietnamese no less than US$22 million per year! 41 Apart from the bewildering array of private standards that no one can really vouch for, who can afford this and what is the point? (See Box: “Falling through the GAP”.)
Bigger players will pay the extra costs for the GlobalGAP “stamp” because, for them, privileged access to the expanding empires that supermarkets are building is worth the price. As one Kenyan exporter puts it, “I tend to be particularly positive about this [certification]. It might sound a bit cynical, but it’s an entry barrier to the business. The more standards there are, the less competition we are going to have”. 42 Tough luck for Kenyan small outgrowers, more than half of whom were dropped immediately once supermarkets began demanding adherence to their GAP norms. 43
It needs to be emphasised that it is not just in exports that this concentration is happening. As supermarkets take over larger shares of the food markets in the South, the distinction between export markets and domestic markets is disappearing, with the same standards being applied for both. This leaves small farmers, and the biodiversity they maintain, with a dwindling space in which to survive.
Falling through the GAP
In 2002, the US closed its border to imports of cantaloupe melons from Mexico after several Salmonella outbreaks were traced back to Mexican fruits. i A year later, under an agreement worked out between US and Mexican authorities, the ban was lifted for cantaloupes that showed compliance with the Mexican government’s new “Programme of federal recognition requirements for production, harvest, packaging, processing and transport of cantaloupe”. But with the enforcement of this GAP programme, modelled on standards set by US retailers, few Mexican growers could re-enter the market.
Under the GAP requirements, farms have to have portable toilets for use during planting and harvest. A survey of small growers in one of the important cantaloupe producing states found that 94% did not have toilet facilities in the vicinity; they were most often more than half an hour away. The GAP norms also require periodic analyses of water that take into account microbial counts. But 88% of the surveyed growers said they used water from rivers, where it is difficult to maintain water quality.
In the end, only two large farms in the state where the survey was carried out regained market access to the US. Now, like other Mexican growers, they have to comply with extensive GAP standards, such as regular soil and water tests, keeping registers on land use, fencing plantation areas and using water from a well that is tested every month during production for microbial contamination. They have also invested in osmosis plants to guarantee water quality, and have toilet facilities on-farm with running water, wash stations and soap and paper. Plus, they have to pay a third-party certification, which averages US$3,000 per farm.
The US imposes no such obligations on its own cantaloupe growers. But in any case, the effectiveness of the Mexican programme is questionable. From late 2006 to early 2007, the US FDA issued six recalls of cantaloupes, four of which involved Mexican melons grown on FDA-approved farms. ii At that point, only nine growers in Mexico had managed to get approval to export to the US. iii
Similar stories can be found around the world. One recent FAO/WHO paper points to data showing that the true cost per farm of small-farmer certification for GlobalGAP is over €1,200, leading the authors to conclude, “The ‘bottom line’ from the small farmer perspective is that GlobalGAP does not make economic sense”. iv
i This case from Mexico is found in Clare Narrod, Devesh Roy, Belem Avendano and Julias Okello, “Impact of International Food Safety Standards on Smallholders: Evidence from Three Cases”, in E.B. McCullough et al., The Transformation of Agri-Food Systems, Earthscan, 2008.
ii Julie Schmit, “US food imports outrun FDA resources”, USA Today, 18 March 2007, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2007-03-18-food-safety-usat_N.htm
iii “Timco issues voluntary cantaloupe recall”, The Packer, 20 November 2006, http://thepacker.com/Timco-issues-voluntary-cantaloupe-recall/Article.aspx?oid=268606&fid=PACKER-TOP-STORIES
iv Spencer Henson and John Humphrey, “The Impacts of Private Food Safety Standards on the Food Chain and on Public Standard-Setting Processes”, paper prepared for FAO/WHO, May 2009.
Privatised Food Safety in the Global South
In China, where supermarkets are expanding at a furious pace, these trends are biting hard. The major supermarket chains, both foreign and domestic, are working hand-in-glove with suppliers and local governments to develop farms to supply fruit and vegetables. As part of a drive to improve food safety and integrate its 700 million small-scale farmers into “high value food chains” with “scientific methods of farming”, the Chinese government has been pursuing the establishment of fruit- and vegetable-growing bases in partnership with the private sector. In each of these designated production zones, local authorities negotiate deals with private companies whereby the company comes in, leases an area of land from the farmers currently occupying it, or acquires their land use rights, and then sets up large-scale production, hiring the displaced farmers as labourers or in contract production arrangements.
Hong Kong Yue Teng Investment is one of these companies. Over the last few years it has emerged as a major vegetable producer in China’s Guizhou Province, where it has two large-scale production bases that supply vegetables to Walmart’s stores in southern China. Walmart’s preferred fruit supplier is the Xingyeyuan Company, which has several thousand hectares of orchards north of Dalian City. For eggs, Walmart deals with Dalian Hongjia, a massive factory farm complex with 470,000 laying hens and an annual production capacity of 7,400 tons of fresh eggs.
Walmart has 56 such “direct purchase bases” with companies in 18 provinces and cities in China, covering a total of at least 33,000 ha of farmland. It calls its network the “Direct Farm Program” and claims that, by 2011, these arrangements will bring benefits to one million farmers. Of course, Walmart does not actually deal directly with farmers, but with companies that hire and manage farmers for their large-scale operations.
Walmart’s moves in agriculture are part of its overall strategy to source more directly and reduce costs in its supply chain. The companies supplying Walmart have to ensure that production happens strictly in accordance with Walmart’s demands, and the company runs training programmes to show the companies and the farmers working for them exactly how they want farming done. “As a multinational corporation with a strong sense of local social responsibility, we have helped farmers to better adapt to market conditions, encouraged them to choose standardised and scaled production methods, and provided instructions on ways to preserve the environment in production activities via sustainable agriculture programs”, says Ed Chan, president and CEO of Walmart China. 44
Chongqing Cikang Vegetables and Fruits, which manages Walmart’s Direct Farm operation in Chongqing Province, says that its production process is fully monitored by third party inspectors approved by Walmart, from variety selection to harvesting and storage. The same goes for companies in China supplying Carrefour, which runs its own direct farm program, called the Carrefour Quality Line, or national retailer Wumart, which has a direct farm programme in the Shandong Province. 45
What do these companies mean by “sustainable agriculture”? Well, for Walmart, at least with its Direct Farm Programs in India and Honduras, it has handed that task over to one of the world’s largest pesticide companies and GMO seed producers, Bayer CropScience of Germany (see Box: “Bye-bye biodiversity”). In Honduras, Bayer, through its Food Chain Partnership programme, trains 700 growers who supply Walmart on “responsible agricultural practices”. In India, the company operates 80 of these Food Chain Partnership projects with Walmart and other retailers, covering an area of 28,000 ha. Participating farmers must use a Bayer “passport” to keep track of their practices. 46
Bayer says that it has 250 Food Chain Partnership projects around the world. In Colombia it works with Carrefour, while in Mexico it directly partners with the national certification authority, Calidad Suprema, a “Civil Association without lucrative ends” that helps the Mexican government with “strengthening the competitiveness of the countryside” and the “promotion of the trademark México Calidad Suprema”, which is owned by the government. 47 Bayer trains Calidad Suprema officials on good agricultural practices, using its BAYGAP tool, and the two sides conduct joint farm visits. 48 Not to be outdone, Syngenta, the world’s second-largest pesticide company, has a food chain programme of its own, called “Fresh Trace”, that it is implementing in Thailand, and both companies are active members of GlobalGAP.
With the pesticide industry so intimately involved in developing and implementing supermarket standards, it’s hardly surprising that pesticide contamination remains prevalent on supermarket produce. Tests done by Greenpeace in China in 2008 and 2009 on popular vegetables and fruit found far more serious pesticide pollution on those collected from Walmart and the other major supermarkets than on those collected at wet markets. 49
Bye-bye biodiversity
One of Bayer’s Food Chain Partnership projects in India is with Indian supermarket major ABRL for the supply of uniformly sized okra. A Bayer promotional video recounts the experience of one farmer who supposedly participated in the Bayer project:
We used to grow our own food here in small fields. Now, on an area of approximately 2.4 ha, I grow okra. We, the farmers, learn from the professionals about sustainable crop growing in line with good agricultural practice.… This includes the controlled and environmentally friendly use of state-of-the-art crop protection products from Bayer CropSciences’ research.… This knowledge is good, not only for my wallet but also for the environment.… I used to grow only local okra varieties. But Food Chain Partnership experts from Bayer CropScience India convinced me to grow the variety Sonal in my fields. This new variety of okra from Nunhems is precisely suited to the regional conditions and the rising standards of domestic food retailers. Every stage of growing and every crop protection measure is recorded in detail in my Bayer passport.… It serves as proof to the food retailers that I have grown my vegetables correctly. i
Carrefour representatives visit a farm in India.
i See the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVRMmYTqsCE
People’s resistance to corporate food safety
In recent years we have seen some amazing social struggles and solid initiatives emerge to counteract this corporate hijack of food safety policy-making and praxis. Some of them have been triggered by the restructuring of international food trade, such as the resistance to US beef waged by citizens’ movements in Taiwan, Australia, Japan or South Korea. Others have been reactions to domestic nightmares, such as the social activism in China following the melamine milk tragedy. Occasionally, all countries get rocked by short-lived food poisoning outbreaks. But we are increasingly seeing much more structural and political questioning of the industrial food system, of capitalist development and of who decides what, because people’s health and livelihoods are being directly affected.
The struggles around mad-cow beef and GMOs are good examples. Many times, social movements have organised to keep them out of their countries not so much because of the health or food safety implications per se, but because of the broader social and economic directions that these symbols of industrial agriculture, corporate power or Western imperialism represent. The Korean people’s resistance to US beef has grown into an expression of profound distrust toward Korea’s system of representational democracy, including the state’s relationship with the US, not an irrational fear of prions. 50 In Australia, the campaign has been more about keeping Australian food within Australian hands, a concern that many peoples across the world share with regard to governance and control of their own country’s food supplies. As to anti-GMO struggles, they are as diverse as the anti-US beef campaigns, but they have also been about profound issues of democracy, the survival of local cultures and food systems against the onslaught of Western “solutions”, about keeping seeds and knowledge alive in communities’ hands and challenging whole models of development.
On a deeper level, people are organising to overcome the health, environmental and social costs of the expanding industrial food system. Movements and campaigns for organic food or to “go local”, in other words to buy food produced nearby and boycott products shipped from far away, have been spreading in many countries. The alarming rise in obesity, type 2 diabetes, cancers and other diseases that are directly linked to unhealthy eating is mobilising many people to change their lifestyles and work with others to promote more wholesome food and farming options. Specific campaigns and actions to stop the demonisation and destruction of local alternatives to an over-sanitised food system, such as street hawkers, raw foods and backyard or traditionally raised livestock, are also growing in popularity. The global peasant/smallholder rights group La Vía Campesina has mounted a campaign to establish the concept of food sovereignty: the “right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems”. 51 Following the lead of Vía Campesina, several townships in the US state of Maine have recently declared their “food independence”. 52 Food safety and broader aspects of food quality are clearly central to these developments.
Certainly, the defence and development of peasant agriculture and non-industrial food systems, particularly in industrial countries, require their own approaches to food safety. This doesn’t mean working outside the mainstream in the sense of breaking laws or creating dangerous underground economies, although some corporate groups try to vilify and eradicate raw foods and other tradition-conscious food cultures. 53 The challenge is to ensure that different knowledge systems and criteria can exist outside the monopolistic grip of supermarkets and their supply chains. As French farmer Guy Basitanelli of La Confédération Paysanne, puts it:
For small businesses that have few staff and operate at an artisanal level, the management of food safety risks hinges on training and direct human contact. Managing microbial balances, and protecting and producing specific flora based on a respect for traditional and local practices, are what best guarantees safety. You do not get safety from a “zero tolerance” approach to microorganisms and sterilisation equipment that destroy these balances. 54
Many producer organisations and consumers groups, not to mention large movements like Slow Food, are convinced that biodiversity and ecological complexity – as opposed to extreme hygiene – are the keys to healthy and stable systems. Nature abhors a vacuum, after all. Of course, these sounder approaches to food safety also rely on short distribution circuits, getting food from the farm or the small-scale processing plant into people’s homes through less complex, more direct distribution schemes (food clubs, all sorts of community-support agriculture systems, co-ops, and so on).
Another big part of people’s resistance to the corporate takeover of food safety and food cultures are the campaigns, investigative work and public education efforts devoted to exposing how supermarkets – and the supply chains that they dictate to if not run – really operate, stopping the spread of big retail and protecting street vendors from annihilation (see Box: “The lobby that dares not put its name on food labels”). Walmart’s anti-union culture is well known all over the world, thanks to decades of civic activism which today informs groups trying to resist Walmart’s entry in new markets such as India. In fact, India has a vibrant movement of hawkers and street vendors who stand to lose their livelihoods if the central government allows foreign retailers to come in. They have the support of farmers, intellectuals and civil society groups that are part of a growing fabric of resistance against TNCs coming in and taking over India’s food supply. Investigative research and political work into other corporate structures, like Carrefour or Tesco, has also been important to help civil society, not to mention legislators, to understand better how big retail works and the exploitative pressures it puts on biodiversity, farmers and food workers. 55
Food industry workers – from seasonal harvesters to the women and men involved in slaughtering or processing – are just as central to what food safety is or should be. After all, they are on the front line of the work, and they are usually paid as little as possible. They often suffer difficult organising conditions, especially migrant workers, children or illegal immigrants. When they do manage to organise and get support from other groups, their capacity to secure changes can be huge. The struggle of migrant farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, for instance, has been phenomenal. Apart from securing higher wages for tomato pickers, the Coalition of Immoklalee Workers has helped demonstrate that the industrial food system, which was set up to provide cheap food, is the problem – socially, environmentally and in terms of safety and health. 56 Today, there is a significant momentum across the US to change the way food is produced, including the food safety standards, by reviving the use of anti-trust legislation. It may turn out to be a smart way to break up the industrial food system and return power to smallholders, local processors, regional markets, and other more democratic structures.
Cold shoulder for Ugandan farmers
In 2000, Icelandic investors set up a company in Uganda called Icemark Africa, to provide logistic operations to the European markets for fresh fish exports, with a complementary side operation in fresh fruit and vegetable exports. Icemark is now the largest exporter of fresh fruits and vegetables from Uganda, with three flights a week delivering products to Europe. Until a few years ago, 90% of Icemark’s produce was sourced from its chain of small-scale out-growers. But then the company began to establish its own farms, where GlobalGAP certification is easier to achieve. It now sources 40% of its produce from its own three farms on 270 ha in central Uganda. i
i Thomas Pere, “Mashamba: the identity of quality fruits, vegetables”, The New Vision, http://www.enteruganda.com/brochures/manifesto_7.html
The lobby that dares not put its name on food labels
Corporate agendas can be deceivingly hidden from view as governments and legislators haggle over what appears to be public policy. Take the fight over food labelling in the EU: corporate-driven globalisation and changes in lifestyles brought on by urbanisation and new technologies are creating a new set of food-related health problems, especially obesity and adult-onset diabetes. These are not restricted to the affluent West; they are penetrating all regions of the world, including fast-changing China and Africa. These diseases are not only painful and debilitating for the affected families, but they incur huge costs to society.
In the EU’s drive to tackle these rising health problems and their causes at home, the challenging task of harmonising food labels to inform consumers of what they are buying has naturally come up. In 2010, a war was pitched between two options: on the one hand a graphic “traffic light” label to show on food packages or restaurant menus how much of the main ingredients to be concerned about – fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt – an item contained; on the other hand, a strictly written list of the ingredients with a calculation of how much of a daily allowance you would consume per serving. The traffic light is used in various EU countries, such as the UK, and is extremely blunt and pro-consumer. The allowances’ listing has proved not very intelligible to most consumers (the whole matter of what a serving is can be very deceptive), and for that reason is the industry’s preference.
According to sleuth work by civil society group Corporate Europe Observatory, the EU food and drinks industry – the third largest economic sector of the union, after agriculture and chemicals – spent a whopping €1 billion to defeat the “traffic light” label and keep consumers in the dark. This was the single most expensive lobbying exercise in EU history. i
i See CEO, “A red light for consumer information”, Brussels, 11 June 2010, http://www.corporateeurope.org/lobbycracy/content/2010/06/red-light-consumer-information. As the EU is now operating under the Lisbon Treaty, a German group called Foodwatch (http://www.foodwatch.de) is proposing to launch a citizen’s initiative which, if it gains the required number of signatures, could oblige the European Commission to review the food labelling issue based on grassroots concern from ordinary people. Of course, the obligation on the Commission is only to take note and review, not actually to change anything, but some groups may use the momentum to build greater awareness of corporate control over the European food system and how that directly affects people’s health and living standards.
Conclusion
In most countries around the world, farming sectors are being rapidly restructured to make way for more agribusiness. With food safety standards playing a critical role in justifying new forms of corporate control, it is high time to reassess what food safety means. At present, it translates into “audit culture”, involving a transfer of power from people (consumers, small farmers, local food shops, markets, eateries) to the private sector (Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever, Walmarts … the list goes on). It can instead be about local control and more community-based food and farming systems. In fact, it can be much more aggressively and explicitly integrated into people’s food sovereignty campaigns and initiatives. In that process, we may want to stop talking about food safety altogether and assert instead our own demands for food quality, or something similarly more holistic.
Food safety, or food quality in broader terms, is a ground on which big corporate agriculture and supermarket cultures cannot outperform small producers and local markets. The challenge is to ensure that the small and the local can remain alive and turn today’s heightened concerns for food safety in our favour.
Going further
GRAIN, “Food safety: rigging the game”, Seedling, July 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=555
Christine Ahn and GRAIN, “Food safety on the butcher’s block”, Foreign Policy In Focus, Washington DC, 18 April 2008, http://www.grain.org/o/?id=83
The SPS-food safety section of the activist website bilaterals.org has a range of highly focused articles tracking how countries use bilateral trade and investment agreements to move food safety standards and policies in favour of their corporations. http://www.bilaterals.org/spip.php?mot185
Sunita Narain, “Control your food. It’s your business”, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, 1 October 2010, http://www.cseindia.org/content/control-your-food-it-your-business
Susan Freidberg, “Supermarkets and imperial knowledge”, Cultural Geographies, 2007, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~geog/facstaff/ CVs/Freidberg/ImpKnowledge.pdf
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ANNEX: Food safety: Who does what?
World Trade Organisation (WTO)
In the realm of food safety, the WTO is responsible for implementing the Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Standards (SPS Agreement) and has an SPS Committee composed of the member states to do this. The SPS Agreement spells out a number of rules that aim to limit the blockage of agricultural trade due to food safety concerns, which it sees as a trade barrier. One of these rules is that countries should use the standards adopted by specialised intergovernmental agencies, such as OIE for animal health and the Codex Alimentarius for food products. But these “standards” are, in many cases, recommendations or guidelines. Countries retain the right to practice “higher” standards of food safety so long as they are justified on “scientific” grounds. They can even follow different standards that produce equivalent results, if they can get away with it. After all, anyone can defend their grounds as scientific. a What we get, as a result of all this, is a politics of “might makes right” (countries bully and argue their way forward), with the risk that some governments will just follow OIE or Codex guidelines for lack of a better alternative (as wished by the industry).
The WTO’s SPS Agreement does have teeth in so far as any disagreement between members can result in a dispute panel and trade sanctions. The US has repeatedly used this method to try to overturn EU policy that bans the entry of hormone beef or GM foods.
One major problem or weakness with the WTO SPS Agreement is the fact that so many food safety standards, which have been exploding in number and complexity, are developed by the private sector, not by governments. And they are voluntary, not mandatory. How do you bring this under the control of trade policy? Developing countries are particularly resistant to the notion of being held responsible for industry standards, especially at a forum like the WTO. Why should the government of Kenya, for instance, work to promote standards developed by Tesco for Tesco’s clients? Who is the government accountable to, after all: Kenya’s citizens or Tesco’s shareholders? This is the pickle that WTO members have driven themselves into.
All told, this means there is something of an SPS deadlock at WTO. The Organisation can advocate certain standards, but it cannot enforce them in a fully predictable or deterring manner. It can serve as a public venue where national policy changes or events are notified for everyone’s information, but most policy-making is actually done by and through the weight of the corporate sector in other fora.
Codex Alimentarius
The Codex Alimentarius (Codex for short) is a commission set up in 1953 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation. The Codex debates and adopts guidelines, standards and recommendations related to food safety, such as what is an acceptable level of pesticide x in bananas. As such, its purpose is to come up with common ground in terms of health and safety in food.
The problem is that the Codex does not operate in a democratic, transparent fashion. Its membership is composed of governments, but the private sector participates very actively in its work, whether as part of official government delegations or as observers. Non-profit public interest, public health, or consumer groups, on the other hand, are barely in the room.
We can say that:
* Codex wields a lot of power, as it draws up official standards for what can pass as food and enter the commercial food chain with a view to achieving global uniformity.
* Apart from civil servants, the main participants at Codex are industry officials.
* The WTO gives the role of Codex a veneer of legitimacy that it never had before.
One major issue that Codex is debating right now is the labelling of GM products. A large group of countries wants to define and promote a common approach to GM food labelling. Others consider labelling a discriminatory practice (because it sets a GM tomato apart from a non-GM tomato!) and do not want any international standards on it. In what may be a welcome development at Codex, the pro-label bloc is gaining ground. b
World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE)
The OIE has a similar role to Codex but for the animal kingdom. It was set up in Paris in the 1920s to stop a rinderpest outbreak. Today, OIE is a fairly large intergovernmental institution that monitors and assesses animal diseases (including those that affect humans, like bird flu or BSE) and draws up sanitary standards for world trade in animal products. Like Codex, OIE has been given a veneer of authority and legitimacy to shape national and international policy on animal health issues thanks to the WTO. But also like Codex, it is very disconnected from people in so far as few farmers, consumers or grassroots public health advocates seem to know what it is, let alone have any influence over it.
OIE gained some notoriety in recent years because of the way it was used to break a logjam between the US and Korean governments over mad cow disease. c The victory for the US, which was conveniently declared a “controlled risk” country for beef, was short-lived however. The OIE has never been able to impose its standards on countries whose people resist US beef, such as Taiwan or Japan or Korea. OIE also, surprisingly, had little role to play during the recent bird flu and swine flu outbreaks.
Right now, OIE is trying to develop international norms or standards for animal welfare as a food trade issue. This clearly comes from the EU. Since the early 2000s, the EU has been trying to introduce animal welfare as an SPS issue through its bilateral free trade agreements with foreign trade partners like Chile and Korea, and it also forms part of the EU’s current talks with India, ASEAN countries, Canada and Mercosur. This goes beyond what was agreed at the WTO, which does not even mention animal welfare, and appears to be more about restricting trade along the line of EU preferences to favour EU businesses. d The OIE animal welfare “standards” related to food that are currently emerging will probably amount to the five freedoms: from hunger, thirst and malnutrition; from fear and distress; from physical and thermal discomfort; from pain, injury and disease; and to express normal patterns of behaviour.
Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)/World Health Organisation (WHO)
Apart from housing the Codex Alimentarius, the FAO and the WHO both deal with food safety from their respective standpoints (food production and health), but they seem to do very little in this field. Not even their joint International Food Safety Authorities Network (INFOSAN), has the resources or commitment to produce adequate global information related to food safety (such as a database on food safety alerts). Unsurprisingly, at the UN level, it seems that food safety is treated much more as a trade issue than as a food production or public health issue.
GlobalGAP and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)
Over the past ten years, the global food industry has probably developed hundreds, if not thousands, of schemes – it is perhaps best to think of them as checklists – to identify products that are “OK” to move through the system, from farm to mouth. These schemes are sets of standards. For example, they may say that a jalapeño pepper should be x green, y slender and have a heat index of z. The complexity of these lists becomes enormous – down to what variety a farmer should sow – but they are central to the industrial food system. The institutions that control these lists wield the hidden power in shaping our food supply. In the 2000s, any country that wanted to participate seriously in the global food trade developed its own national benchmarking and standards systems for food producers under the name of GAP (good agricultural practices). Thailand, for example, developed ThaiGAP as an assurance of quality control for Thai agricultural products. This turned out to be crucial for Thai exporters even to sell products to China under the 2003 China–Thailand free trade agreement. These GAPs are voluntary private standards developed by the industry (originally led by retailers) to regulate itself. A whole battery of firms has sprung up to implement these standards: auditors, controllers, certifiers and companies that process the data.
Two institutions are important to note because of their ambitions to serve as global leaders in this web of private food controllers. In 2007, EurepGAP – a network of European GAPs formed in 1997 – rebirthed itself as GlobalGAP. This move amounted to no less than the European food industry globalising its standards to serve as world standards. As a consequence, other national GAPs (KenyaGAP, ThaiGAP, and so on) had to reorient themselves and work to get accepted by GlobalGAP as national benchmarks of the new system. Today, GlobalGAP holds the global authority over standards for agricultural products. This means that any farm that wants its products to enter the mainstream of global food trade and retail – and end up on Tesco’s shelves, for instance, with all the traceability and control assurances that that implies – would have to get GlobalGAP accreditation (via local members). Hence the power of those who define these standards.
GFSI was set up in 2000 by the Food Business Forum (now CIES), a club of the world’s most important food industry CEOs. The argument behind GFSI is that Codex, supposed to harmonise national standards, is too slow. GFSI bypasses harmonisation to create a system for the global approval of foods based on benchmarked private-sector schemes. If GAP guarantees a product’s quality (the jalapeño pepper that is x, y and z), GFSI accreditation is a mark of adherence to a host of broader food safety measures – including GlobalGAP.
GFSI insists that it is not a standard in itself but a forum that “benchmarks” best practices, almost like a brand. Composed of the top 400 food industry players, who collectively boast an annual turnover of €2.1 trillion (US$2.9 trillion), GFSI can be expected to have an important influence in reshaping food safety policy in the years to come.
a For example, on 7 April 2010, Japan’s then Agriculture Minister Hirotaka Akamatsu told reporters after meeting US Department of Agriculture head Tom Vilsack in Tokyo, “For us, food safety based on Japan’s scientific standards is the priority. The OIE standards are different from the Japanese scientific ones.” This was the Japanese government’s way of rebuffing US insistence that Tokyo open its market to all forms of US beef. See Jae Hur and Ichiro Suzuki, “Japan, US to Continue Dialogue on Beef Import Curbs”, Bloomberg, 8 April 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-07/u-s-japan-face-some-distance-as-talks-on-beef-import-curbs-to-continue.html
b At its meeting on the issue in Quebec in May 2010, the Codex commission was mostly in favour of GM labelling through the voices of the EU, many individual European countries, Brazil, India, Morocco, Kenya, Mali, Ghana, Cameroon and Korea. Staunchly against GM labelling were the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Mexico and Argentina. This anti- bloc seems be cracking, however. The next set of discussions will be held in 2011.
c See GRAIN, “Food safety: rigging the game”, Seedling, July 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=555
d It is true that animal welfare is a concern among people in the EU, and rightly so. But the argument used by European trade negotiators according to which it is a major societal demand that needs to be imposed upon EU trade partners is negated by the latest Eurobarometer survey among EU consumers who do not even mention animal welfare when asked to spontaneously identify the issues that concern them around food quality and food safety. See European Food Safety Authority, “2010 Eurobarometer survey report on risk perception in the EU”, November 2010, http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/riskcommunication/riskperception.htm
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Acronyms
ACP Africa Caribbean Pacific states
AREA-AD Association de Réflexion, d’Echanges et d’Actions pour l’Environnement et le Développement (Algeria)
ASEAN Association of South-East Asian Nations
ASC Aquatic Stewardship Council (WWF)
BSE bovine spongiform encephalopathy
CDC Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (US)
CEO chief executive officer
CIES Consumer Goods Forum (formerly Food Business Forum)
FAO UN Food and Agriculture Organisation
FTA free trade agreement
GAP good agricultural practices
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GFSI Global Food Safety Initiative
GM(O) genetically modified (organism)
HACCP Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points
INFOSAN International Food Safety Authorities Network (WHO/FAO)
MRSA Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
NASA National Aeronautics and Space Agency (US)
OIC Organisation of the Islamic Conference
OIE Organisation for Animal Health
ppb parts per billion
SPS sanitary and phytosanitary standards
SQF Safe Food Quality (US)
TNC transnational corporation
WHO World Health Organisation
WTO World Trade Organisation
WWF World Wide Fund for Nature
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GRAIN would like to thank various friends and colleagues who commented on or helped knock this briefing into shape. These include Phil Bereano, Brewster Kneen, Meriem Louanchi, Marta Rivera Ferre and Tom Philipott, plus our board and staff.
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References
1 “Germany approves anti-dioxin action plan”, Reuters, 19 January 2011, http://af.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idAFTRE70I2CC20110119?sp=true
2 The FAO and WHO collaborate on these issues, particularly through INFOSAN, but there is no global database or tracking tool. Individual countries have (or don’t have) their own alert systems, plus they band together in various groupings. Australia and New Zealand share competency on food safety, and the EU as a whole has, apart from its highly contested European Food Safety Authority, what seems to be an extremely effective rapid alert system. See http://ec.europa.eu/food/food/rapidalert/index_en.htm
3 Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore, “Importance of Food Safety”, 13 April 2010, http://www.ava.gov.sg/FoodSector/ FoodSafetyEducation/ AboutFoodSafetyPublicEduProg/ ImptFoodSafety/index.htm
4 The data do not reflect the increasing privatisation of food safety. To give just one example of a private legal cost generated by the failings of the US food system: in April 2010, Cargill settled a lawsuit with Stephanie Smith, a 22-year-old dancer who was paralysed for life after eating an Escherichia coli-tainted hamburger made from Cargill beef. The amount of the settlement will never be known, but it is said to provide for Ms Smith’s lifelong health costs related to coping with her affliction (and she is committed to walking again.) In the US context, this may climb to millions of dollars.
5 Aurelio Suarez Montoya, “Colombia, una pieza mas en la conquista de un ‘nuevo nundo’ lacteo”, RECALCA, November 2010, http://www.recalca.org.co/Colombia-una-pieza-mas-en-la.html
6 US regulation now forbids feeding cow protein to cows, but allows the feeding of “poultry litter”, which can contain “restricted feed ingredients including meat and bone meal from dead cattle”. See “Downright Scary: Cows fed chicken feces, recycled cow remains”, Consumers Union, 29 October 2009, http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/core_food_safety/015272.html
7 Lee Eun-joo, “New mad cow disease case in Canada noted”, JoongAng Daily, 7 March 2011, http://joongangdaily.joins.com/article/view.asp?aid=2933089
8 “Goldman Sachs may sell stake in Shineway to CDH: report,” China Knowledge, 6 November 2009.
9 Video of the news report is available here: http://video.sina.com.cn/v/b/48370817-1290078633.html. See also, “The clenbuterol crisis,” Dim Sums, 22 March 2011: http://dimsums.blogspot.com/2011/03/clenbuterol-crisis.html
10 Wang Qingchu, “Banned drug used widely in pig trade,” Shanghai Daily, 16 March 2011.
11 The rich countries still use subsidies to protect and promote their own agricultural businesses.
12 Veena Jha, chapter on South Asia in Environmental regulation and food safety: Studies of protection and protectionism, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, 2006, http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-93090-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
13 Gumisai Mutume, “New barriers hinder African trade”, Africa Renewal, January 2006, http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol19no4/194trade.html
14 This process has been dubbed the “Senegalisation” of EU fishing vessels, because of where it began. See ActionAid, “SelFish Europe”, June 2008, http://www.actionaid.org/main.aspx?PageID=1114, and Jean Sébastien Mora, “L’Europe pêche en eaux troubles”, Politis, 27 May 2010, http://www.bilaterals.org/spip.php?article17454.
15 For peanuts, the level adopted by the EU in the 1990s was 4 parts per billion (ppb). The level recommended by Codex Alimentarius is 15 ppb. Many countries practise the standard of 15 (Canada, Australia, Peru), 20 (Thailand, US, China) or 30 (India, Brazil). Data from the Almond Board of California, November 2009, http://californiaalmonds.fr/Handlers/Documents/Intnl-Aflatoxin-Limits.pdf
16 Timothy Josling, Donna Roberts and David Orden, “Food regulation and trade: toward a safe and open global system”, Institute for International Economics, Washington DC, 2004, p. 113.
17 T. Otsuki et al., “Saving two in a billion: quantifying the trade effect of European food safety standards on African exports”, Food Policy, Vol. 26, No. 5, October 2001, pp. 495–514.
18 See Veena Jha (ed.), Environmental regulation and food safety: Studies of protection and protectionism, International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, 2006, p. 16.
19 It is also to get rid of slime and odour.
20 HACCP is a method of controlling risks in a food production process by identifying the key points to monitor, and keeping an eye on them. It was developed by the Pillsbury Corporation to create foods suitable for NASA space flights, so one can imagine the ramifications! It is basically just a system of private checklists.
21 “Subject: France and the WTO ag biotech case”, Wikileaks cable Reference ID 07PARIS4723, dated 14 December 2007, http://213.251.145.96/cable/2007/12/07PARIS4723.html
22 For details, see bilaterals.org and GRAIN, “FTAs and biodiversity”, in Fighting FTAs, 2008, http://www.bilaterals.org/spip.php?article15225, and GRAIN, “Food safety: rigging the game”, Seedling, July 2008, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=555
23 GRAIN, “Big Meat is growing in the South”, Seedling, October 2010, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=82
24 This includes milk of cattle fed with feeds produced from internal organs, blood meal and tissues of ruminant origin or products that may contain animal rennet. See Gargi Parsai, “No import of US dairy products for now”, The Hindu, 15 November 2010, http://www.bilaterals.org/spip.php?article18483
25 They also fall under the remit of Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) disciplines, the close cousin of SPS. TBT rules govern labelling, and many food safety and broader food quality issues require proper labelling.
26 The same is true for nanomaterials.
27 Exact figures of the market size vary, but come to US$550–630 billion per year. The main reasons why this market is booming are population growth and conversion rates. But practicalities facing the food service industry also weigh in. For instance, the catering firms that supply the airline industry at the world’s major hubs (e.g. Heathrow and Frankfurt) are increasingly opting to use only halal meat.
28 Whether GMOs – like cloning and other new technologies – are halal or haram has long been an issue of debate, and the answer often depends on the country or the authority giving it.
29 Outside the SPS arena, Canada filed a WTO dispute in August 2010 against the EU’s seal trade ban. While this conflict is not over food safety, it does challenge how far the EU can go in pushing its animal welfare standards on other countries. This issue will also have to be dealt with in the current EU–Canada FTA negotiations.
30 This involves not just food but testing and cosmetics.
31 Their main concerns are lack of harmonisation, lack of transparency, lack of scientific basis and no consultation. For OIE’s overview of the discussion process, see “Implications of private standards in international trade of animals and animal products”, updated 23 June 2010, http://www.oie.int/eng/normes/en_Implications%20of%20private%20standards.htm. For an account of developing country concerns, see the final report of the OIE questionnaire on private standards, http://www.oie.int/eng/normes/A_AHG_PS_NOV09_2.pdf
32 Bruce Blythe, “Walmart will require stricter safety tests for beef suppliers”, Drovers CattleNetwork, 29 April 2010, http://www.cattlenetwork.com/cattle-news/latest/wal-mart-will-require-stricter-safety-tests-for-beef-suppliers-114326579.html
33 Zensho statement of 30 November 2010, http://www.zensho.co.jp/en/ZENSHO_SFC_20101130.pdf
34 “South African poultry makers ‘racist’, politician says”, BBC, 29 December 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12090741
35 For an excellent discussion of Walmart’s role in the US food system, see Barry C. Lynn, “Breaking the chain: the antitrust case against Wal-Mart”, Harper’s, July 2006, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2006/07/0081115
36 Thomas Reardon, Spencer Hensen and Julio Berdegué, “‘Proactive fast-tracking’ diffusion of supermarkets in developing countries: implications for market institutions and trade”, Journal of Economic Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2007.
37 GRAIN, “Global agribusiness: two decades of plunder”, Seedling, July 2010, http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=81
38 Niels Fold, “Transnational Sourcing Practices in Ghana’s Perennial Crop Sectors”, Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 94–122.
39 Peter Jaeger, “Ghana export horticulture cluster strategic profile study”, prepared for World Bank, Ghana Ministry of Food and Agriculture and EU ACP Agricultural Commodities Programme, 2008.
40 See “Don’t let Vietnam’s Tra fish be ‘stricken down’” , Voice of Vietnam, 13 February 2011, http://english.vovnews.vn/Home/Dont-let-Vietnams-Tra-fish-be-stricken-down/20112/123832.vov
41 Ibid. WWF’s ASC certification alone costs US$7,500 per 5 hectares per year.
42 Spencer Henson and John Humphrey, “The Impacts of Private Food Safety Standards on the Food Chain and on Public Standard-Setting Processes”, paper prepared for FAO/WHO, May 2009.
43 Clare Narrod, Devesh Roy, Belem Avendano and Julius Okello, “Impact of International Food Safety Standards on Smallholders: Evidence from Three Cases”, in McCullough, Pingali and Stamoulis (eds), The Transformation of Agri-Food Systems: globalization, supply chains and smallholder farmers, London, Earthscan, 2008.
44 Walmart press release, 25 October 2010, http://en.prnasia.com/pr/2010/10/25/100984911.shtml
45 “Large Corporations Engaging Small Producers – Fruits and Vegetables in India and China”, live case prepared and presented by Nancy Barry, President of NBA Enterprise Solutions to Poverty, at the Harvard Business School Forum on the Future of Market Capitalism, 9–10 October 2009,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24650313/Case-on-India-and-China-Corporations-and-Small-Farmers-fin%E2%80%A6
46 See Bayer’s Food Chain Partnership promotional video for India, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVRMmYTqsCE ; “Wal-Mart Centroamérica y el Grupo Bayer firman convenio para impulsar agricultura”, La Tribuna, 15 January 2010, http://www.latribuna.hn/web2.0/?p=86331
47 See México Calidad Suprema website at http://www.mexicocalidadsuprema.com.mx/nosotros.php
48 Bayer CropScience, “An exceptional collaboration with Mexico Calidad Suprema”, http://www.bayercropscience.com/bcsweb/cropprotection.nsf/id/ EN_Mexico_Calidad_Suprema_English/$file/MEXICO_CS_web_EN_NEW.pdf
49 Greenpeace, “Pesticides: not your problem?”, 9 April 2009, http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/news/China-pesticides
50 See Jo Dongwon, “Real-time networked media activism in the 2008 Chotbul protest”, Interface, Vol. 2, No. 2, November 2010, pp. 92–102.
51 See the Via Campesina web site: http://viacampesina.org
52 David Gumpert, “Maine towns reject one-size-fits-all regulation, declare ‘food sovereignty’”, Grist, 15 March 2011: http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-15-maine-towns-reject-one-size-fits-all-regulation-declare-food
53 The armed raid on Rawesome Foods in the US in 2010, which was captured on security camera and circulated over the internet, is one example (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2jgpGyyQW8). In France, two years earlier, industrial dairy processors that want a bigger share of the market tried to dismantle the rule that only raw milk can be used to make Camembert cheese, on the ground that it’s not safe. They were quickly defeated, including with regards to the lack of scientific data that there is any meaningful safety problem with raw-milk cheese. This debate has also flared up in Canada, but the government of Quebec has decided to keep the production of raw-milk cheese legal.
54 Quoted by Cécile Koehler in “Le risque zéro: du ‘sur mesure’ pour l’agriculture industrielle”, Campagnes solidaires, FADEAR, Bagnolet, November 2008. This dossier also points out that no study can show a correlation between heavy investment in industrial and administrative practices and a high level of food safety.
55 Western journalists and academics such as Christian Jacquiau, Marion Nestle, Felicity Lawrence and Michael Pollan have been doing a great job in helping the public to understand how supermarkets and food safety systems really work, and how citizens can retake control of such matters.
56 “Historic breakthrough in Florida’s tomato fields”, joint press release from Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, 16 November 2010, http://www.ciw-online.org/FTGE_CIW_joint_release.html See also: “The human cost of industrial tomatoes”, Grist, 6 March 2009, http://www.grist.org/article/Immokalee-Diary-part-I/
http://www.grain.org/briefings/?id=222
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A NATIONAL STRATEGIC NARRATIVE
By CAPT Wayne Porter, USN and Col Mark “Puck” Mykleby, USMC
Woodrow Wilson International Center For Scholars
2011
With preface by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
PREFACE
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs,
Princeton University
Director of Policy Planning, U.S. Department of State, 2009-2011
The United States needs a national strategic narrative. We have a national security strategy, which sets forth four core national interests and outlines a number of dimensions of an overarching strategy to advance those interests in the 21st century world. But that is a document written by specialists for specialists. It does not answer a fundamental question that more and more Americans are asking. Where is the United States going in the world? How can we get there? What are the guiding stars that will illuminate the path along the way? We need a story with a beginning, middle, and projected happy ending that will transcend our political divisions, orient us as a nation, and give us both a common direction and the confidence and commitment to get to our destination.
These questions require new answers because of the universal awareness that we are living through a time of rapid and universal change. The assumptions of the 20th century, of the U.S. as a bulwark first against fascism and then against communism, make little sense in a world in which World War II and its aftermath is as distant to young generations today as the War of 1870 was to the men who designed the United Nations and the international order in the late 1940s. Consider the description of the U.S. president as “the leader of the free world,” a phrase that encapsulated U.S. power and the structure of the global order for decades. Yet anyone under thirty today, a majority of the world’s population, likely has no idea what it means.
Moreover, the U.S. is experiencing its latest round of “declinism,” the periodic certainty that we are losing all the things that have made us a great nation. In a National Journal poll conducted in 2010, 47% percent of Americans rated China’s economy as the world’s strongest economy, even though today the U.S. economy is still 2 ½ times larger than the Chinese economy with only 1/6 of the population. Our crumbling roads and bridges reflect a crumbling self-confidence. Our education reformers often seem to despair that we can ever educate new generations effectively for the 21st century economy. Our health care system lags increasingly behind that of other developed nations – even behind British National Health in terms of the respective overall health of the British and American populations.
Against this backdrop, Captain Porter’s and Colonel Mykleby’s “Y article” could not come at a more propitious time. In 1947 George Kennan published “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym X, so as not to reveal his identity as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. The X article gave us an intellectual framework within which to understand the rise and eventual fall of the Soviet Union and a strategy to hasten that objective. Based on that foundation, the strategic narrative of the Cold War was that the United States was the leader of the free world against the communist world; that we would invest in containing the Soviet Union and limiting its expansion while building a dynamic economy and as just, and prosperous a society as possible. We often departed from that narrative in practice, as George Kennan was one of the first to recognize. But it was a narrative that fit the facts of the world we perceived well enough to create and maintain a loose bipartisan national consensus for forty years.
Porter and Mykleby give us a non-partisan blueprint for understanding and reacting to the changes of the 21st century world. In one sentence, the strategic narrative of the United States in the 21st century is that we want to become the strongest competitor and most influential player in a deeply inter-connected global system, which requires that we invest less in defense and more in sustainable prosperity and the tools of effective global engagement.
At first reading, this sentence may not seem to mark much of a change. But look closer. The Y article narrative responds directly to five major transitions in the global system:
1) From control in a closed system to credible influence in an open system. The authors argue that Kennan’s strategy of containment was designed for a closed system, in which we assumed that we could control events through deterrence, defense, and dominance of the international system. The 21st century is an open system, in which unpredictable external events/phenomena are constantly disturbing and disrupting the system. In this world control is impossible; the best we can do is to build credible influence – the ability to shape and guide global trends in the direction that serves our values and interests (prosperity and security) within an interdependent strategic ecosystem. In other words, the U.S. should stop trying to dominate and direct global events. The best we can do is to build our capital so that we can influence events as they arise.
2) From containment to sustainment. The move from control to credible influence as a fundamental strategic goal requires a shift from containment to sustainment (sustainability). Instead of trying to contain others (the Soviet Union, terrorists, China, etc), we need to focus on sustaining ourselves in ways that build our strengths and underpin credible influence. That shift in turn means that the starting point for our strategy should be internal rather than external. The 2010 National Security Strategy did indeed focus on national renewal and global leadership, but this account makes an even stronger case for why we have to focus first and foremost on investing our resources domestically in those national resources that can be sustained, such as our youth and our natural resources (ranging from crops, livestock, and potable water to sources of energy and materials for industry). We can and must still engage internationally, of course, but only after a careful weighing of costs and benefits and with as many partners as possible. Credible influence also requires that we model the behavior we recommend for others, and that we pay close attention to the gap between our words and our deeds.
3) From deterrence and defense to civilian engagement and competition. Here in many ways is the hard nub of this narrative. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen has already said publicly that the U.S. deficit is our biggest national security threat. He and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have also given speeches and written articles calling for “demilitarizing American foreign policy” and investing more in the tools of civilian engagements – diplomacy and defense. As we modernize our military and cut spending the tools of 20th century warfare, we must also invest in a security complex that includes all domestic and foreign policy assets. Our credibility also requires a willingness to compete with others. Instead of defeatism and protectionism, we must embrace competition as a way to make ourselves stronger and better (e.g. Ford today, now competing with Toyota on electric cars). A willingness to compete means a new narrative on trade and a new willingness to invest in the skills, education, energy sources, and infrastructure necessary to make our products competitive.
4) From zero sum to positive sum global politics/economics. An interdependent world creates many converging interests and opportunities for positive-sum rather than zero-sum competition. The threats that come from interdependence (economic instability, global pandemics, global terrorist and criminal networks) also create common interests in countering those threats domestically and internationally. President Obama has often emphasized the significance of moving toward positive sum politics. To take only one example, the rise of China as a major economic power has been overall very positive for the U.S. economy and the prosperity and stability of East Asia. The United States must be careful to guard our interests and those of our allies, but we miss great opportunities if we assume that the rise of some necessarily means the decline of others.
5) From national security to national prosperity and security. The piece closes with a call for a National Prosperity and Security Act to replace the National Security Act of 1947. The term “national security” only entered the foreign policy lexicon after 1947 to reflect the merger of defense and foreign affairs. Today our security lies as much or more in our prosperity as in our military capabilities. Our vocabulary, our institutions, and our assumptions must reflect that shift. “National security” has become a trump card, justifying military spending even as the domestic foundations of our national strength are crumbling. “National prosperity and security” reminds us where our true security begins. Foreign policy pundits have long called for an overhaul of NSC 68, the blueprint for the national security state that accompanied the grand strategy of containment. If we are truly to become the strongest competitor and most influential player in the deeply interconnected world of the 21st century, then we need a new blueprint.
A narrative is a story. A national strategic narrative must be a story that all Americans can understand and identify with in their own lives. America’s national story has always see-sawed between exceptionalism and universalism. We think that we are an exceptional nation, but a core part of that exceptionalism is a commitment to universal values – to the equality of all human beings not just within the borders of the United States, but around the world. We should thus embrace the rise of other nations when that rise is powered by expanded prosperity, opportunity, and dignity for their peoples. In such a world we do not need to see ourselves as the automatic leader of any bloc of nations. We should be prepared instead to earn our influence through our ability to compete with other nations, the evident prosperity and wellbeing of our people, and our ability to engage not just with states but with societies in all their richness and complexity. We do not want to be the sole superpower that billions of people around the world have learned to hate from fear of our military might. We seek instead to be the nation other nations listen to, rely on and emulate out of respect and admiration.
The Y article is the first step down that new path. It is written by two military men who have put their lives on the line in the defense of their country and who are non-partisan by profession and conviction. Their insights and ideas should spark a national conversation. All it takes is for politicians, pundits, journalists, businesspeople, civic leaders, and engaged citizens across the country to read and respond.
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A NATIONAL STRATEGIC NARRATIVE
By CAPT Wayne Porter, USN and Col Mark “Puck” Mykleby, USMC
This Strategic Narrative is intended to frame our National policy decisions regarding investment, security, economic development, the environment, and engagement well into this century. It is built upon the premise that we must sustain our enduring national interests – prosperity and security – within a “strategic ecosystem,” at home and abroad; that in complexity and uncertainty, there are opportunities and hope, as well as challenges, risk, and threat. The primary approach this Strategic Narrative advocates to achieve sustainable prosperity and security, is through the application of credible influence and strength, the pursuit of fair competition, acknowledgement of interdependencies and converging interests, and adaptation to complex, dynamic systems – all bounded by our national values.
From Containment to Sustainment: Control to Credible Influence
For those who believe that hope is not a strategy, America must seem a strange contradiction of anachronistic values and enduring interests amidst a constantly changing global environment. America is a country conceived in liberty, founded on hope, and built upon the notion that anything is possible with enough hard work and imagination. Over time we have continued to learn and mature even as we strive to remain true to those values our founding fathers set forth in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
America’s national strategy in the second half of the last century was anchored in the belief that our global environment is a closed system to be controlled by mankind – through technology, power, and determination – to achieve security and prosperity. From that perspective, anything that challenged our national interests was perceived as a threat or a risk to be managed. For forty years our nation prospered and was kept secure through a strategy of containment. That strategy relied on control, deterrence, and the conviction that given the choice, people the world over share our vision for a better tomorrow. America emerged from the Twentieth Century as the most powerful nation on earth. But we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable source of energy. The new century brought with it a reminder that the world, in fact, is a complex, open system – constantly changing. And change brings with it uncertainty. What we really failed to recognize, is that in uncertainty and change, there is opportunity and hope.
It is time for America to re-focus our national interests and principles through a long lens on the global environment of tomorrow. It is time to move beyond a strategy of containment to a strategy of sustainment (sustainability); from an emphasis on power and control to an emphasis on strength and influence; from a defensive posture of exclusion, to a proactive posture of engagement. We must recognize that security means more than defense, and sustaining security requires adaptation and evolution, the leverage of converging interests and interdependencies. To grow we must accept that competitors are not necessarily adversaries, and that a winner does not demand a loser. We must regain our credibility as a leader among peers, a beacon of hope, rather than an island fortress. It is only by balancing our interests with our principles that we can truly hope to sustain our growth as a nation and to restore our credibility as a world leader.
As we focus on the opportunities within our strategic environment, however, we must also address risk and threat. It is important to recognize that developing credible influence to pursue our enduring national interests in a sustainable manner requires strength with restraint, power with patience, deterrence with detente. The economic, diplomatic, educational, military, and commercial tools through which we foster that credibility must always be tempered and hardened by the values that define us as a people.
Our Values and Enduring National Interests
America was founded on the core values and principles enshrined in our Constitution and proven through war and peace. These values have served as both our anchor and our compass, at home and abroad, for more than two centuries. Our values define our national character, and they are our source of credibility and legitimacy in everything we do. Our values provide the bounds within which we pursue our enduring national interests. When these values are no longer sustainable, we have failed as a nation, because without our values, America has no credibility.
As we continue to evolve, these values are reflected in a wider global application: tolerance for all cultures, races, and religions; global opportunity for self-fulfillment; human dignity and freedom from exploitation; justice with compassion and equality under internationally recognized rule of law; sovereignty without tyranny, with assured freedom of expression; and an environment for entrepreneurial freedom and global prosperity, with access to markets, plentiful water and arable soil, clean and abundant energy, and adequate health services.
From the earliest days of the Republic, America has depended on a vibrant free market and an indomitable entrepreneurial spirit to be the engines of our prosperity. Our strength as a world leader is largely derived from the central role we play in the global economy. Since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, the United States has been viewed as an anchor of global economic security and the U.S. dollar has served as an internationally recognized medium of exchange, the monetary standard. The American economy is the strongest in the world and likely to remain so well into the foreseeable future. Yet, while the dramatic acceleration of globalization over the last fifteen years has provided for the cultural, intellectual and social comingling among people on every continent, of every race, and of every ideology, it has also increased international economic interdependence and has made a narrowly domestic economic perspective an unattractive impossibility. Without growth and competition economies stagnate and wither, so sustaining America’s prosperity requires a healthy global economy. Prosperity at home and through global economic competition and development is then, one of America’s enduring national interests.
It follows logically that prosperity without security is unsustainable. Security is a state of mind, as much as it is a physical aspect of our environment. For Americans, security is very closely related to freedom, because security represents freedom from anxiety and external threat, freedom from disease and poverty, freedom from tyranny and oppression, freedom of expression but also freedom from hurtful ideologies, prejudice and violations of human rights. Security cannot be safeguarded by borders or natural barriers; freedom cannot be secured with locks or by force alone. In our complex, interdependent, and constantly changing global environment, security is not achievable for one nation or by one people alone; rather it must be recognized as a common interest among all peoples. Otherwise, security is not sustainable, and without it there can be no peace of mind. Security, then, is our other enduring national interest.
Our Three Investment Priorities
As Americans we have access to a vast array of resources. Perhaps the most important first step we can take, as part of a National Strategy, is to identify which of these resources are renewable and sustainable, and which are finite and diminishing. Without doubt, our greatest resource is America’s young people, who will shape and execute the vision needed to take this nation forward into an uncertain future. But this may require a reawakening, of sorts. Perhaps because our nation has been so blessed over time, many of us have forgotten that rewards must be earned, there is no “free ride” – that fair competition and hard work bring with them a true sense of accomplishment. We can no longer expect the ingenuity and labor of past generations to sustain our growth as a nation for generations to come. We must embrace the reality that with opportunity comes challenge, and that retooling our competitiveness requires a commitment and investment in the future.
Inherent in our children is the innovation, drive, and imagination that have made, and will continue to make, this country great. By investing energy, talent, and dollars now in the education and training of young Americans – the scientists, statesmen, industrialists, farmers, inventors, educators, clergy, artists, service members, and parents, of tomorrow – we are truly investing in our ability to successfully compete in, and influence, the strategic environment of the future. Our first investment priority, then, is intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.
Our second investment priority is ensuring the nation’s sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them. As has been stated already, Americans view security in the broader context of freedom and peace of mind. Rather than focusing primarily on defense, the security we seek can only be sustained through a whole of nation approach to our domestic and foreign policies. This requires a different approach to problem solving than we have pursued previously and a hard look at the distribution of our national treasure. For too long, we have underutilized sectors of our government and our citizenry writ large, focusing intensely on defense and protectionism rather than on development and diplomacy. This has been true in our approach to domestic and foreign trade, agriculture and energy, science and technology, immigration and education, public health and crisis response, Homeland Security and military force posture. Security touches each of these and must be addressed by leveraging all the strengths of our nation, not simply those intended to keep perceived threat a safe arm’s length away.
America is a resplendent, plentiful and fertile land, rich with natural resources, bounded by vast ocean spaces. Together these gifts are ours to be enjoyed for their majesty, cultivated and harvested for their abundance, and preserved for following generations. Many of these resources are renewable, some are not. But all must be respected as part of a global ecosystem that is being tasked to support a world population projected to reach nine billion peoples midway through this century. These resources range from crops, livestock, and potable water to sources of energy and materials for industry. Our third investment priority is to develop a plan for the
sustainable access to, cultivation and use of, the natural resources we need for our continued wellbeing, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace.
Fair Competition and Deterrence
Competition is a powerful, and often misunderstood, concept. Fair competition – of ideas and enterprises, among individuals, organizations, and nations – is what has driven Americans to achieve greatness across the spectrum of human endeavor. And yet with globalization, we seem to have developed a strange apprehension about the efficacy of our ability to apply the innovation and hard work necessary to successfully compete in a complex security and economic environment. Further, we have misunderstood interdependence as a weakness rather than recognizing it as a strength. The key to sustaining our competitive edge, at home or on the world stage, is credibility – and credibility is a difficult capital to foster. It cannot be won through intimidation and threat, it cannot be sustained through protectionism or exclusion.
Credibility requires engagement, strength, and reliability – imaginatively applied through the national tools of development, diplomacy, and defense.
In many ways, deterrence is closely linked to competition. Like competition, deterrence in the truest sense is built upon strength and credibility and cannot be achieved solely through intimidation and threat. For deterrence to be effective, it must leverage converging interests and interdependencies, while differentiating and addressing diverging and conflicting interests that represent potential threats. Like competition, deterrence requires a whole of nation effort, credible influence supported by actions that are consistent with our national interests and values.
When fair competition and positive influence through engagement – largely dependent on the tools of development and diplomacy – fail to dissuade the threat of destructive behavior, we will approach deterrence through a broad, interdisciplinary effort that combines development and diplomacy with defense.
A Strategic Ecology
Rather than focusing all our attention on specific threats, risks, nations, or organizations, as we have in the past, let us evaluate the trends that will shape tomorrow’s strategic ecology, and seek opportunities to credibly influence these to our advantage. Among the trends that are already shaping a “new normal” in our strategic environment are the decline of rural economies, joblessness, the dramatic increase in urbanization, an increasing demand for energy, migration of populations and shifting demographics, the rise of grey and black markets, the phenomenon of extremism and anti-modernism, the effects of global climate change, the spread of pandemics
and lack of access to adequate health services, and an increasing dependency on cyber networks.
At first glance, these trends are cause for concern. But for Americans with vision, guided by values, they represent opportunities to reestablish and leverage credible influence, converging interests, and interdependencies that can transform despair into hope. This focus on improving our strategic ecosystem, and favorably competing for our national interests, underscores the investment priorities cited earlier, and the imaginative application of diplomacy, development, and defense in our foreign policy.
Many of the trends affecting our environment are conditions-based. That is, they have developed within a complex system as the result of conditions left unchecked for many years. These global trends, whether manifesting themselves in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Eurasia, or within our own hemisphere impact the lives of Americans in ways that are often obscure as they propagate over vast areas with cascading and sometimes catastrophic effect.
Illiteracy, for example, is common in countries with high birth rates. High birth rates and illiteracy contribute to large labor pools and joblessness, particularly in rural areas in which changing weather conditions have resulted in desertification and soil erosion. This has led to the disruption of family and tribal support structures and the movement of large numbers of young, unskilled people into urban areas that lack infrastructure. This rapid urbanization has taxed countries with weak governance that lack rule of law, permitting the further growth of exploitive, grey and black market activities. Criminal networks prey upon and contribute to the disenfranchisement of a sizeable portion of the population in many underdeveloped nations.
This concentration of disenfranchised youth, with little-to-no licit support infrastructure has provided a recruiting pool for extremists seeking political support and soldiers for local or foreign causes, often facilitated through the internet. The wars and instability perpetrated by these extremists and their armies of the disenfranchised have resulted in the displacement of many thousands more, and the further weakening of governance. This displacement has, in many cases, produced massive migrations of disparate families, tribes, and cultures seeking a more sustainable existence. This migration has further exacerbated the exploitation of the weak by criminal and ideological profiteers and has facilitated the spread of diseases across natural barriers previously considered secure. The effect has been to create a kind of subculture of despair and hopelessness that is self-perpetuating. At some point, these underlying conditions must be addressed by offering choices and options that will nudge global trends in a positive direction. America’s national interests and values are not sustainable otherwise.
We cannot isolate our own prosperity and security from the global system. Even in a land as rich as ours, we too, have seen the gradual breakdown of rural communities and the rapid expansion of our cities. We have experienced migration, crime, and domestic terrorism. We struggle with joblessness and despite a low rate of illiteracy, we are losing our traditional role of innovation dominance in leading edge technologies and the sciences. We are, in the truest sense, part of an interdependent strategic ecosystem, and our interests converge with those of people in virtually every corner of the world. We must remain cognizant of this, and reconcile our domestic and foreign policies as being complementary and largely congruent.
As we pursue the growth of our own prosperity and security, the welfare of our citizens must be seen as part of a highly dynamic, and interconnected system that includes sovereign nations, world markets, natural and man-generated challenges and solutions – a system that demands adaptability and innovation. In this strategic environment, it is competition that will determine how we evolve, and Americans must have the tools and confidence required to successfully compete.
This begins at home with quality health care and education, with a vital economy and low rates of unemployment, with thriving urban centers and carefully planned rural communities, with low crime, and a sense of common purpose underwritten by personal responsibility. We often hear the term “smart power” applied to the tools of development and diplomacy abroad empowering people all over the world to improve their own lives and to help establish the stability needed to sustain security and prosperity on a global scale. But we can not export “smart power” until we practice “smart growth” at home. We must seize the opportunity to be a model of stability, a model of the values we cherish for the rest of the world to emulate. And we must ensure that our domestic policies are aligned with our foreign policies. Our own “smart growth” can serve as the exportable model of “smart power.” Because, truthfully, it is in our interest to see the rest of the world prosper and the world market thrive, just as it is in our interest to see our neighbors prosper and our own urban centers and rural communities come back to life.
Closing the “Say-do” Gap – the Negative Aspects of “Binning” An important step toward re-establishing credible influence and applying it effectively is to close the “say-do” gap. This begins by avoiding the very western tendency to label or “bin” individuals, groups, organizations, and ideas. In complex systems, adaptation and variation demonstrate that “binning” is not only difficult, it often leads to unintended consequences. For example, labeling, or binning, Islamist radicals as “terrorists,” or worse, as “jihadis,” has resulted in two very different, and unfortunate unintended misperceptions: that all Muslims are thought of as “terrorists;” and, that those who pervert Islam into a hateful, anti-modernist ideology to justify unspeakable acts of violence are truly motivated by a religious struggle (the definition of “jihad,” and the obligation of all Muslims), rather than being seen as apostates waging war against society and innocents. This has resulted in the alienation of vast elements of the global Muslim community and has only frustrated efforts to accurately depict and marginalize extremism.
Binning and labeling are legacies of a strategy intent on viewing the world as a closed system. Another significant unintended consequence of binning, is that it creates divisions within our own government and between our own domestic and foreign policies. As has been noted, we cannot isolate our own prosperity and security from the global system. We exist within a strategic ecology, and our interests converge with those of people in virtually every corner of the world. We must remain cognizant of this, and reconcile our domestic and foreign policies as being complementary and largely congruent. Yet we have binned government departments, agencies, laws, authorities, and programs into lanes that lack the strategic flexibility and dynamism to effectively adapt to the global environment. This, in turn, further erodes our credibility, diminishes our influence, inhibits our competitive edge, and exacerbates the say-do gap. The tools to be employed in pursuit of our national interests – development, diplomacy, and defense – cannot be effective if they are restricted to one government department or another. In fact, if these tools are not employed within the context of a coherent national strategy, vice being narrowly applied in isolation to individual countries or regions, they will fail to achieve a sustainable result. By recognizing the advantages of interdependence and converging interests, domestically and internationally, we gain the strategic flexibility to sustain our national interests without compromising our values. The tools of development do not exist within the domain of one government department alone, or even one sector of society, anymore than do the tools of diplomacy or defense.
Another form of binning that impedes strategic flexibility, interdependence, and converging interests in the global system, is a geo-centric approach to foreign policy. Perhaps since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, westerners have tended to view the world as consisting of sovereign nation-states clearly distinguishable by their political borders and physical boundaries.
In the latter half of the Twentieth Century a new awareness of internationalism began to dominate political thought. This notion of communities of nations and regions was further broadened by globalization. But the borderless nature of the internet, and the accompanying proliferation of stateless organizations and ideologies, has brought with it a new appreciation for the interconnectivity of today’s strategic ecosystem. In this “new world order,” converging interests create interdependencies. Our former notion of competition as a zero sum game that allowed for one winner and many losers, seems as inadequate today as Newton’s Laws of Motion (written about the same time as the Westphalia Peace) did to Albert Einstein and quantum physicists in the early Twentieth Century. It is time to move beyond a narrow Westphalian vision of the world, and to recognize the opportunities in globalization.
Such an approach doesn’t advocate the relinquishment of sovereignty as it is understood within a Westphalian construct. Indeed, sovereignty without tyranny is a fundamental American value. Neither does the recognition of a more comprehensive perspective place the interests of American citizens behind, or even on par with those of any other country on earth. It is the popular convergence of interests among peoples, nations, cultures, and movements that will determine the sustainability of prosperity and security in this century. And it is credible influence, based on values and strength that will ensure America’s continuing role as a world leader. Security and prosperity are not sustainable in isolation from the rest of the global system. To close the say-do gap, we must stop behaving as if our national interests can be pursued without regard for our values.
Credible Influence in a Strategic Ecosystem
Viewed in the context of a strategic ecosystem, the global trends and conditions cited earlier are seen to be borderless. The application of credible influence to further our national interests, then, should be less about sovereign borders and geographic regions than the means and scope of its conveyance. By addressing the trends themselves, we will attract others in our environment also affected. These converging interests will create opportunities for both competition and interdependence, opportunities to positively shape these trends to mutual advantage. Whether this involves out-competing the grey and black market, funding research to develop alternate and sustainable sources of energy, adapting farming for low-water-level environments, anticipating and limiting the effects of pandemics, generating viable economies to relieve urbanization and migration, marginalizing extremism and demonstrating the futility of anti-modernism, or better managing the global information grid – international divisions among people will be less the focus than flexible and imaginative cooperation. Isolation – whether within national borders, physical boundaries, ideologies, or cyberspace – will prove to be a great disadvantage for any competitor in the evolution of the system.
The advent of the internet and world wide web, that ushered in the information age and greatly accelerated globalization, brought with it profound second and third order effects the implications of which have yet to be fully recognized or understood. These effects include the near-instantaneous and anonymous exchange of ideas and ideologies; the sharing and manipulation of previously protected and sophisticated technologies; vast and transparent social networking that has homogenized cultures, castes, and classes; the creation of complex virtual worlds; and, a universal dependence on the global grid from every sector of society that has become almost existential. The worldwide web has also facilitated the spread of hateful and manipulative propaganda and extremism; the theft of intellectual property and sensitive information; predatory behavior and the exploitation of innocence; and the dangerous and destructive prospect of cyber warfare waged from the shadows of non-attribution and deception.
Whether this revolution in communication and access to information is viewed as the democratization of ideas, or as the technological catalyst of an apocalypse, nothing has so significantly impacted our lives in the last one hundred years. Our perceptions of self, society, religion, and life itself have been challenged. But cyberspace is yet another dimension within the strategic ecosystem, offering opportunity through complex interdependence. Here, too, we must invest the resources and develop the capabilities necessary to sustain our prosperity and security without sacrificing our values.
Opportunities beyond Threat and Risk
As was stated earlier, while this Strategic Narrative advocates a focus on the opportunities inherent in a complex global system, it does not pretend that greed, corruption, ancient hatreds and new born apprehensions won’t manifest into very real risks that could threaten our national interests and test our values. Americans must recognize this as an inevitable part of the strategic environment and continue to maintain the means to minimize, deter, or defeat these diverging or conflicting interests that threaten our security. This calls for a robust, technologically superior, and agile military – equally capable of responding to low-end, irregular conflicts and to major conventional contingency operations. But it also requires a strong and unshakable economy, a more diverse and deployable Inter Agency, and perhaps most importantly a well-informed and supportive citizenry. As has also been cited, security means far more than defense, and strength denotes more than power. We must remain committed to a whole of nation application of the tools of competition and deterrence: development, diplomacy, and defense. Our ability to look beyond risk and threat – to accept them as realities within a strategic ecology – and to focus on opportunities and converging interests will determine our success in pursuing our national interests in a sustainable manner while maintaining our national values. This requires the projection of credible influence and strength, as well as confidence in our capabilities as a nation.
As we look ahead, we will need to determine what those capabilities should include. As Americans, our ability to remain relevant as a world leader, to evolve as a nation, depends as it always has on our determination to pursue our national interests within the constraints of our core values. We must embrace and respect diversity and encourage the exchange of ideas, welcoming as our own those who share our values and seek an opportunity to contribute to our nation. Innovation, imagination, and hard work must be applied through a national unity of effort that recognizes our place in the global system. We must accept that to be great requires competition and to remain great requires adaptability, that competition need not demand a single winner, and that through converging interests we should seek interdependencies that can help sustain our interests in the global strategic ecosystem. To achieve this we will need the tools of development, diplomacy and defense – employed with agility through an integrated whole of nation approach. This will require the prioritization of our investments in intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth; investment in the nation’s sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them, including space and cyberspace; and investment in sustainable access to, cultivation and use of, the natural resources we need for our continued wellbeing, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace. Only by developing internal strength through smart growth at home and smart power abroad, applied with strategic agility, can we muster the credible influence needed to remain a world leader.
A National Prosperity and Security Act
Having emerged from the Second World War with the strongest economy, most powerful military, and arguably the most stable model of democracy, President Truman sought to better align America’s security apparatus to face the challenges of the post-war era. He did this through the National Security Act of 1947 (NSA 47). Three years later, with the rise of Chinese communism and the first Russian test of a nuclear device, he ordered his National Security Council to consider the means with which America could confront the global spread of communism. In 1950, President Truman signed into law National Security Council finding 68 (NSC 6. Often called the “blueprint” for America’s Cold War strategy of containment, NSC 68 leveraged not only the National Security structures provided by NSA 47, but recommended funding and authorization for a Department of Defense-led strategy of containment, with other agencies and departments of the Federal government working in supporting roles. NSA 47 and NSC 68 provided the architecture, authorities and necessary resources required for a specific time in our nation’s progress.
Today, we find ourselves in a very different strategic environment than that of the last half of the Twentieth Century. The challenges and opportunities facing us are far more complex, multinodal, and interconnected than we could have imagined in 1950. Rather than narrowly focus on near term risk and solutions for today’s strategic environment, we must recognize the need to take a longer view, a generational view, for the sustainability of our nation’s security and prosperity. Innovation, flexibility, and resilience are critical characteristics to be cultivated if we are to maintain our competitive edge and leadership role in this century. To accomplish this, we must take a hard look at our interagency structures, authorities, and funding proportionalities.
We must seek more flexibility in public / private partnerships and more fungibility across departments. We must provide the means for the functional application of development, diplomacy, and defense rather than continuing to organizationally constrain these tools. We need to pursue our priorities of education, security, and access to natural resources by adopting sustainability as an organizing concept for a national strategy. This will require fundamental changes in policy, law, and organization.
What this calls for is a National Prosperity and Security Act, the modern day equivalent of the National Security Act of 1947. This National Prosperity and Security Act would: integrate policy across agencies and departments of the Federal government and provide for more effective public/private partnerships; increase the capacity of appropriate government departments and agencies; align Federal policies, taxation, research and development expenditures and regulations to coincide with the goals of sustainability; and, converge domestic and foreign policies toward a common purpose. Above all, this Act would provide for policy changes that foster and support the innovation and entrepreneurialism of America that are essential to sustain our qualitative growth as a people and a nation. We need a National Prosperity and Security Act and a clear plan for its application that can serve us as well in this strategic environment, as NSA 47 and NSC 68 served a generation before us.
A Beacon of Hope, a Pathway of Promise
This Narrative advocates for America to pursue her enduring interests of prosperity and security through a strategy of sustainability that is built upon the solid foundation of our national values. As Americans we needn’t seek the world’s friendship or to proselytize the virtues of our society. Neither do we seek to bully, intimidate, cajole, or persuade others to accept our unique values or to share our national objectives. Rather, we will let others draw their own conclusions based upon our actions. Our domestic and foreign policies will reflect unity of effort, coherency and constancy of purpose. We will pursue our national interests and allow others to pursue theirs, never betraying our values. We will seek converging interests and welcome interdependence. We will encourage fair competition and will not shy away from deterring bad behavior. We will accept our place in a complex and dynamic strategic ecosystem and use credible influence and strength to shape uncertainty into opportunities. We will be a pathway of promise and a beacon of hope, in an ever changing world.
CAPT Wayne Porter, USN and Col Mark “Puck” Mykleby, USMC are actively serving military officers. The views expressed herein are their own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/events/docs/A%20National%20Strategic%20Narrative.pdf
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2011/04/24/national-strategic-narrative-mr-y/
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The Kill Team
How U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan murdered innocent civilians and mutilated their corpses – and how their officers failed to stop them. Plus: An exclusive look at the war crime photos censored by the Pentagon
By Mark Boal
Rolling Stone
March 27, 2011
Cpl. Jeremy Morlock with Staff Sgt. David Bram
Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.
Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.
Bravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields.
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To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Then they set out on foot. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. troops. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water; bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes; young kids eager for candy and money. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs.
While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. “The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it,” one of the men later told Army investigators.
The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. The two soldiers, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. And just like that, they picked him for execution.
He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. “He was not a threat,” Morlock later confessed.
Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. The boy did as he was told. He stood still.
The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun.
Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. His cap toppled off. A pool of blood congealed by his head.
The loud retort of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. The sound of such unexpected gunfire typically triggers an emergency response in other soldiers, sending them into full battle mode. Yet when the shots rang out, some soldiers didn’t seem especially alarmed, even when the radio began to squawk. It was Morlock, agitated, screaming that he had come under attack. On a nearby hill, Spc. Adam Winfield turned to his friend, Pfc. Ashton Moore, and explained that it probably wasn’t a real combat situation. It was more likely a staged killing, he said – a plan the guys had hatched to take out an unarmed Afghan without getting caught.
Back at the wall, soldiers arriving on the scene found the body and the bloodstains on the ground. Morlock and Holmes were crouched by the wall, looking excited. When a staff sergeant asked them what had happened, Morlock said the boy had been about to attack them with a grenade. “We had to shoot the guy,” he said.
It was an unlikely story: a lone Taliban fighter, armed with only a grenade, attempting to ambush a platoon in broad daylight, let alone in an area that offered no cover or concealment. Even the top officer on the scene, Capt. Patrick Mitchell, thought there was something strange about Morlock’s story. “I just thought it was weird that someone would come up and throw a grenade at us,” Mitchell later told investigators.
But Mitchell did not order his men to render aid to Mudin, whom he believed might still be alive, and possibly a threat. Instead, he ordered Staff Sgt. Kris Sprague to “make sure” the boy was dead. Sprague raised his rifle and fired twice.
As the soldiers milled around the body, a local elder who had been working in the poppy field came forward and accused Morlock and Holmes of murder. Pointing to Morlock, he said that the soldier, not the boy, had thrown the grenade. Morlock and the other soldiers ignored him.
To identify the body, the soldiers fetched the village elder who had been speaking to the officers that morning. But by tragic coincidence, the elder turned out to be the father of the slain boy. His moment of grief-stricken recognition, when he saw his son lying in a pool of blood, was later recounted in the flat prose of an official Army report. “The father was very upset,” the report noted.
The father’s grief did nothing to interrupt the pumped-up mood that had broken out among the soldiers. Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, they cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Next they scanned his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.
Then, in a break with protocol, the soldiers began taking photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. Holding a cigarette rakishly in one hand, Holmes posed for the camera with Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse, grabbing the boy’s head by the hair as if it were a trophy deer. Morlock made sure to get a similar memento.
No one seemed more pleased by the kill than Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the platoon’s popular and hard-charging squad leader. “It was like another day at the office for him,” one soldier recalls. Gibbs started “messing around with the kid,” moving his arms and mouth and “acting like the kid was talking.” Then, using a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears, he reportedly sliced off the dead boy’s pinky finger and gave it to Holmes, as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.
According to his fellow soldiers, Holmes took to carrying the finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”
After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin’s death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit” operating completely on its own, without the knowledge of its superiors. Military prosecutors swiftly charged five low-ranking soldiers with murder, and the Pentagon clamped down on any information about the killings. Soldiers in Bravo Company were barred from giving interviews, and lawyers for the accused say their clients faced harsh treatment if they spoke to the press, including solitary confinement. No officers were charged.
But a review of internal Army records and investigative files obtained by Rolling Stone, including dozens of interviews with members of Bravo Company compiled by military investigators, indicates that the dozen infantrymen being portrayed as members of a secretive “kill team” were operating out in the open, in plain view of the rest of the company. Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by “pretty much the whole platoon,” according to one soldier who complained about them. Staged killings were an open topic of conversation, and at least one soldier from another battalion in the 3,800-man Stryker Brigade participated in attacks on unarmed civilians. “The platoon has a reputation,” a whistle-blower named Pfc. Justin Stoner told the Army Criminal Investigation Command. “They have had a lot of practice staging killings and getting away with it.”
From the start, the questionable nature of the killings was on the radar of senior Army leadership. Within days of the first murder, Rolling Stone has learned, Mudin’s uncle descended on the gates of FOB Ramrod, along with 20 villagers from La Mohammad Kalay, to demand an investigation. “They were sitting at our front door,” recalls Lt. Col. David Abrahams, the battalion’s second in command. During a four-hour meeting with Mudin’s uncle, Abrahams was informed that several children in the village had seen Mudin killed by soldiers from 3rd Platoon. The battalion chief ordered the soldiers to be reinterviewed, but Abrahams found “no inconsistencies in their story,” and the matter was dropped. “It was cut and dry to us at the time,” Abrahams recalls.
Other officers were also in a position to question the murders. Neither 3rd Platoon’s commander, Capt. Matthew Quiggle, nor 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay has been held accountable for their unit’s actions, despite their repeated failure to report killings that they had ample reason to regard as suspicious. In fact, supervising the murderous platoon, or even having knowledge of the crimes, seems to have been no impediment to career advancement. Ligsay has actually been promoted to captain, and a sergeant who joined the platoon in April became a team leader even though he “found out about the murders from the beginning,” according to a soldier who cooperated with the Army investigation.
Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.
In many of the photos it is unclear whether the bodies are civilians or Taliban, and it is possible that the unidentified deaths involved no illegal acts by U.S. soldiers. But it is a violation of Army standards to take such photos of the dead, let alone share them with others. Among the soldiers, the collection was treated like a war memento. It was passed from man to man on thumb drives and hard drives, the gruesome images of corpses and war atrocities filed alongside clips of TV shows, UFC fights and films such as Iron Man 2. One soldier kept a complete set, which he made available to anyone who asked.
The collection also includes several videos shot by U.S. troops. In a jumpy, 30-minute clip titled “Motorcycle Kill,” soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the Stryker Brigade gun down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. One of the most chilling files shows two Afghans suspected of planting an IED being blown up in an airstrike. Shot through thermal imaging, the grainy footage has been edited into a music video, complete with a rock soundtrack and a title card that reads ‘death zone.’
Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos – an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.
By suppressing the photos, however, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In one image, two dead Afghans have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road. A sign – handwritten on cardboard from a discarded box of rations – hangs around their necks. It reads “Taliban are Dead.” The Pentagon says it is investigating the photos, but insists that there is little more investigators can do to identify the men. “It’s a mystery,” says a Pentagon spokesman. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure they know where to take it next. All we have is two apparently dead Afghans handcuffed to each other against a mile marker. We don’t know much beyond that. For all we know, those two guys may have been killed by the Taliban for being sympathizers.”
But such statements suggest that the Pentagon isn’t following every lead. A Stryker vehicle in the photos, for example, bears identifying marks that are clearly visible in the image. And according to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity, the two unarmed men in the photos were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which has not yet been implicated in the scandal.
“Those were some innocent farmers that got killed,” the source says. “Their standard operating procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the highway.”
Army prosecutors insist that blame for the killings rests with a soldier near the bottom of the Stryker Brigade’s totem pole: Calvin Gibbs, a three-tour veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan who served as a squad leader in 3rd Platoon. Morlock and five soldiers charged with lesser crimes have pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against Gibbs, who faces life in prison for three counts of premeditated murder.
The 26-year-old staff sergeant has been widely portrayed as a sociopath of Mansonesque proportions, a crazed killer with a “pure hatred for all Afghans” who was detested and feared by those around him. But the portrait omits evidence that the Army’s own investigators gathered from soldiers in Bravo Company. “Gibbs is very well-liked in the platoon by his seniors, peers and subordinates alike,” Spc. Adam Kelly reported, adding that Gibbs was “one of the best NCOs I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with in my military career. I believe that because of his experience, more people came back alive and uninjured than would have without him having been part of the platoon.” Another soldier described Gibbs as an “upbeat guy, very funny. He was one of those guys you could talk to about anything and he would make you feel better about the situation.”
At six-feet-four and 220 pounds, Gibbs could certainly intimidate those around him. Growing up in a devout Mormon family in Billings, Montana, he had dropped out of high school to get an equivalency degree and enlist in the Army. He plunged into soldiering, accumulating a slew of medals in Iraq, where the line between legitimate self-defense and civilian deaths was often blurry at best. In 2004, Gibbs and other soldiers allegedly fired on an unarmed Iraqi family near Kirkuk, killing two adults and a child. The incident, which was not prosecuted at the time, is now under investigation by the Army.
Before he joined Bravo Company in November 2009, Gibbs worked on the personal security detail for one of the top commanders in Afghanistan, a controversial, outspoken colonel named Harry Tunnell. Tunnell, who at the time was the commander of 5th Stryker Brigade, openly mocked the military’s approach to counterinsurgency – which emphasizes the need to win the support of local civilians – as better suited to a “social scientist.” “Political correctness dictates that we cannot talk about the oppressive measures employed during successful counterinsurgency campaigns,” he wrote. Tunnell also pushed his men to go after “guerrilla hunter killers,” insisting that the enemy “must be attacked relentlessly.”
When Gibbs left Tunnell’s detail and arrived at the front, he quickly became an extreme version of a relentless attacker. After he took command, Gibbs put a pirate flag on his tent. “Hey, brother,” he told a friend. “Come down to the line and we’ll find someone to kill.” A tattoo on his left shin featured a pair of crossed rifles offset by six skulls. Three of the skulls, colored in red, represented his kills in Iraq. The others, in blue, were from Afghanistan.
By the time Gibbs arrived, morale in the Stryker Brigade had hit rock bottom. Only four months earlier, the unit had been deployed to Afghanistan amid a chorus of optimism about its eight-wheeled armored vehicles, a technological advancement that was supposed to move infantry to the battlefield more quickly and securely, enabling U.S. troops to better strike against the Taliban. By December, however, those hopes had dissolved. The Taliban had forced the Strykers off the roads simply by increasing the size and explosive force of their IEDs, and the brigade had suffered terrible casualties; one battalion had lost more soldiers in action than any since the start of the war. Gibbs, in fact, had been brought in after a squad leader had his legs blown off by an IED.
The soldiers were bored and shellshocked and angry. They had been sent to Afghanistan as part of a new advance guard on a mission to track down the Taliban, but the enemy was nowhere to be found. “To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference between local nationals and combatants,” one soldier later confessed. During the unit’s first six months in Afghanistan, the Taliban evaded almost every patrol that 3rd Platoon sent out. Frustrations ran so high that when the unit came across the body of an insurgent killed by a helicopter gunship in November 2009, one soldier took out a hunting knife and stabbed the corpse. According to another soldier, Gibbs began playing with a pair of scissors near the dead man’s hands. “I wonder if these can cut off a finger?” Gibbs asked.
The Pentagon’s top command, rather than addressing the morale problems, actually held up the brigade as a media-worthy example of progress in the war. The month after the helicopter incident – only four weeks before the killings began – the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, paid a heavily publicized visit to the area. The military’s strategy of counterinsurgency, he reminded members of 5th Stryker Brigade, required them to win hearts and minds by protecting the population. “If we’re killing local civilians,” he cautioned, “we’re going to strategically lose.”
Gibbs had a different idea about how to breathe new life into 3rd Platoon. Not long after he arrived, he explained to his fellow soldiers that they didn’t have to wait passively to be attacked by the enemy’s IEDs. They could strike back by hitting people in towns known to be sympathetic to the Taliban. “Gibbs told everyone about this scenario by pitching it – by saying that all these Afghans were savages, and we had just lost one of our squad leaders because his legs got blown off by an IED,” Morlock recalled. Killing an Afghan – any Afghan – became a way to avenge the loss.
The members of Bravo Company began to talk incessantly about killing Afghans as they went about their daily chores, got stoned or relaxed over a game of Warhammer. One idea, proposed half in jest, was to throw candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shoot the children who came running to pick up the sweets. According to one soldier, they also talked about a second scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.” Another elaborate plan involved waiting for an IED attack, then using the explosion as an excuse to kill civilians. That way, the soldiers reasoned, “you could shoot anyone in the general area and get away with it.”
“We were operating in such bad places and not being able to do anything about it,” Morlock said in a phone interview from the jail at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. “I guess that’s why we started taking things into our own hands.”
After killing the Afghan boy at La Mohammad Kalay, members of 3rd Platoon were jubilant. “They were high-fiving each other about having killed the guy,” one soldier recalled. They put the corpse in a black body bag and stowed it on top of their Stryker for the ride back to FOB Ramrod. No sooner had they arrived at the base than they were recounting the tale to soldiers they barely knew.
A few hours after the shooting, during a routine checkup at the base’s clinic, Holmes and Morlock bragged about having killed an insurgent to Alyssa Reilly, a fair-skinned, blond medic who was popular among the men in the unit. Reilly later paid the soldiers a social visit, and they all sat around playing spades. When it came time for their wager, Morlock and Holmes said they would bet a finger. Then they tossed the finger that Gibbs had sliced from Mudin’s body on the card pile. “I thought it was gross,” Reilly told investigators.
Morlock was particularly eager to volunteer the truth to his fellow soldiers, evidently unconcerned about how they would react to his having murdered an unarmed Afghan. The same evening he shot Mudin, several members of Bravo Company convened in the privacy of a Stryker vehicle for a nightcap of hashish, a common activity among the unit. Hash supplied by Afghan translators was a major part of the daily lives of many soldiers; they smoked up constantly, getting high in their vehicles, their housing units, even porta-potties. Now, in the tanklike interior of the Stryker, surrounded by its mesh of wires and periscopes and thermal-imaging computers, Morlock passed the hash and recounted the killing in detail, even explaining how he had been careful not to leave the grenade’s spoon and pin on the ground, where they might have been used as evidence that a U.S. weapon had been involved in the attack. For the same reason, he’d also been careful to brush away traces of white explosive powder around Mudin’s body.
Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid whom the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. In those days, he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident. Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.
As Morlock bragged about the killing, word of the murder spread back home to families and friends. Soldiers e-mailed photos to their buddies and talked about the killing during visits home. On February 14th, three months before the Army launched its investigation, Spc. Adam Winfield sent a Facebook message to his father, Chris, back in Cape Coral, Florida. A skinny, bookish 21-year-old, Winfield was pissed off at being disciplined by Gibbs. “There are people in my platoon that have gotten away with murder,” he told his father. “Everyone pretty much knows it was staged. . . . They all don’t care.” Winfield added that the victim was “some innocent guy about my age, just farming.”
During Facebook chats, Winfield continued to keep his father in the loop. “Adam told me that he heard the group was planning on another murder involving an innocent Afghanistan man,” Chris Winfield, himself a veteran, later told investigators. “They were going to kill him and drop an AK-47 on him to make it look like he was the bad guy.” Alarmed, the elder Winfield called the command center at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and told the sergeant on duty what was going on. But according to Winfield, the sergeant simply shrugged it off, telling him that “stuff like that happens” and that “it would be sorted out when Adam got home.” Tragically, commanders at the base did nothing to follow up on the report.
Back in Afghanistan, Winfield was having second thoughts about reporting the incident. He believed the killings were wrong, but he had finally earned a place in the “circle of trust” erected by Gibbs, who had started off thinking of him as too “weak” to belong to the kill team. Reversing course, he begged his father to stop contacting the Army, saying that he feared for his life. Winfield said Gibbs had warned him that if he told anyone about the murder, he would “go home in a body bag.” His father agreed to keep the matter quiet.
Given the lack of response from their superiors, the soldiers of 3rd Platoon now believed they could kill with impunity – provided they planted “drop weapons” at the scene to frame their victims as enemy combatants. The presence of a weapon virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill, even under the stricter rules of engagement the military had implemented as a key element of counterinsurgency. A drop weapon was the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. And in the chaotic war zone, they were easy to find.
The military keeps close track of the weapons and ammunition it issues to soldiers, carefully documenting every grenade exploded, every magazine expended. So Gibbs made it his business to gather “off the books” weapons through a variety of channels. He got friendly with guys in the Afghan National Police and tried to trade them porn magazines in exchange for rocket-propelled grenades; he cajoled other units to give him munitions; he scrounged for broken and discarded UXO – unexploded ordnance – until he had collected a motley arsenal of random weaponry, old frag grenades, bent RPG tails, duct-taped claymore mines, C-4, mortar rounds. His best find was a working AK-47 with a folding butt stock and two magazines, which he pulled from the wreckage of an Afghan National Police vehicle that had been blown up near the base’s gate. Gibbs placed the AK-47 and the magazines in a metal box in one of the Strykers. Later, a corporal named Emmitt Quintal discovered the gun and wondered what it was doing there. As he recalled, Staff Sgt. David Bram “sat me down and explained to me that it was basically to cover our ass if anything happened.”
Two weeks after the murder of Gul Mudin, something did.
It was the night of January 27th and the platoon was driving along the highway near their forward operating base. Suddenly, through their thermal imaging, they spotted a human heat signature on the side of the road – a potentially suspicious sign, since the Taliban often operate at night, using the cover of darkness to plant IEDs.
The patrol stopped 100 yards away from the man, and a handful of soldiers and an interpreter got out of their vehicles. They could see that the man was crouched down, or curled up like a ball close to the ground. As they approached, the man stood up and held his arms in front of his chest. To the soldiers, the motion was either an indication that he was cold, or that he was hiding a suicide-bomb vest.
Shouting to the man in Pashto, the soldiers illuminated him with intense, high-power spotlights and ordered him to lift up his shirt. But the man began to pace back and forth in the blinding white light, ignoring their calls. “He was acting strange,” recalls a soldier. For several minutes the man shuffled around as the soldiers fired warning shots at him. The bullets skipped around him.
Then – ignoring the warnings – the man began walking toward the troops. “Fire!” someone yelled. Gibbs opened fire, followed by at least five other soldiers. In the course of a few seconds, they expended approximately 40 rounds.
The man’s body lay on the ground. He turned out to be completely unarmed. According to official statements made by several soldiers, he also appears to have been deaf or mentally disabled. Above his beard, a large portion of his skull was missing, blown away by the hail of bullets. Spc. Michael Wagnon collected a piece of the skull and kept it as a trophy.
It was the team’s second killing of an unarmed man in as many weeks, and the second time they violated a body. But rather than investigate the shooting, the platoon’s officers concentrated on trying to justify it. When 1st Lt. Roman Ligsay radioed Capt. Matthew Quiggle, the platoon’s commanding officer, and informed him that the same unit had shot an unarmed Afghan male, the captain was furious. “He strongly believed that we had illegitimately killed a local national,” recalls Quintal.
Quiggle ordered Ligsay to search until they found a weapon. “Lt. Ligsay was pretty freaked out,” Quintal recalls. “He was positive he was going to lose his job.” For the next hour the platoon swept the area with their flashlights looking for weapons, but they couldn’t find anything.
Then Staff Sgt. Bram ordered Quintal to hand him the AK-47 magazine that Gibbs had stowed in the metal box in the Stryker. A private named Justin Stoner passed it down. A few minutes later, a voice called out in the darkness. “Sir!” Bram yelled. “I think I found something.”
Lt. Ligsay walked up and saw the black magazine lying on the ground. He called it in, and the platoon breathed a sigh of relief. The members of the kill team knew it was a drop magazine, but it turned the shooting into a legitimate kill.
“The incident was staged to look like he may have had a weapon,” Stoner told investigators. “Basically, what we did was a desperate search to justify killing this guy. But in reality he was just some old, deaf, retarded guy. We basically executed this man.”
Under the rules of engagement, however, the U.S. military still considers the man responsible for his own death. Because he ignored the platoon’s warnings and moved in their direction, no one has been charged in his killing – even though the Army now knows he was gunned down by soldiers intent on shooting unarmed civilians for sport.
Within a month, according to the Army, Gibbs executed another civilian and planted a weapon on the body. It was during Operation Kodak Moment, a routine mission to photograph and compile a database of the male residents of a village called Kari Kheyl. On February 22nd, the day of the mission, Gibbs hid the AK-47 he had stolen from the Afghan National Police in a black assault pack. As the platoon made its way through the village, he went to the hut of Marach Agha, a man he suspected of belonging to the Taliban, and ordered him outside.
First Gibbs fired the AK-47 into a nearby wall and dropped the weapon at Agha’s feet. Then he shot the man at close range with his M4 rifle. Morlock and Wagnon followed up with a few rounds of their own. With the scene staged to his satisfaction, Gibbs called in a report.
Staff Sgt. Sprague was one of the first to respond. Gibbs claimed that he had turned a corner and spotted the man, who had fired at him with the AK-47, only to have the rifle jam. But when Sprague picked up the Kalashnikov, it seemed to be in perfect operating condition. A short time later, as he walked down a dusty alley in the village, Sprague himself came under attack from small-arms fire. He responded instinctively by squeezing the trigger on the AK-47 – and the gun fired “with no problems at all.”
Sprague reported the discrepancy to Lt. Ligsay. When the body was identified, relatives also reported that Agha was a deeply religious man who would never have taken up arms. He “did not know how to use an AK-47,” they told Ligsay. Once again, however, no action was taken, nor was Gibbs disciplined.
With their commanding officers repeatedly failing to investigate, the kill team was starting to feel invulnerable. To encourage soldiers in other units to target unarmed civilians, Gibbs had given one of the “off the books” grenades he had scrounged to a friend from another battalion, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens. “It showed up in a box on my desk,” recalled Stevens, a senior medic. “When I opened the box, I saw a grenade canister, which had a grenade in it and a dirty green sock.” Figuring the sock was some kind of joke, Stevens threw it away. Later, when he saw Gibbs, he mentioned getting the grenade.
“Did you get the other thing?” Gibbs asked.
“What, the sock?” Stevens said.
“No, what was in the sock,” Gibbs replied.
Inside the sock, Gibbs had placed a severed human finger.
Stevens got the message. On March 10th, as his convoy was driving down Highway 1, the central road connecting Kandahar to the north, Stevens stuck his head out of his Stryker’s open hatch and tossed the grenade. It detonated a few seconds later than he had anticipated, and when it blew, it thudded into the vehicle. Stevens immediately began firing at a nearby compound of huts, yelling at another platoon member to do the same. “Get the fuck up, Morgan!” he screamed. “Let’s go, shoot!”
No casualties were reported from the incident, but it earned Stevens an Army Commendation Medal and a Combat Medical Badge. Stevens later admitted that he had concocted the ambush not only because he wanted to get rid of the illegal grenade but because he “wanted to hook up the guys in the company” with their Combat Infantryman Badges, 14 of which were awarded in the aftermath of the shooting. All of the awards were revoked when the Army learned the attack had been faked.
The assault staged by Stevens suggested a new way to target Afghan civilians. In addition to approaching targets on foot, Gibbs decided to use his Stryker as a shooting platform, affording greater mobility with the protection of armor. In a perverse twist, the vehicle that had proved ineffective at combating the Taliban was about to be turned on the very people it was supposed to defend.
On March 18th, during a maintenance run to Kandahar Airfield, the unit drove past a populated area of the city. According to one soldier, Gibbs opened the hatch of the moving Stryker and tossed out a grenade. As it exploded with a loud bang, shrapnel hit the Stryker. “RPG!” Gibbs shouted. “RPG!” Sgt. Darren Jones, who had discussed faking attacks with Gibbs, opened fire indiscriminately on the local residents, who frantically scrambled to avoid the incoming rounds. Gibbs raised his M4 and laid down fire as well.
There is no way to know how many, if any, casualties resulted from the fusillade. Lt. Ligsay, who was in the same Stryker with Gibbs and Jones, maintains that he mistakenly believed the attack to be genuine and ordered the convoy to keep moving. The platoon did not return to the area to conduct a battle damage assessment, and no charges were ever filed in the incident.
A few weeks later, sometime in late March or early April, members of 3rd Platoon fired on unarmed civilians twice on the same day, indicating a growing sense of their own invincibility. Five soldiers were part of a patrol in a grape field in the Zhari District when they spotted three unarmed men. According to Stevens, Gibbs ordered the soldiers to open fire, even though the men were standing erect and posed no threat. All five soldiers fired their weapons at the men, but they managed to escape unscathed. Gibbs was not pleased. “He mentioned that we needed to work on our accuracy,” Stevens recalled, “because it did not appear that anyone was hurt.”
That same evening, while manning a guard tower overlooking a field in the Zhari District, soldiers from 3rd Platoon were directly told not to shoot at an elderly farmer who had been granted permission to work his land nearby. Despite the warning, two soldiers reportedly shot at the farmer as if he were an armed combatant. They once again failed to hit their target, but the officer in charge was furious. “This farmer has never been a problem,” he later told investigators. “He’s 60 to 70 years old.”
One morning that spring, Gibbs approached Morlock flashing what looked like a small metal pineapple. “Hey, man, I’ve got this Russian grenade,” he said. Gibbs added that the weapon would be the perfect tool to fake another attack, since the Taliban were known to carry Russian explosives. Morlock liked the idea. The night before, talking with a bunch of soldiers outside their bunk rooms, he had announced that he was looking to kill another haji, a pejorative term that U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan use for Muslims. One soldier who took part in the conversation dismissed it as idle talk. “I didn’t really think anything of it,” he told investigators, “because soldiers say stuff like that all the time.”
The morning of May 2nd, the platoon was on a routine patrol in a village called Qualaday, a few miles from base. Following standard procedure, the unit’s leaders entered a house to talk with a man who had previously been arrested for having an IED. That inadvertently left the rest of the platoon free to roam the village looking for targets, without having to worry about an officer’s supervision.
Outside the house, Morlock was overheard instructing Winfield in how a grenade explodes, cautioning him to remain on the ground during the blast. Then the two soldiers moved off with Gibbs. Nearby, in a compound filled with children, they picked out a man with a white beard and escorted him outside. “He seemed friendly,” Winfield recalled. “He didn’t seem to have any sort of animosity toward us.”
Gibbs turned to his men. “You guys want to wax this guy or what?” he asked. Morlock and Winfield agreed that the man seemed perfect.
Gibbs walked the Afghan to a nearby ditch and forced him to his knees, ordering him to stay that way. Then he positioned Morlock and Winfield in a prone position behind a small berm no more than 10 feet away. “To be honest,” Morlock later told investigators, “me and Winfield thought we were going to frag ourselves, ’cause we were so fucking close.”
With everyone in position, Gibbs took cover behind a low wall and chucked a grenade toward the Afghan. “All right, dude, wax this guy!” he shouted. “Kill this guy, kill this guy!”
As the grenade went off, Morlock and Winfield opened fire. Morlock got off several rounds with his M4. Winfield, who was armed with the more powerful SAW machine gun, squeezed off a burst that lasted for three to five seconds.
Gibbs shouted for Morlock to proceed with the next stage of the plan. “Get up there and plant that fucking grenade!”
The man lay where he had fallen. One of his feet had been blown off by the blast; his other leg was missing below the knee. Morlock ran up and dropped the Russian pineapple grenade near the dead man’s hand. Gibbs walked up to the body, stood directly over it, and fired twice into the man’s head, shattering the jaw.
Later, when the scene had calmed down – after soldiers had pushed away the dead man’s wife and children, who were screaming, hysterical with grief, and Morlock had spun the story to the higher-ups – Gibbs took out a pair of medical shears and cut off the corpse’s left pinky finger, which he kept for himself. Then, wearing a surgical glove, he reached into the dead man’s mouth, pulled out a tooth and handed it to Winfield.
Winfield held the tooth for a while. Then he tossed it aside, leaving it behind on the ground at Qualaday.
This time, though, the villagers refused to be placated. The dead man, it turned out, was a peaceful cleric named Mullah Allah Dad. Two days later, the murder provoked an uproar at a districtwide council attended by Capt. Quiggle, the unit’s commanding officer. The district leader launched into a blistering attack of the platoon. “He pretty much told us that we planted the grenade in order to shoot the guy,” recalled 1st Lt. Stefan Moye, who escorted Quiggle to the meeting.
But the next day, instead of launching an inquiry into the platoon’s behavior, Quiggle dispatched Moye to the scene of the shooting to do damage control. With Gibbs hovering nearby, the lieutenant found two elderly villagers who claimed to have seen Mullah Allah Dad with a grenade. Relieved, Moye urged them to spread the word. “This is the type of stuff that the Taliban likes to use against us and try to recruit people to fight against us,” he said.
His mission accomplished, Moye left the village feeling that the platoon could return to its usual rhythms. “After that,” he said, “everything was normal.”
Things might have remained “normal,” and the killings might have continued, if it hadn’t been for what began as a trivial spat between bunkmates. Around midnight, the same evening that Moye returned from pacifying village elders, Pfc. Stoner walked into the company’s tactical operations center to register a complaint. Stoner, who had helped plant the AK-47 magazine on the civilian murdered by the highway, said he was sick and tired of other soldiers in the unit using his room as “a smoke shack for hash.” Worried that the lingering odor would get him busted, he had asked them to find another place to get stoned. They had refused, pausing only to remove the battery from the room’s smoke detector.
“They baked the room many times until it stank constantly,” Stoner said. “I was worried for my own job.” Emphasizing that he wasn’t a snitch, Stoner told the sergeant on duty that he didn’t want to get his fellow soldiers in trouble. Then, growing emotional, he mentioned that “he and a bunch of other guys had executed a local national out on Highway 1.” The sergeant didn’t take the story seriously enough to report it up the chain of command. “I thought he was just upset and needed to talk to someone about the incident,” he later recalled. Instead of alerting his superiors about the murder allegation, the sergeant simply assured Stoner that the matter of hash smoking in his room would be handled quietly, and that his identity would be kept confidential.
But discretion wasn’t exactly the unit’s strong suit. By the next day, everyone knew that Stoner had ratted them out. “Everyone began to panic,” Quintal recalls. Gibbs, who didn’t care for hashish, gathered members of the kill team in his room. “We need to address the situation with Stoner,” he reportedly said. “Snitches get stitches.”
On May 6th, Gibbs and six other soldiers descended on Stoner’s room, locking the door behind them, and attacked Stoner while he was sitting on his bed. Grabbing him by the throat, they dragged him to the floor and piled on, striking him hard but taking care to avoid blows to the face that might leave visible bruises. “I’ve been in the Army four years,” Morlock said as he pummeled Stoner in the stomach. “How could you do this to me?” Before leaving, they struck Stoner in the crotch and spit in his face.
A few hours later, Gibbs and Morlock returned to Stoner’s room. As Stoner sat on his bed, still dazed from the assault, Morlock explained that the beating would not happen again, so long as Stoner kept his mouth shut “from fucking now on.” If Stoner were disloyal again, Gibbs warned, he would be killed the next time he went out on patrol. “It’s too easy,” he added, explaining that he could hide Stoner’s body in a Hesco barrier, one of the temporary structures used to fortify U.S. positions.
Then Gibbs reached into his pocket and took out a bit of cloth. Unfolding it, he tossed two severed fingers on the floor, with bits of skin still hanging off the bone. If Stoner didn’t want to end up like “that guy,” Morlock said, he better “shut the hell up.” After all, he added, he “already had enough practice” at killing people.
Stoner had no doubt that Morlock would follow through on the threat. “Basically, I do believe that Morlock would kill me if he had the chance,” he said later.
But the beating proved to be the kill team’s undoing. When a physician’s assistant examined Stoner the next day, she saw the angry red welts covering his body. She also saw the large tattoo across Stoner’s back. In gothic type, beneath a grinning red skull flanked by two grim reapers, it read:
what if im not the hero
what if im the bad guy
Stoner was sent to talk to Army investigators. In the course of recounting the assault, he described how Gibbs had thrown the severed fingers on the floor. The investigators pressed him about how Gibbs came by the fingers. Stoner told them it was because the platoon had killed a lot of innocent people.
At that point, the investigators asked Stoner to start from the beginning. When had the platoon killed innocent people? Bit by bit, Stoner laid out the whole history, naming names and places and times.
As other members of the platoon were called in and interviewed, many confirmed Stoner’s account and described the shootings for investigators. Morlock, who proved particularly gregarious, agreed to speak on videotape. Relaxed and unconcerned in front of the camera, he nonchalantly described the kills in detail.
Morlock’s confession kicked off an intense search for evidence. When the Army’s investigators were dispatched to FOB Ramrod, they went straight to the top of a Hesco barrier near Gibbs’ housing unit. Right where Morlock said it would be, they found the bottom of a plastic water bottle containing two pieces of cloth. Inside each piece of cloth was a severed human finger. But then a strange thing happened. When investigators compared prints of the two fingers to those in the company’s database, the prints didn’t match up. Either the records were screwed up, which was quite possible, or there were more dead guys out there who were unaccounted for.
Last week, on March 23rd, Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. “The Army wants Gibbs,” says one defense lawyer. “They want to throw him in jail and move on.” Gibbs insists that all three killings he took part in were “legitimate combat engagements.” Three other low-level soldiers facing murder charges – Winfield, Holmes and Wagnon – also maintain their innocence. As for the other men in Bravo Company, five have already been convicted of lesser crimes, including drug use, stabbing a corpse and beating up Stoner, and two more face related charges. In December, Staff Sgt. Stevens was sentenced to nine months in prison after agreeing to testify against Gibbs. He was stripped to the lowest service rank – private E-1 – but over the protests of military prosecutors, he was allowed to remain in the Army.
So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret – and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit. Indeed, the resentment of Afghans was so commonplace among soldiers in the platoon that when Morlock found himself being questioned by Army investigators, he expressed no pity or remorse about the murders.
Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur. “None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.
Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan. “Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ‘em.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-kill-team-20110327
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The Man Who Poisoned Us All
The Case Against Charles Kettering
By HUGH IGLARSH
CounterPunch.org
March 25 – 27, 2011
Is the jury seated? Let’s begin the trial.
The (spectral) gentleman in the dock tonight is named Kettering – Charles Franklin Kettering, rather tellingly called “Boss” for short by his associates during his lifetime. Born in 1876 on a small farm in Loudonville, Ohio, Kettering would grow up to become one of America’s most famous engineers. His pinched visage graced the cover of Time magazine in 1933, and he was mentioned in the same breath as Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison. He was the “Wizard of General Motors” – an inventor extraordinaire who became a vice president of the world’s largest manufacturing concern, and a culturally comforting transitional figure between the lone-wolf inventor-industrialists of the 19th century and the corporate research bureaucrats of the 20th. At his death in 1958, he left a charitable estate valued at $200 million – an unheard-of sum at that time, accumulated through methods to be touched on here.
His reputation has since faded to the burnished afterglow of all great fortunes. If Kettering is remembered at all by most Americans, it is as one-half of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, famous – ironically, as we shall see – for cancer research, and as namesake of the Kettering Foundation, which was initiated “to sponsor and carry out scientific research for the benefit of humanity.” Now, according to the foundation’s Web site, its scope has changed and broadened: “The primary question addressed by its research today is, ‘What does it take to make democracy work as it should?’” Seen in light of the Boss’s career, this mission statement, too, is not without a certain irony.
Kettering has joined the pantheon of good, gray philanthropists, his name adorning lecture halls and laboratories in New York City, Cincinnati and Oberlin, Ohio, and possibly elsewhere. There is even a Kettering University in Flint, Michigan – the name given GM’s research institute. His adoring biographer, Stuart Leslie, himself an engineer, says that Kettering “embodied the best aspirations of his own generation” and “as much as any man … helped shape the future in which we live out our lives.” Most of all, says Leslie, Kettering “made corporate bureaucracy work for him … Within the largest private organization of his time he fashioned a managerial role that proved technological entrepreneurship could flourish, and one man could still make a difference.”
Here I agree with the hero-worshiping biography. Boss Kettering has certainly made a difference in all of our lives. First of all, there are his automotive innovations, including his ignition systems, his electric self-starter that made drivers out of women; his four-wheel brakes, his ingenious crankcase ventilators and vibration dampers. All of these helped change America from a land of towns, villages and neighborhoods into a shopping-mall, fast-food, subdivision nation with as many cars as citizens, and as many parking lots as pastures.
More intimately, Kettering put his mark on our blood and bones, and within our cell structures and genetic material. I am referring to the burden of lead we all carry within ourselves, in quantities many times the natural background level. Kettering was the driving force, so to speak, behind the introduction of tetra-ethyl lead, or TEL, as a gasoline additive. Thanks to his work with TEL, there are an estimated 5 million tons of toxic lead in the soil near busy roads and highways. During the era of leaded gasoline, which lasted roughly from the mid-1920s to the mid-1980s, busy urban intersections absorbed no less than four or five tons of particulate lead per year from tailpipe emissions. As environmental toxicologist Howard Mielke notes, “That’s roughly equivalent to having a lead smelter at every major intersection in the United States. As a result, there is a very, very large reservoir of lead in soil.” Mielke is quoted in Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber’s fine book, “Trust Us, We’re Experts!,” which contains the story of TEL in abbreviated form. According to Rampton and Stauber, “In cities where there has been a high density of traffic, adults have blood-lead levels of about 20 to 25 micrograms per deciliter – roughly half the level at which lead exposure leads to impairment of peripheral nerves. No other toxic chemical has accumulated in humans to average levels that are this close to the threshold for overt chemical poisoning.”
Kettering also left his poisonous mark on our culture and institutions. As the point man in GM’s fight to use TEL to improve combustion, Kettering subverted the regulatory process supposedly in place to protect public health. He pioneered the tactic of creating and funding pseudo-non-profit organizations specifically designed to counter genuine medical research with profit-centered junk science. His PR campaign was disastrously effective: He and his friends at DuPont and Standard Oil won over regulators and public opinion alike to the idea that mechanical efficiency and capitalist expansion outweighed all considerations of environmental safety and biological integrity.
In the process, Kettering corrupted the supposedly humanist enterprises of science and philanthropy. The Kettering Foundation and Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology, children of Kettering’s wealth as GM’s largest single stockholder, served to bolster the values, monetary and otherwise, of the shares on which they were based. For decades, these puppet research institutions gave institutional credibility to the dangerously false idea that “low-level” lead exposures could be processed and eliminated by our systems, and hence posed no chronic health danger. His foundations functioned as factories for obfuscation and profit-protection, grinding out bogus reassurance the way GM plants mass-produced cars. They also worked tirelessly to manufacture an image of Kettering as a visionary benefactor of humanity, lionizing a man whose business decisions reflect a fanatical devotion to private wealth over public weal.
These foundations’ spiritual heirs remain with us. While Kettering’s name is honored as long as the endowment money flows, the anti-life forces have found an enemy to drag down: Rachel Carson, author of “Silent Spring” and the mother of`modern environmentalism. Carson’s attack on DDT, they claim, has led to its disuse in the Third World and to a consequent resurgence of mosquito-borne malaria. This claim is false, according to those scientists who are not in the pay of the insecticide industry. The real problem, they say, is that many years of over-spraying have created a race of super-skeeters, resistant not only to the universally toxic, spring-silencing DDT, but also to other, less apocalyptic pesticides. It’s a classic adaptation, just as Darwin would have predicted. But these people are more at home with social Darwinism, the imagined right of the rich to profit off the rest, and to do what they will to the planetary commons. The well-funded campaign to defame Rachel Carson, begun during her lifetime, captures the attention of the mainstream media. Yet Kettering – who introduced not only leaded gasoline, but also the ozone-destroying refrigerant Freon – is untouchable, his reputation secured within the ideological gated community inhabited by the very, very rich.
The accusations are as follows: Through the alchemy of corporate capitalism, Kettering turned base lead into golden wealth and power. He used science against humanity. He feathered his nest by poisoning his fellow man. He helped turn America into what it is now: a place where machines and banks and corporations thrive, and ordinary, non-shareholding human beings do not. Thanks to Charles Franklin Kettering and his henchmen, we now live in what could be called the Age of Lead – not only in terms of blood chemistry and soil contamination, but also of regard for truth and basic values.
The Scope of the Crime, and the Weapon
Lead is pure poison. It has no value or place within the human body, and its use invariably leads to disaster downstream. Lead is also a commodity and its mining and production major industries. Hence, the propagators of lead exert an invisible and orchestrated power that its less organized victims – that is, us – cannot match.
Lead is a soft, bluish-gray metal, common and easily worked. It is an element and so does not degrade: once present, it remains with us forever. Doctors have recognized lead as a toxin since at least the 4th century BC, when Hippocrates discussed lead workers’ susceptibility to colic and the Greek physician Dioscorides noticed that the metal makes “the mind give way.” According to writer Devin Ceartas, lead is particularly deadly because its molecular form is similar to minerals that do play important biochemical roles – specifically, calcium, zinc and iron. Lead ions supplant these other substances within our nervous system and elsewhere, but then behave very differently, disrupting the complex chemistry of the neurotransmitters that carry signals between nerve cells.
Lead alters enzymes, with dire effects on growth and metabolism. It interferes with the RNA processes that make proteins, which in turn affects our brain and kidney functioning. It attacks our mitochondria, our cellular powerhouses, and interferes with the processing of vital nutrients, such as vitamin D. Because our body mistakes lead for calcium, we accumulate the metal in our bones and teeth, which may be released much later, due to stress, disease or menopausal changes. Some researchers think that many of the traits associated with old age in our society are not “natural,” but instead reflect a lifetime’s gradual absorption of lead, which is linked to brain shrinkage and development of abnormal brain tissue.
A recent, large-scale government study found that blood-lead levels of 5 to 9 micrograms/deciliter – that is, under the 10 microgram level declared “safe” for women of childbearing age by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – are in fact not safe at all. Adults in this range were two-and-a-half times as likely to die of stroke and almost twice as likely to die of heart attack as those with very low blood-lead levels. The researchers believe this may be due to the fact that lead impairs the kidneys’ ability to filter blood, and alters the hormonal chemistry that maintains our veins and arteries. By now, the evidence is clear that there is no safe blood-lead level – yet OSHA regulations deem blood-lead levels of up to 40 micrograms per deciliter to be acceptable for adults.
It is children who are most vulnerable to lead. Fetal exposure is extremely damaging, as lead crosses the placental barrier. And when infants and children are exposed even to minute quantities of the metal, their neural pathways fail to form normally, leading to everything from decreased verbal and reasoning ability to memory loss to heightened impulsiveness and behavioral problems. The symptoms of acute and chronic lead insult for children are numerous and varied: Headaches, irritability, anemia, short attention span, learning difficulties, hyperactivity, delayed development, weight loss and kidney disease are just some of the conditions associated with lead exposure. Poor children are at greatest risk, due to the problem of lead paint dust in older buildings and the fact that lead absorption is facilitated by iron and calcium deficiency, high-fat diets and empty stomachs.
As lead in a child’s blood rises, IQ drops. If the lead level goes up from less than 1 microgram per deciliter to 10 micrograms, IQ goes down an average of 7 points – and keeps on dropping as lead levels increase. A 1991 study showed that a remarkable 88 percent of American children under the age of 6 had lead levels high enough to stunt their mental and physical development. Even now, 20 years after the not-quite-total banning of leaded gasoline, 26 percent of all children in the U.S. – and about half of black children – have lead levels ranging from 5 to 10 micrograms per deciliter.
Lead is the enemy of intelligence and the friend of mayhem. Economist Rick Nevin’s work reveals a surprisingly close connection between lead poisoning and violence. According to Nevin, “65 to 90 percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in nine countries was explained by lead.” The crime rate in each of these countries closely tracks lead exposure levels of 20 years earlier. Studies show a link between lead and aggression: In 2001, researchers Paul Stretesky and Michael Lynch showed that counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low levels, after correcting for other factors. In 2002, well-known lead researcher Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh showed that youths arrested in that city had four times the lead levels of a control group. According to Nevin, “Lead decreases the ability to tell yourself, ‘If I do this, I will go to jail.’ ”
Despite lead’s manifold dangers to the young, toys from China – including the popular “Thomas and Friends” toy trains – were recalled in large numbers because of lead paint. Something is wrong with this picture: the message of lead toxicity has not gotten through. Lead’s champions – and Kettering was the worst – must be shown for what they are. They are mass poisoners, treating the lives and well-being of others with sociopathic indifference.
Leaded fuel is still a huge problem, especially in the Third World. In 1996, over 90 percent of the gasoline sold in Africa and the Middle East contained lead. Consequently, according to the World Bank, 1.7 billion city dwellers in the developing world are endangered by airborne lead. As the number of cars grows in places like China, the problem will worsen dramatically. But as an executive of England’s Octel Company, one of the world’s largest producers of TEL, said to a Nation magazine writer: “There’s no proven health effect [of banning leaded gas], so there’s no need to do it precipitously. … Because if you replaced lead with other components of petrol, then there’s a risk from anything. … Petrol itself is a risk without lead.”
And in our country, municipal waste incinerators continue to spit out masses of lead ash – and even so-called “unleaded” gasoline still contains a legally allowed quantity of the element, creating millions of pounds of lead waste each year. Clearly, the spirit of Kettering lives on, and must be confronted. The Age of Lead will not end until we refuse to sacrifice ourselves and our children on the altar of technological “progress.” This process of healthy negation involves identifying the individuals as well as the historical forces that have led us into our predicament.
The Scenes of the Crime: Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, the World
Tetra-ethyl lead was the solution to two problems: First, engine knocking; second, Kettering’s flagging reputation at General Motors. Kettering was the founder of DELCO, the auto parts maker based in Dayton, Ohio, which became the real heart of GM when the corporation was formed in the nineteen-teens by William Durant, Alfred Sloan and Pierre S. DuPont. In 1920, GM named Kettering VP and general manager of the newly created General Motors Research Corporation. That year, he was also placed on GM’s board of directors. He was a power within the company, avidly promoting GM’s grand strategy of planned obsolescence, or what Kettering referred to as “keeping the customer dissatisfied.”
He was also GM’s resident genius, widely liked by the public for his well-rehearsed folksiness, and frequently trotted out for PR purposes, where he enjoyed hearing himself pontificate. Kettering thought of himself as a serious scientist, but Albert Einstein is said to have introduced him once at Princeton as “the auto mechanic” – a comment that stung the image-conscious executive. It encouraged him in his long-term, high-profile hobby of researching photosynthesis at Antioch College, a quest that produced many tax write-offs and few major advances.
But Kettering’s stock within the company declined seriously when his major project of the early ‘20s, the copper-cooled engine – an attempt to outdo Ford in the field of simple, inexpensive automotive engineering – flopped. In June of 1923, he even offered his resignation, which was declined by GM CEO Alfred Sloan. But his vanity and reputation had been injured, and he needed a winner – an idea that would make money for GM and restore his personal luster.
Kettering decided that the area to focus on was fuel, a subject that his Dayton laboratory staff had already been exploring. His goal was to increase the compression ratio of internal combustion engines, thereby improving power and efficiency. However, as engine compression grew, so did engine knock, caused by the non-combustion of less volatile distillates in the gasoline. These knocks could be strong enough to crack pistons. At the time, there were fears of a petroleum shortage, so it became a priority of both auto manufacturers and oil companies to get more use out of each drop of crude oil. Later, when abundant Middle-Eastern petroleum began flooding the market, GM discounted fuel economy as a selling point and instead emphasized higher octane as the key to increased engine performance, acceleration and raw speed.
One solution to the problem was to mix petroleum with alcohol, a natural and safe anti-knock ingredient available in almost unlimited quantities. But the problem here was economic, not technical. Alcohol was easy to make and unpatentable, and so could not create mega-profits for industry. By 1923, it was gasoline-powered internal combustion engines that GM had bet its future on, and it was the oil companies that were GM’s allies. What was needed was a substance that GM could license and control – a magic ingredient that maintained the dominance of petroleum over alcohol. (Kettering’s immense service to the cause of fossil-fuel dependence was recognized late in life when he received a medal from the American Petroleum Institute for “doing more than any other individual to promote petroleum products.”)
After hundreds or thousands of trials, Kettering’s research team discovered the anti-knock properties of tetra-ethyl lead, an obscure compound that worked even at extreme dilutions. It was known to be horrifically poisonous, but this was not necessarily a bad thing for GM, as it meant that the new additive could be produced in quantity only by industry, not by individuals. DuPont chemists quickly began synthesizing it – soon to be joined by Standard Oil of New Jersey – and Kettering was named president of the General Motors Chemical Company.
Health problems emerged immediately. Thomas Midgely and Carroll Hochwalt, Kettering’s chief assistants on the anti-knock project, suffered symptoms of lead poisoning in early 1923. By June 1924, two men at the Dayton blending plant were dead and 60 had suffered serious health effects.
Then the lead really hit the fan. An accident at Standard Oil’s TEL blending plant in Bayway, New Jersey, killed 10 workers outright (some sources say five) and sent about 50 others to the hospital, some in straitjackets. DuPont’s Deepwater, New Jersey plant, another TEL blending facility, soon became known as the “House of Butterflies” because of what people who worked there any length of time began seeing everywhere. In two years, the Deepwater plant experienced at least 300 cases of lead poisoning – in fact, 80 percent of the DuPont workers who handled TEL were affected. For the most part, they were the victims not of massive, sudden exposures, but of a slow accumulation of the poisonous substance over months. The New Jersey plant workers began to refer to TEL simply as “loony gas.”
Kettering could hardly have been unaware of TEL’s risks, when his own people were dropping like flies around him. Yet when TEL production was suspended after the Bayway disaster, he acted as though the whole thing were some kind of communist plot. According to accounts, “the Boss just glowered and sped down the road to Detroit, muttering about government interference and public ignorance.”
The Conspiracy
Here we come to the heart of the case. For it was in the spring of 1925, after the widely publicized New Jersey blending plant disasters, that the issue of TEL was debated by industry, public health experts and government officials, with the famous Boss Kettering as chief spokesman for the cause of leaded gasoline.
According to Leslie’s biography, Kettering’s stump speech on the topic involved warning his audience that “an innovation crucial to the economy and military must not be halted by public hysteria, especially since the health hazards were as yet unsubstantiated. Health risks were simply an inevitable part of progress. … Unless Americans were unwilling to forgo the car, which Kettering thought inconceivable, gasoline extenders like TEL would have to be tolerated.” There is no indication in his biography that Kettering wavered for one moment in his advocacy of lead, even after the casualties started mounting.
The Surgeon General convened a parley in May 1925 to hash out the question. On one side were the industrial hygiene people, an impressive group that included Yandell Henderson of Yale University, who stated that “leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold … before the public and the government awaken to the situation.” He argued the precautionary principle: that it was up to industry to prove that coating American roads and cities with lead powder was not the bad idea that it sounded like. On the other side were Kettering and his supporters, contending that, in the words of one Standard Oil executive, “Leaded gasoline is a gift of God … Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up? It must not be fears, but facts that we are guided by.”
Here we meet a significant co-conspirator – Robert Kehoe, director of the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology in Cincinnati. Kehoe, who also served as Ethyl Gasoline Corporation’s Medical Director, gained a reputation as one of the nation’s greatest experts on occupational safety, especially regarding the chemical business. This was due in part to his in-depth investigation of the hideous experiments done by Nazi doctors on slave laborers during World War II, which is detailed in the eye-opening book, “The Secret History of the War on Cancer,” by Devra Davis.
Kehoe’s contribution to the TEL debate was a “scientific” examination of about 20 garage mechanics and drivers exposed to TEL. Kehoe found no evidence of lead contamination among them, and decided that better factory safety precautions within the blending plants were the answer to TEL’s dangers. It was a couple of weeks later that the Bayway works accident occurred. Nevertheless, Kehoe’s opinions about lead – that is, the views of an employee of Ethyl Gasoline – would be influential for decades to come, and still are in some quarters. He claimed to believe that lead occurred naturally in the human body, and at “low levels” was not toxic. He even asserted that lead was an essential micromineral – i.e., lead was good for you! It was a Big Lie strategy, which was not unpopular with the employers and corporate funders of the interest-conflicted Kehoe.
Kehoe’s solution to the controversy was marvelously simple, practical and inexpensive: hip boots, to prevent absorption through the skin. If blending plant workers just dressed and behaved properly, and stopped goofing off, there would be no more of that unseemly toppling over, followed by delirium or death, which occurred with such frequency in the blending factories. The only problem with this suggestion is that it is based on utterly false assumptions. Someone should have checked Kehoe’s exposure to “loony gas” when he declared that high lead levels were quite normal and no threat to an otherwise healthy organism. In fact, lead absorption is a byproduct of industrial products and processes. People living in the Himalayas have lead levels close to zero. But Kehoe didn’t use Nepalese villagers as his baseline – he used American factory workers, who were already saturated with workplace lead compounds.
Based on Kehoe’s work, and dubious, small-sampled animal research that was conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Mines and actually funded by GM, a committee appointed by the Surgeon General found “no good grounds” for banning sale of leaded gasoline. The committee reported that all injuries linked to TEL had occurred during either the manufacturing or blending process, and that apparently no motorist or pedestrian had died as of yet. This was technically true, if not exactly reassuring.
The report did note that more research was necessary regarding long-term effects of chronic, low-level exposures, and called for the Public Health Service to do further studies. Interestingly, even the industry-supported American Chemical Society and the Society of Automotive Engineers developed cold feet at this moment and seconded the request for additional research. It was these scientists and engineers who had the most experience handling TEL, and the most immediate knowledge of its dangers. But no further studies were paid for or conducted by the government. All future research would be funded by the lead industry itself, through the agency of such safely co-opted figures as Robert Kehoe.
One possible reason why the Public Health Service failed to conduct any more studies is that the Service was under the jurisdiction of the Dept. of the Treasury. The Secretary of the Treasury at that time was Andrew Mellon, whose family controlled Gulf Oil. And Gulf Oil was one of the three major oil companies recently given lucrative distribution rights to leaded gasoline by Ethyl Corporation. One must give Kettering credit for one thing: He knew how the game was played.
The Long Cover-up
In May 1926, reports Jamie Lincoln Kitman in his authoritative Nation magazine article, “The Secret History of Lead,” one year after leaded gasoline had been withdrawn from sale, signs appeared in gas stations: “Ethyl is back.” The rest is history. Lead would remain in our gasoline for another 60 years. (It still has one legal use in the USA: as a fuel for prop planes.) Research on lead would continue to be underwritten by the lead industry, and the Bureau of Mines would have a clause in its contract with GM giving the company veto rights over its findings. Those who took on the pro-lead consensus (such as Herbert Needleman) would be savagely attacked by industry shills and captive government regulators. These intrepid souls would face loss of funding and employment by university administrators, who feared having their institutions seen as “unfriendly” to corporate interests and plutocratic foundations, and the research dollars they controlled.
From Kettering’s perspective, Kehoe had earned his money, making possible the future astronomical profits from TEL: three cents from every gallon of leaded gasoline would go directly into the corporate coffers. Within a decade, 80 percent of gasoline sold in the United States would be of the leaded variety, producing an annual gross profit of close to $300 million.
This consideration mattered a great deal to Kettering, who owned 450,000 shares of General Motors common stock, producing annual dividends worth approximately $700,000, in addition to his six-figure annual salary – all astonishing figures in the 1920s. “I was taught that a scientist is a man who works at his subject for the sake of the subject alone, and that a man who works on a scientific project with the idea of selling it has no right to be associated with science,” he said in 1927. “I have since learned that a bank account in the black is the popular applause of a scientific accomplishment.”
Money like this can make a fellow overlook somebody else’s bad luck. Here’s what Kettering had to say about the death of the two workers in the Dayton blending plant, practically in his own backyard: “We could not get this across to the boys. We put watchmen at the plant, and they used to snap the stuff [that is, pure tetra-ethyl lead] at each other, and throw it at each other, and they were saying they were sissies. They did not realize what they were working with.” Kettering admits here that he understood “what they were working with.” But this information about TEL’s profound toxicity was proprietary, and never shared with “the boys” or the larger public.
It is the immense profits derived from a proven carcinogen that fund Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and other Kettering-related philanthropies. And, as detailed in Davis’ history of cancer research, relatively few of those foundation-supported studies look to the environmental causes of cancer – that is, the preventive side of the equation, which would produce much more bang for the buck. Researchers learn early on not to nip the corporate hand that feeds them. Instead, the tendency is to blame the pollutees instead of the polluters, focusing on genetics as well as smoking and other individual misbehaviors, and doing endless and riskless “basic research.”
The eventual phase-out of leaded gasoline happened not primarily because TEL harms people, but because it damages the expensive platinum in catalytic converters, which were installed in cars in the 1970s in response to tougher EPA air quality standards. And Kehoe’s views about lead were finally discredited around the same time, when Prof. Clair Patterson of the California Institute of Technology showed that industrial civilization had raised lead levels within human bones by a factor of at least 100, and within the atmosphere by a factor of 1,000. Ethyl Corp. allegedly offered to endow a research chair at Cal Tech if they fired Patterson, but the damage was done.
Twenty years after the phase-out of leaded gasoline, our blood-lead levels have declined significantly. But bone-lead levels are harder to measure, and it is clear that the consequences of 60 years of massive contamination will be with us for generations. Considering the virulence of the poison, the duration of its effect, the greedy indifference of its makers and the elaborateness of the concealment effort – I contend that Charles Kettering’s development, marketing and promotion of tetra-ethyl lead is nothing less than the worst environmental crime in history. Kettering’s positive reputation 50 years after his death confirms that the conspiracy of silence he initiated regarding lead is still to some extent in force.
Sidebar: Fueling the Fuhrer
Another episode in the dark history of Ethyl Gasoline Corporation should be mentioned, although Kettering plays a less direct role. The story of Ethyl Gasoline, GM, I.G. Farben and Nazi Germany merits its own trial. But here’s a short version, to be taken into account when assessing the historical legacy of Charles Franklin Kettering.
As mentioned earlier, Kettering knew that tetraethyl lead had military as well as civilian applications, allowing combat aircraft to fly faster, higher and farther. For this reason, the militaristic Nazi and Italian fascist regimes sought the formula – and American corporations were quick to cooperate. A consortium of GM, Ethyl Gasoline Corporation and Standard Oil of New Jersey (now Exxon) supplied the German chemical cartel I. G. Farben, which was closely tied to the Nazi Party and the German state, with the secret of producing TEL for aviation fuel, as well as other crucial patents. In 1934, Ethyl Gasoline Corporation actually joined forces with I. G. Farben in creating a new firm, Ethyl Gemeinschaft. Ethyl had similar arrangements in place with the Italian firm Montecatini.
It is literally true, as attested to in captured German documents, that this assistance by American companies, done in defiance of the U.S. War Department, made the Nazis’ fearsome war machine possible. I. G. Farben officials noted that “we received from [the Americans], above and beyond the agreement, many very valuable contributions for the synthesis and improvement of motor fuels and lubricating oils, which just now during the war are most useful to us; and we also received other advantages from them.” It is noteworthy that Ethyl Gasoline gave I. G. Farben and the Nazis the formula for the TEL process not due to any contractual requirement, but essentially as a favor to cement the relationship. The corporations were more than limited business partners; they were allies in a quest for global commercial dominance.
Harry Truman, heading a 1942 Senate committee on war profiteering, said of the Standard-Ethyl-GM-Farben arrangement: “This is treason.” However, for reasons of “morale” and fear of alienating important advertisers, the findings of this and other, similar commissions were not widely publicized by the press. They have since become part of America’s underground history. As for Kettering, while he does not appear to have been directly involved in the negotiations with Farben, he was on the board of directors of both GM and Ethyl Corp. during the period of collusion, and must bear some measure of responsibility. (The words “Hitler,” “I. G. Farben” or “Germany” do not appear in the index to Leslie’s biography of Kettering; this chapter in the life of GM and Ethyl Gasoline has been excised from the official story.)
Let us also briefly consider Kettering’s philanthropic efforts during his lifetime. In the 1930s, his incorporated foundations were investigated by Congress as suspected tax dodges. And while his dollar contributions to higher education may have been liberal, his attitude toward academic tolerance was anything but. Kettering funded a long-term project to study chlorophyll at Antioch College, close to his Ohio roots. Antioch was a haven for left-leaning faculty, a fact that the reactionary, New Deal-hating Kettering could not abide: “I don’t think Antioch has any future unless you lay down what you stand for and quit trying to be all things to all people,” he wrote to the college president. “Michigan has made it absolutely impossible for a known Communist to enter the University of Michigan. Until you people quit playing around with your pink teas, I don’t want anything more to do with you.” Eventually, Kettering’s threat to withdraw support from Antioch helped drive its president to resign.
We see here that Kettering was not above using philanthropy as a bludgeon to advance his own interests and silence competing views. This power to expedite certain directions of inquiry and retard others is the dark side of eleemosynary foundations, and explains much about the state of cancer research and academic timidity in general.
Summing Up
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: You have heard about Charles Franklin Kettering and his connection to the leaded world we live in today. I leave the judgment to you. There’s a limit, obviously, to the punitive possibilities for a man who died a half-century ago, and who went out in style: laid in state at the Engineers’ Club in Dayton, visited by thousands of mourners and carried to his final rest accompanied by a fleet of 40 GM automobiles. Never has it been more truly said: Ask not for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee.
Yet, Kettering’s biographer dubs the final chapter of his book, “The Last Hero.” Kettering still jauntily wears his purchased halo, and I submit it deserves knocking off.
Of course, no fortunes are squeaky clean, but many educated people know that Alfred Nobel’s dynamite contributed to the horrors of the Great War; that Ford was a vicious anti-Semite and an inspiration for Hitler; that Carnegie brutally crushed the union at Homestead, Pennsylvania; that Rockefeller had his coal miners and their families machine-gunned at Ludlow, Colorado. However, very few know of Charles Kettering and his role in filling our bodies and landscape with aerosolized lead. Kettering is not fundamentally different from other donor-capitalists – except that the catastrophe he engineered was an order of magnitude worse, and his role better hidden.
The ancient Greeks and Romans knew that lead was toxic. Benjamin Franklin, a printer by trade, knew that lead was toxic. It took considerable money and effort to make the American public forget this simple fact, and to create the myth of an acceptable dosage. The question isn’t whether Kettering knew what he had wrought; it is whether he cared more about human beings than about engine compression ratios. I believe the answer is no, and I have presented here some evidence to that effect.
Charles Kettering has gone to the great Engineers’ Club in the sky, beyond our ability to punish – but not to scrutinize and judge. He embodied a system that secures profits and endangers people, and then through the magic of public relations transforms atrocities into accomplishments, and ogres into heroes. His inflated reputation today is a product of a foggy, upside-down, manufactured consciousness, which turns ordinary folks against their own most basic rights and interests, and prevents firm opposition and resistance from crystallizing. Kettering’s development of TEL and his denial of its consequences is more than a real-life horror story; it is a paradigm of how the system operates. And that is why his story – and our judgment – still matter.
Hugh Iglarsh is a Chicago-based writer, editor, speaker and movie buff (and is also a member of the Nelson Algren Committee, which will be celebrating the great mid-century novelist’s birthday this March 26; www.nelsonalgren.org). He can be reached at hiiglarsh@hotmail.com.
This essay originated as a presentation at the College of Complexes in Chicago.
http://www.counterpunch.org/iglarsh03252011.html
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CONCLUSIONS OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
02/10/2011
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been called upon to examine the financial and economic crisis that has gripped our country and explain its causes to the American people. We are keenly aware of the significance of our charge, given the economic damage that America has suffered in the wake of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Our task was first to determine what happened and how it happened so that we could understand why it happened. Here we present our conclusions. We encourage the American people to join us in making their own assessments based on the evidence gathered in our inquiry. If we do not learn from history, we are unlikely to fully recover from it. Some on Wall Street and in Washington with a stake in the status quo may be tempted to wipe from memory the events of this crisis, or to suggest that no one could have foreseen or prevented them. This report endeavors to expose the facts, identify responsibility, unravel myths, and help us understand how the crisis could have been avoided. It is an attempt to record history, not to rewrite it, nor allow it to be rewritten.
To help our fellow citizens better understand this crisis and its causes, we also present specific conclusions at the end of chapters in Parts III, IV, and V of this report.
The subject of this report is of no small consequence to this nation. The profound events of 2007 and 2008 were neither bumps in the road nor an accentuated dip in the financial and business cycles we have come to expect in a free market economic system. This was a fundamental disruption—a financial upheaval, if you will—that wreaked havoc in communities and neighborhoods across this country.
As this report goes to print, there are more than 26 million Americans who are out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work. About four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure and another four and a half million have slipped into the foreclosure process or are seriously behind on their mortgage payments. Nearly $11 trillion in household wealth has vanished, with retirement accounts and life savings swept away. Businesses, large and small, have felt the sting of a deep recession. There is much anger about what has transpired, and justifiably so. Many people who abided by all the rules now find themselves out of work and uncertain about their future prospects. The collateral damage of this crisis has been real people and real communities. The impacts of this crisis are likely to be felt for a generation. And the nation faces no easy path to renewed economic strength.
Like so many Americans, we began our exploration with our own views and some preliminary knowledge about how the world’s strongest financial system came to the brink of collapse. Even at the time of our appointment to this independent panel, much had already been written and said about the crisis. Yet all of us have been deeply affected by what we have learned in the course of our inquiry. We have been at various times fascinated, surprised, and even shocked by what we saw, heard, and read. Ours has been a journey of revelation.
Much attention over the past two years has been focused on the decisions by the federal government to provide massive financial assistance to stabilize the financial system and rescue large financial institutions that were deemed too systemically important to fail. Those decisions—and the deep emotions surrounding them—will be debated long into the future. But our mission was to ask and answer this central question: how did it come to pass that in 2008 our nation was forced to choose between two stark and painful alternatives—either risk the total collapse of our financial system and economy or inject trillions of taxpayer dollars into the financial system and an array of companies, as millions of Americans still lost their jobs, their savings, and their homes?
In this report, we detail the events of the crisis. But a simple summary, as we see it, is useful at the outset. While the vulnerabilities that created the potential for crisis were years in the making, it was the collapse of the housing bubble—fueled by low interest rates, easy and available credit, scant regulation, and toxic mortgages—that was the spark that ignited a string of events, which led to a full-blown crisis in the fall of 2008. Trillions of dollars in risky mortgages had become embedded throughout the financial system, as mortgage-related securities were packaged, repackaged, and sold to investors around the world. When the bubble burst, hundreds of billions of dollars in losses in mortgages and mortgage-related securities shook markets as well as financial institutions that had significant exposures to those mortgages and had borrowed heavily against them. This happened not just in the United States but around the world. The losses were magnified by derivatives such as synthetic securities.
The crisis reached seismic proportions in September 2008 with the failure of Lehman Brothers and the impending collapse of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG). Panic fanned by a lack of transparency of the balance sheets of major financial institutions, coupled with a tangle of interconnections among institutions perceived to be “too big to fail,” caused the credit markets to seize up. Trading ground to a halt. The stock market plummeted. The economy plunged into a deep recession.
The financial system we examined bears little resemblance to that of our parents’ generation. The changes in the past three decades alone have been remarkable. The financial markets have become increasingly globalized. Technology has transformed the efficiency, speed, and complexity of financial instruments and transactions. There is broader access to and lower costs of financing than ever before. And the financial
sector itself has become a much more dominant force in our economy.
From 1978 to 2007, the amount of debt held by the financial sector soared from $3 trillion to $36 trillion, more than doubling as a share of gross domestic product. The very nature of many Wall Street firms changed—from relatively staid private partnerships to publicly traded corporations taking greater and more diverse kinds of risks. By 2005, the 10 largest U.S. commercial banks held 55% of the industry’s assets, more than double the level held in 1990. On the eve of the crisis in 2006, financial sector profits constituted 27% of all corporate profits in the United States, up from 15% in 1980. Understanding this transformation has been critical to the Commission’s analysis.
Now to our major findings and conclusions, which are based on the facts contained in this report: they are offered with the hope that lessons may be learned to help avoid future catastrophe.
• We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble. While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.
Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to quell the threats in a timely manner.
The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards. The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not. The record of our examination is replete with evidence of other failures: financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care to examine, or knew to be defective; firms depended on tens of billions of dollars of borrowing that had to be renewed each and every night, secured by subprime mortgage securities; and major firms and investors blindly relied on credit rating agencies as their arbiters of risk. What else could one expect on a highway where there were neither speed limits nor neatly painted lines?
• We conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets. The sentries were not at their posts, in no small part due to the widely accepted faith in the selfcorrecting nature of the markets and the ability of financial institutions to effectively police themselves. More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe. This approach had opened up gaps in oversight of critical areas with trillions of dollars at risk, such as the shadow banking system and over-the-counter derivatives markets. In addition, the government permitted financial firms to pick their preferred regulators in what became a race to the weakest supervisor.
Yet we do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it. To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They did not. In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles, often downgrading them just before their collapse. And where regulators lacked authority, they could have sought it. Too often, they lacked the political will—in a political and ideological environment that constrained it—as well as the fortitude to critically challenge the institutions and the entire system they were entrusted to oversee.
Changes in the regulatory system occurred in many instances as financial markets evolved. But as the report will show, the financial industry itself played a key role in weakening regulatory constraints on institutions, markets, and products. It did not surprise the Commission that an industry of such wealth and power would exert pressure on policy makers and regulators. From 1999 to 2008, the financial sector expended $2.7 billion in reported federal lobbying expenses; individuals and political action committees in the sector made more than $1 billion in campaign contributions. What troubled us was the extent to which the nation was deprived of the necessary strength and independence of the oversight necessary to safeguard financial stability.
• We conclude dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management at many systemically important financial institutions were a key cause of this crisis. There was a view that instincts for self-preservation inside major financial firms would shield them from fatal risk-taking without the need for a steady regulatory hand, which, the firms argued, would stifle innovation. Too many of these institutions acted recklessly, taking on too much risk, with too little capital, and with too much dependence on short-term funding. In many respects, this reflected a fundamental change in these institutions, particularly the large investment banks and bank holding companies, which focused their activities increasingly on risky trading activities that produced hefty profits. They took on enormous exposures in acquiring and supporting subprime lenders and creating, packaging, repackaging, and selling trillions of dollars in mortgage-related securities, including synthetic financial products. Like Icarus, they never feared flying ever closer to the sun.
Many of these institutions grew aggressively through poorly executed acquisition and integration strategies that made effective management more challenging. The CEO of Citigroup told the Commission that a $40 billion position in highly rated mortgage securities would “not in any way have excited my attention,” and the co-head of Citigroup’s investment bank said he spent “a small fraction of 1%” of his time on those securities. In this instance, too big to fail meant too big to manage.
Financial institutions and credit rating agencies embraced mathematical models as reliable predictors of risks, replacing judgment in too many instances. Too often, risk management became risk justification.
Compensation systems—designed in an environment of cheap money, intense competition, and light regulation—too often rewarded the quick deal, the short-term gain—without proper consideration of long-term consequences. Often, those systems encouraged the big bet—where the payoff on the upside could be huge and the downside limited. This was the case up and down the line—from the corporate boardroom to the mortgage broker on the street.
Our examination revealed stunning instances of governance breakdowns and irresponsibility. You will read, among other things, about AIG senior management’s ignorance of the terms and risks of the company’s $79 billion derivatives exposure to mortgage-related securities; Fannie Mae’s quest for bigger market share, profits, and bonuses, which led it to ramp up its exposure to risky loans and securities as the housing market was peaking; and the costly surprise when Merrill Lynch’s top management
realized that the company held $55 billion in “super-senior” and supposedly “super-safe” mortgage-related securities that resulted in billions of dollars in losses.
• We conclude a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack of transparency put the financial system on a collision course with crisis. Clearly, this vulnerability was related to failures of corporate governance and regulation, but it is significant enough by itself to warrant our attention here.
In the years leading up to the crisis, too many financial institutions, as well as too many households, borrowed to the hilt, leaving them vulnerable to financial distress or ruin if the value of their investments declined even modestly. For example, as of 2007, the five major investment banks—Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley—were operating with extraordinarily thin capital. By one measure, their leverage ratios were as high as 40 to 1, meaning for every $40 in assets, there was only $1 in capital to cover losses. Less than a 3% drop in asset values could wipe out a firm. To make matters worse, much of their borrowing was short-term, in the overnight market—meaning the borrowing had to be renewed each and every day. For example, at the end of 2007, Bear Stearns had $11.8 billion in equity and $383.6 billion in liabilities and was borrowing as much as $70 billion in the overnight market. It was the equivalent of a small business with $50,000 in equity borrowing $1.6 million, with $296,750 of that due each and every day. One can’t really ask “What were they thinking?” when it seems that too many of them were thinking alike.
And the leverage was often hidden—in derivatives positions, in off-balance-sheet entities, and through “window dressing” of financial reports available to the investing public.
The kings of leverage were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two behemoth government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). For example, by the end of 2007, Fannie’s and Freddie’s combined leverage ratio, including loans they owned and guaranteed, stood at 75 to 1.
But financial firms were not alone in the borrowing spree: from 2001 to 2007, national mortgage debt almost doubled, and the amount of mortgage debt per household rose more than 63% from $91,500 to $149,500, even while wages were essentially stagnant. When the housing downturn hit, heavily indebted financial firms and families alike were walloped.
The heavy debt taken on by some financial institutions was exacerbated by the risky assets they were acquiring with that debt. As the mortgage and real estate markets churned out riskier and riskier loans and securities, many financial institutions loaded up on them. By the end of 2007, Lehman had amassed $111 billion in commercial and residential real estate holdings and securities, which was almost twice what it held just two years before, and more than four times its total equity. And again, the risk wasn’t being taken on just by the big financial firms, but by families, too. Nearly 1 in 10 mortgage borrowers in 2005 and 2006 took out “option ARM” loans, which meant they could choose to make payments so low that their mortgage balances rose every month.
Within the financial system, the dangers of this debt were magnified because transparency was not required or desired. Massive, short-term borrowing, combined with obligations unseen by others in the market, heightened the chances the system could rapidly unravel. In the early part of the 20th century, we erected a series of protections—the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort, federal deposit insurance, ample regulations—to provide a bulwark against the panics that had regularly plagued America’s banking system in the 19th century. Yet, over the past 30-plus years, we permitted the growth of a shadow banking system—opaque and laden with shortterm debt—that rivaled the size of the traditional banking system. Key components of the market—for example, the multitrillion-dollar repo lending market, off-balance-sheet entities, and the use of over-the-counter derivatives—were hidden from view, without the protections we had constructed to prevent financial meltdowns. We had a 21st-century financial system with 19th-century safeguards.
When the housing and mortgage markets cratered, the lack of transparency, the extraordinary debt loads, the short-term loans, and the risky assets all came home to roost. What resulted was panic. We had reaped what we had sown.
• We conclude the government was ill prepared for the crisis, and its inconsistent response added to the uncertainty and panic in the financial markets. As part of our charge, it was appropriate to review government actions taken in response to the developing crisis, not just those policies or actions that preceded it, to determine if any of those responses contributed to or exacerbated the crisis.
As our report shows, key policy makers—the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—who were best positioned to watch over our markets were ill prepared for the events of 2007 and 2008. Other agencies were also behind the curve. They were hampered because they did not have a clear grasp of the financial system they were charged with overseeing, particularly as it had evolved in the years leading up to the crisis. This was in no small measure due to the lack of transparency in key markets. They thought risk had been diversified when, in fact, it had been concentrated. Time and again, from the spring of 2007 on, policy makers and regulators were caught off guard as the contagion spread, responding on an ad hoc basis with specific programs to put fingers in the dike. There was no comprehensive and strategic plan for containment, because they lacked a full understanding of the risks and interconnections in the financial markets. Some regulators have conceded this error. We had allowed the system to race ahead of our ability to protect it.
While there was some awareness of, or at least a debate about, the housing bubble, the record reflects that senior public officials did not recognize that a bursting of the bubble could threaten the entire financial system. Throughout the summer of 2007, both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson offered public assurances that the turmoil in the subprime mortgage markets would be contained. When Bear Stearns’s hedge funds, which were heavily invested in mortgage-related securities, imploded in June 2007, the Federal Reserve discussed the implications of the collapse. Despite the fact that so many other funds were exposed to the same risks as those hedge funds, the Bear Stearns funds were thought to be “relatively unique.” Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox expressed “comfort about the capital cushions” at the big investment banks. It was not until August 2008, just weeks before the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the Treasury Department understood the full measure of the dire financial conditions of those two institutions. And just a month before Lehman’s collapse, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was still seeking information on the exposures created by Lehman’s more than 900,000 derivatives contracts.
In addition, the government’s inconsistent handling of major financial institutions during the crisis—the decision to rescue Bear Stearns and then to place Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, followed by its decision not to save Lehman Brothers and then to save AIG—increased uncertainty and panic in the market.
In making these observations, we deeply respect and appreciate the efforts made by Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, formerly president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now treasury secretary, and so many others who labored to stabilize our financial system and our economy in the most chaotic and challenging of circumstances.
• We conclude there was a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. The integrity of our financial markets and the public’s trust in those markets are essential to the economic well-being of our nation. The soundness and the sustained prosperity of the financial system and our economy rely on the notions of fair dealing, responsibility, and transparency. In our economy, we expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits, at the same time that they produce products and services of quality and conduct themselves well.
Unfortunately—as has been the case in past speculative booms and busts—we witnessed an erosion of standards of responsibility and ethics that exacerbated the financial crisis. This was not universal, but these breaches stretched from the ground level to the corporate suites. They resulted not only in significant financial consequences but also in damage to the trust of investors, businesses, and the public in the financial system.
For example, our examination found, according to one measure, that the percentage of borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages within just a matter of months after taking a loan nearly doubled from the summer of 2006 to late 2007. This data indicates they likely took out mortgages that they never had the capacity or intention to pay. You will read about mortgage brokers who were paid “yield spread premiums” by lenders to put borrowers into higher-cost loans so they would get bigger fees, often never disclosed to borrowers. The report catalogues the rising incidence of mortgage fraud, which flourished in an environment of collapsing lending standards and lax regulation. The number of suspicious activity reports—reports of possible financial crimes filed by depository banks and their affiliates—related to mortgage fraud grew 20-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then more than doubled again between 2005 and 2009. One study places the losses resulting from fraud on mortgage loans made between 2005 and 2007 at $112 billion.
Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities. As early as September 2004, Countrywide executives recognized that many of the loans they were originating could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Less than a year later, they noted that certain high-risk loans they were making could result not only in foreclosures but also in “financial and reputational catastrophe” for the firm. But they did not stop.
And the report documents that major financial institutions ineffectively sampled loans they were purchasing to package and sell to investors. They knew a significant percentage of the sampled loans did not meet their own underwriting standards or those of the originators. Nonetheless, they sold those securities to investors. The Commission’s review of many prospectuses provided to investors found that this critical information was not disclosed.
THESE CONCLUSIONS must be viewed in the context of human nature and individual and societal responsibility. First, to pin this crisis on mortal flaws like greed and hubris would be simplistic. It was the failure to account for human weakness that is relevant to this crisis.
Second, we clearly believe the crisis was a result of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds that resulted in systemic failures for which our nation has paid dearly. As you read this report, you will see that specific firms and individuals acted irresponsibly. Yet a crisis of this magnitude cannot be the work of a few bad actors, and such was not the case here. At the same time, the breadth of this crisis does not mean that “everyone is at fault”; many firms and individuals did not participate in the excesses that spawned disaster.
We do place special responsibility with the public leaders charged with protecting our financial system, those entrusted to run our regulatory agencies, and the chief executives of companies whose failures drove us to crisis. These individuals sought and accepted positions of significant responsibility and obligation. Tone at the top does matter and, in this instance, we were let down. No one said “no.”
But as a nation, we must also accept responsibility for what we permitted to occur. Collectively, but certainly not unanimously, we acquiesced to or embraced a system, a set of policies and actions, that gave rise to our present predicament.
THIS REPORT DESCRIBES THE EVENTS and the system that propelled our nation toward crisis. The complex machinery of our financial markets has many essential gears—some of which played a critical role as the crisis developed and deepened. Here we render our conclusions about specific components of the system that we believe contributed significantly to the financial meltdown.
• We conclude collapsing mortgage-lending standards and the mortgage securitization pipeline lit and spread the flame of contagion and crisis. When housing prices fell and mortgage borrowers defaulted, the lights began to dim on Wall Street. This report catalogues the corrosion of mortgage-lending standards and the securitization pipeline that transported toxic mortgages from neighborhoods across America to investors around the globe.
Many mortgage lenders set the bar so low that lenders simply took eager borrowers’ qualifications on faith, often with a willful disregard for a borrower’s ability to pay. Nearly one-quarter of all mortgages made in the first half of 2005 were interest-only loans. During the same year, 68% of “option ARM” loans originated by Countrywide and Washington Mutual had low- or no-documentation requirements.
These trends were not secret. As irresponsible lending, including predatory and fraudulent practices, became more prevalent, the Federal Reserve and other regulators and authorities heard warnings from many quarters. Yet the Federal Reserve neglected its mission “to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation’s banking and financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers.” It failed to build the retaining wall before it was too late. And the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, caught up in turf wars, preempted state regulators from reining in abuses.
While many of these mortgages were kept on banks’ books, the bigger money came from global investors who clamored to put their cash into newly created mortgage-related securities. It appeared to financial institutions, investors, and regulators alike that risk had been conquered: the investors held highly rated securities they thought were sure to perform; the banks thought they had taken the riskiest loans off their books; and regulators saw firms making profits and borrowing costs reduced. But each step in the mortgage securitization pipeline depended on the next step to keep demand going. From the speculators who flipped houses to the mortgage brokers who scouted the loans, to the lenders who issued the mortgages, to the financial firms that created the mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDOs squared, and synthetic CDOs: no one in this pipeline of toxic mortgages had enough skin in the game. They all believed they could off-load their risks on a moment’s notice to the next person in line. They were wrong. When borrowers stopped making mortgage payments, the losses—amplified by derivatives—rushed through the pipeline. As it turned out, these losses were concentrated in a set of systemically important financial institutions.
In the end, the system that created millions of mortgages so efficiently has proven to be difficult to unwind. Its complexity has erected barriers to modifying mortgages so families can stay in their homes and has created further uncertainty about the health of the housing market and financial institutions.
• We conclude over-the-counter derivatives contributed significantly to this crisis. The enactment of legislation in 2000 to ban the regulation by both the federal and state governments of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives was a key turning point in the march toward the financial crisis.
From financial firms to corporations, to farmers, and to investors, derivatives have been used to hedge against, or speculate on, changes in prices, rates, or indices or even on events such as the potential defaults on debts. Yet, without any oversight, OTC derivatives rapidly spiraled out of control and out of sight, growing to $673 trillion in notional amount. This report explains the uncontrolled leverage; lack of transparency, capital, and collateral requirements; speculation; interconnections among firms; and concentrations of risk in this market.
OTC derivatives contributed to the crisis in three significant ways. First, one type of derivative—credit default swaps (CDS)—fueled the mortgage securitization pipeline. CDS were sold to investors to protect against the default or decline in value of mortgage-related securities backed by risky loans. Companies sold protection—to the tune of $79 billion, in AIG’s case—to investors in these newfangled mortgage securities, helping to launch and expand the market and, in turn, to further fuel the housing bubble.
Second, CDS were essential to the creation of synthetic CDOs. These synthetic CDOs were merely bets on the performance of real mortgage-related securities. They amplified the losses from the collapse of the housing bubble by allowing multiple bets on the same securities and helped spread them throughout the financial system. Goldman Sachs alone packaged and sold $73 billion in synthetic CDOs from July 1, 2004, to May 31, 2007. Synthetic CDOs created by Goldman referenced more than 3,400 mortgage securities, and 610 of them were referenced at least twice. This is apart from how many times these securities may have been referenced in synthetic CDOs created by other firms.
Finally, when the housing bubble popped and crisis followed, derivatives were in the center of the storm. AIG, which had not been required to put aside capital reserves as a cushion for the protection it was selling, was bailed out when it could not meet its obligations. The government ultimately committed more than $180 billion because of concerns that AIG’s collapse would trigger cascading losses throughout the global financial system. In addition, the existence of millions of derivatives contracts of all types between systemically important financial institutions—unseen and unknown in this unregulated market—added to uncertainty and escalated panic, helping to precipitate government assistance to those institutions.
• We conclude the failures of credit rating agencies were essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction. The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval. Investors relied on them, often blindly. In some cases, they were obligated to use them, or regulatory capital standards were hinged on them. This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies. Their ratings helped the market soar and their downgrades through 2007 and 2008 wreaked havoc across markets and firms.
In our report, you will read about the breakdowns at Moody’s, examined by the Commission as a case study. From 2000 to 2007, Moody’s rated nearly 45,000 mortgage-related securities as triple-A. This compares with six private-sector companies in the United States that carried this coveted rating in early 2010. In 2006 alone, Moody’s put its triple-A stamp of approval on 30 mortgage-related securities every working day. The results were disastrous: 83% of the mortgage securities rated triple-A that year ultimately were downgraded.
You will also read about the forces at work behind the breakdowns at Moody’s, including the flawed computer models, the pressure from financial firms that paid for the ratings, the relentless drive for market share, the lack of resources to do the job despite record profits, and the absence of meaningful public oversight. And you will see that without the active participation of the rating agencies, the market for mortgage-related securities could not have been what it became.
THERE ARE MANY COMPETING VIEWS as to the causes of this crisis. In this regard, the Commission has endeavored to address key questions posed to us. Here we discuss three: capital availability and excess liquidity, the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the GSEs), and government housing policy.
First, as to the matter of excess liquidity: in our report, we outline monetary policies and capital flows during the years leading up to the crisis. Low interest rates, widely available capital, and international investors seeking to put their money in real estate assets in the United States were prerequisites for the creation of a credit bubble. Those conditions created increased risks, which should have been recognized by market participants, policy makers, and regulators. However, it is the Commission’s conclusion that excess liquidity did not need to cause a crisis. It was the failures outlined above—including the failure to effectively rein in excesses in the mortgage and financial markets—that were the principal causes of this crisis. Indeed, the availability of well-priced capital—both foreign and domestic—is an opportunity for economic expansion and growth if encouraged to flow in productive directions.
Second, we examined the role of the GSEs, with Fannie Mae serving as the Commission’s case study in this area. These government-sponsored enterprises had a deeply flawed business model as publicly traded corporations with the implicit backing of and subsidies from the federal government and with a public mission. Their $5 trillion mortgage exposure and market position were significant. In 2005 and 2006, they decided to ramp up their purchase and guarantee of risky mortgages, just as the housing market was peaking. They used their political power for decades to ward off effective regulation and oversight—spending $164 million on lobbying from 1999 to 2008. They suffered from many of the same failures of corporate governance and risk management as the Commission discovered in other financial firms. Through the third quarter of 2010, the Treasury Department had provided $151 billion in financial support to keep them afloat.
We conclude that these two entities contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause. Importantly, GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses that were central to the financial crisis.
The GSEs participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages, but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders in the rush for fool’s gold. They purchased the highest rated non-GSE mortgage-backed securities and their participation in this market added helium to the housing balloon, but their purchases never represented a majority of the market. Those purchases represented 10.5% of non-GSE subprime mortgage-backed securities in 2001, with the share rising to 40% in 2004, and falling back to 28% by 2008. They relaxed their underwriting standards to purchase or guarantee riskier loans and related securities in order to meet stock market analysts’ and investors’ expectations for growth, to regain market share, and to ensure generous compensation for their executives and employees—justifying their activities on the broad and sustained public policy support for homeownership.
The Commission also probed the performance of the loans purchased or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. While they generated substantial losses, delinquency rates for GSE loans were substantially lower than loans securitized by other financial firms. For example, data compiled by the Commission for a subset of borrowers with similar credit scores—scores below 660—show that by the end of 2008, GSE mortgages were far less likely to be seriously delinquent than were non-GSE securitized mortgages: 6.2% versus 28.3%.
We also studied at length how the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) affordable housing goals for the GSEs affected their investment in risky mortgages. Based on the evidence and interviews with dozens of individuals involved in this subject area, we determined these goals only contributed marginally to Fannie’s and Freddie’s participation in those mortgages.
Finally, as to the matter of whether government housing policies were a primary cause of the crisis: for decades, government policy has encouraged homeownership through a set of incentives, assistance programs, and mandates. These policies were put in place and promoted by several administrations and Congresses—indeed, both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush set aggressive goals to increase homeownership.
In conducting our inquiry, we took a careful look at HUD’s affordable housing goals, as noted above, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The CRA was enacted in 1977 to combat “redlining” by banks—the practice of denying credit to individuals and businesses in certain neighborhoods without regard to their creditworthiness. The CRA requires banks and savings and loans to lend, invest, and provide services to the communities from which they take deposits, consistent with bank safety and soundness.
The Commission concludes the CRA was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis. Many subprime lenders were not subject to the CRA. Research indicates only 6% of high-cost loans—a proxy for subprime loans—had any connection to the law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.
Nonetheless, we make the following observation about government housing policies—they failed in this respect: As a nation, we set aggressive homeownership goals with the desire to extend credit to families previously denied access to the financial markets. Yet the government failed to ensure that the philosophy of opportunity was being matched by the practical realities on the ground. Witness again the failure of the Federal Reserve and other regulators to rein in irresponsible lending. Homeownership peaked in the spring of 2004 and then began to decline. From that point on, the talk of opportunity was tragically at odds with the reality of a financial disaster in the making.
WHEN THIS COMMISSION began its work 18 months ago, some imagined that the events of 2008 and their consequences would be well behind us by the time we issued this report. Yet more than two years after the federal government intervened in an unprecedented manner in our financial markets, our country finds itself still grappling with the aftereffects of the calamity. Our financial system is, in many respects, still unchanged from what existed on the eve of the crisis. Indeed, in the wake of the crisis, the U.S. financial sector is now more concentrated than ever in the hands of a few large, systemically significant institutions.
While we have not been charged with making policy recommendations, the very purpose of our report has been to take stock of what happened so we can plot a new course. In our inquiry, we found dramatic breakdowns of corporate governance, profound lapses in regulatory oversight, and near fatal flaws in our financial system. We also found that a series of choices and actions led us toward a catastrophe for which we were ill prepared. These are serious matters that must be addressed and resolved to restore faith in our financial markets, to avoid the next crisis, and to rebuild a system of capital that provides the foundation for a new era of broadly shared prosperity.
The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will happen again.
This report should not be viewed as the end of the nation’s examination of this crisis. There is still much to learn, much to investigate, and much to fix.
This is our collective responsibility. It falls to us to make different choices if we want different results.
http://c0182732.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/fcic_final_report_conclusions.pdf
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The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy
Peter Dale Scott
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
January 2011
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
– Senator Frank Church (1975)
In recent years I have become more and more concerned with the interactions between three important and alarming trends in recent American history. The first is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, even obsession, to involve itself in needless and pernicious wars. The second, closely related, is the progressive shrinking of public politics and the rule of law as they are subordinated, even domestically, to the requirements of covert U.S. operations abroad.
The third, also closely related, is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history and the global extension of American power, of what I have called deep events. These events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.
One factor linking Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all three deep events of personnel involved in America’s highest-level emergency planning, known since the 1980s as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more colloquially as “the Doomsday Project.” The implementation of COG plans on 9/11, or what I call Doomsday Power, was the culmination of three decades of such planning, and has resulted in the permanent militarization of the domestic United States, and the imposition at home of institutions and processes designed for domination abroad.
Writing about these deep events as they occurred over the decades, I have been interested in the interrelations among them. It is now possible to show how each was related both to those preceding it, and those which followed.
I would like in this essay to go further and propose a framework to analyze the on-going forces underlying all of the most important deep events, and how they have contributed to the political ascendance of what used to be called the military-industrial complex. I hope to describe certain impersonal governing laws that determine the socio-dynamics of all large-scale societies (often called empires) that deploy their surplus of power to expand beyond their own borders and force their will on other peoples. This process of expansion generates predictable trends of behavior in the institutions of all such societies, and also in the individuals competing for advancement in those institutions. In America it has converted the military-industrial complex from a threat at the margins of the established civil order, to a pervasive force dominating that order.
With this framework I hope to persuade readers that in some respects our recent history is simpler than it appears on the surface and in the media. Our society, by its very economic successes and consequent expansion, has been breeding impersonal forces both outside and within itself that are changing it from a bottom-up elective democracy into a top-down empire. And among these forces are those that produce deep events.
I am far from alone in seeing this degradation of America’s policies and political processes. A similar pattern, reflecting the degradation of earlier empires, was described at length by the late Chalmers Johnson:
The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.
President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961 warned that “We must guard against the unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex.”
But my analysis goes beyond that of Johnson, Kevin Phillips, Andrew Bacevich, and other analysts, in proposing that three major deep events – Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11 – were not just part of this degradation of American democracy, but played a significant role in shaping it.
As author Michael Lind has observed, there have for a long time been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government. One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain “order.”
To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία).”
Hannah Arendt
Writing amid the protests and riots of the 1960s, Arendt feared that traditional authority was at risk, threatened (in her eyes) by the contemporary “loss of tradition and of religion.” A half century later, I would argue that a far greater danger to social equilibrium comes now from those on the right who invoke authority in the name of tradition and religion. With America’s huge expansion into the enterprise of covertly dominating and exploiting the rest of the world, the open processes of persuasion, which have been America’s traditional ideal for handling domestic affairs, have increasingly tilted towards top-down violence.
This tilt towards violent or repressive power is defended rhetorically as a means to preserve social stability, but in fact it threatens it. As Kevin Phillips and others have demonstrated, empires built on violent or repressive power tend to rise and then fall, often with surprising rapidity. Underlying the discussion in this essay is the thesis that repressive power is unstable, creating dialectical forces both within and outside its system. Externally, repressive power helps create its own enemies, as happened with Britain (in India), France (in Indochina) and the Netherlands (in Indonesia).
The Socio-dynamics of Repressive Power in Large-scale Societies
But more dangerous and destabilizing has been the conversion of those empires themselves, into hubristic mechanisms of war. The fall of Periclean Athens, which inspired Thucydides’ reflections, is a case in point. Thucydides described how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly in the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy. Paul Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Chalmers Johnson have described the recreation of this process in the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires. Its recurrence again in recent American history corroborates that there is a self-propelling dynamic of power that becomes repressive.
It is useful to be reminded of the historical division between two cultures in America, which both underlay and predated the Civil War. But these two cultures have evolved and been reinforced by many factors. For example urbanization in America’s South and West worked for most of the 20th century to meld the two cultures, but after about 1980 the increasing disparity of wealth in America tended to separate them to an extent recalling the Gilded Age of the 19th century.
More importantly, postwar U.S. history has seen the institutions of domestic self-government steadily displaced by an array of new institutions, like the CIA and Pentagon, adapted first to the repressive dominance and control of foreign populations abroad, and now increasingly dominant domestically. The manipulative ethos of this repressive bureaucracy promotes and corrupts those who, in order to be promoted, internalize the culture of repressive dominance into a mindset.
The egalitarian mindset is widely shared among Americans. But Washington today is securely in the hands of the global repressive dominance mindset, and a deepening of the military-industrial complex into what in my most recent book I call the American war machine. This transformation of America represents a major change in our society. When Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex in 1961 it was still a minority element in our political economy. Today it finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960.
That change has been achieved partly by money, but partly as a result of deep events like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, and 9/11. As a rule, each of these deep events is attributed by our government and media to marginal outsiders, like Lee Harvey Oswald, or the nineteen alleged plane hijackers.
I have long been skeptical of these “lone nut” explanations, but recently my skepticism has advanced to another level. My research over four decades points to the conclusion that each of these deep events
1) was carried out, at least in part, by individuals in and out of government who shared and sought to promote this repressive mindset;
2) enhanced the power of the repressive mindset within the U.S. government;
3) formed another stage in a continuous narrative whose result has been a transformation of America, into a social system dominated from above, rather than governed from below.
Please note that I am talking about the result of this continuous narrative, not about its purpose. In saying that these deep events have contributed collectively to a major change in American society, I am not attributing them all to a single manipulative “secret team.” Rather I see them as flowing from the workings of repressive power itself, which (as history has shown many times) transforms both societies with surplus power and also the individuals exercising that surplus power.
We are conditioned to think that the open institutions of American governance could not possibly provide a milieu for plots like 9/11 against public order. But since World War Two covert U.S. agencies like the CIA have helped create an alternative world where power is exercised with minimal oversight, often at odds with public agencies’ proclaimed policy objectives of law and order, and often in conjunction with lawless and even criminal foreign and domestic elements.
The expansion of this covert world has occurred principally in Asia. There covert U.S. decisions were made to build up drug-financed armies in Burma, Thailand, and Laos, in a series of aggressive actions that by the 1960s involved America in a hot Indochina War. This war, like the related wars that ensued later in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was initiated by America for a mix of geostrategic and economic reasons, above all the desire to establish a dominant U.S. presence in an important region of petroleum reserves.
Air America at Sam Thong, Laos, 1961
The country most deeply affected by the succession of Asian Wars has been America itself. Its expansive forces, backed by powerful interest groups, are now out of control, as our managers, like other empire managers before them, have “come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain – in our case, nowhere on earth – in which their presence is not crucial.”7
To illustrate this loss of control, let us look for a moment at a milieu which I believe to have been an important factor in all of America’s major domestic deep events: the CIA’s ongoing interactions with the global drug connection.
Unaccountable Power: The CIA and the Return of the Global Drug Connection
Since World War Two the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence — first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan.8 With America’s expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends.
In 2004 Time and USA Today ran major stories about two of the chief Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that Khan in particular “has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe.”9 Later it was revealed that both traffickers were simultaneously CIA assets, and that Khan in particular was “paid a large amount of cash by the United States,” even while he was reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish smuggling networks.10
There is no longer anything surprising in the news that large U.S. payments were made to a drug trafficker who was himself funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The arrangement is no more bizarre than the CIA’s performance during the U.S. “war on drugs” in Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA first set up an anti-drug unit in Venezuela, and then helped its chief, Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami International Airport.11
It would be easy to conclude from these reports that the CIA and Pentagon intentionally use drugs to help finance the enemy networks that justify their overseas operations. Yet I doubt that such a cynical Machiavellian objective is ever consciously voiced by those responsible in Washington.
More likely, it is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. repressive style of conducting covert operations. Great emphasis is put on recruiting covert assets; and in unstable areas with weak governance, drug traffickers with their own ample funds and repressive networks are the most obvious candidates for recruitment by the CIA. The traffickers in turn are happy to become U.S. assets, because this status affords them at least a temporary immunity from U.S. prosecution.12
In a nutshell: I am describing a development that is not so much intentional, as a consequence of repressive dynamics. A related example would be the CIA’s recurring use of double agents, again for the reason just suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, the chief planner was a double agent, Ali Mohammed, who surveyed the Embassy and reported to Osama bin Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI had ordered the Canadian RCMP to release him from detention.13 In the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008, the scene was initially surveyed for the attackers by a DEA double agent, David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. authorities sent … to work for them in Pakistan…despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups.”14
The central point is that expansion beyond a nation’s borders engenders a pattern of repressive power with predictable results — results that transcend the conscious intentions of anyone within that repressive power system. Newly formed and ill-supervised agencies spawn contradictory policies abroad, the net effect of which is usually both expansive and deleterious – not just to the targeted nation but also to America.
This is especially true of covert agencies, whose practice of secrecy means that controversial policies proliferate without either coordination or review. Asia in particular has been since 1945 the chief area where the CIA has ignored or overridden the policy directives of the State Department. As I document in American War Machine, CIA interventions in Asia, especially those that escalated into the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars, fostered an ongoing global CIA drug connection, or what I have called elsewhere a dark quadrant of unaccountable power.
This drug connection, richly endowed with huge resources and its own resources of illegal violence, has a major stake in both American interventions and above all unwinnable wars to aggravate the conditions of regional lawlessness that are needed for drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect sense that the global drug connection has, as I believe, been an ongoing factor in the creation of an overseas American empire that most U.S. citizens never asked for. More specifically, the dark quadrant has contributed to all the major deep events – including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, that have helped militarize America and overshadow its public institutions.
Doomsday Power and the Military Occupation of America
I have said that, underlying the surface of America’s major deep events, there has been a pattern of conflict between two mindsets – that of openness and that of repressive dominance – dating back to the Civil War and the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century (and before that to the American Revolution).15 But it would be wrong to conclude from this on-going pattern of conflict that there is nothing new in our current situation. On the contrary, America is in the midst of a new crisis arising from this very old antagonism.
Since World War Two, secrecy has been used to accumulate new covert bureaucratic powers under the guise of emergency planning for disasters, planning known inside and outside the government as the “Doomsday Project.” Known more recently (and misleadingly) as “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, the Doomsday Project, under the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others, became the vehicle on 9/11 for a significant change of government. This package of extreme repressive power accumulated under the guise of the Doomsday Project can be referred to as Doomsday Power. In concrete terms, the repressive power developed to control the rest of the world is now, to an unprecedented extent, treating America itself as an occupied territory.
What I mean by “doomsday power” is the package of repressive mechanisms (which I have discussed elsewhere under their official name of “continuity of government” or COG plans), that was prepared over two decades by the elite COG planning group, and then implemented beginning on 9/11. The package includes 1) warrantless surveillance, 2) warrantless detention, (including unprecedented abridgments of the right to habeas corpus), and 3) unprecedented steps towards the militarization of domestic security enforcement and shrinking of the posse comitatus acts.
One recent development of Doomsday power, for example, has been the deployment since 2008 of a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team to be stationed permanently in the United States. A major part of its dedicated assignment is to be “called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”16 Many people seem to be unaware that Americans, together with this Brigade, have lived since 2002 under a U.S. Army Command called NORTHCOM.17 Yet if nothing is done to change the present course of events, historians may come some day to compare the stationing of this brigade in 2008 CE to the date, in 49 BCE, when Caesar, along with his legion, crossed the Rubicon.
And I believe that the forces that have worked for decades to create Doomsday power have, like the global drug connection, been involved in every one of the deep events, from Dallas to 9/11, that have helped bring us here.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.
His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 4 No 2, January 24, 2011.
Notes
1 Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 217. Cf. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2004).
2 Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 143.
3 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 93. Adapting Arendt’s distinction, Jonathan Schell made a Gandhian case in support of nonviolent persuasive or community power as a means of challenging top-down violent power and thus reforming the world. I developed this case myself in The Road to 9/11 (Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People [New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003], 227-31; Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, 249-66, 269).
4 Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 171-200.
5 Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, philosopher, and mathematician king (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207: “In Diodotus’ speech in the Mytilenian debate, wealth is particularly identified as producing arrogant “overreaching” (pleonexia –iii.45.4). Thus pleonexia seems to be associated with the abuse of power by either a tyrant or a wealthy oligarchy.”
6 Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987); Phillips, Wealth and Democracy; Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire.
7 Johnson, Blowback, 221.
8 Scott, American War Machine, 63-142, 239-53. The Karzai regime in Afghanistan is only the latest of CIA client governments to struggle to maintain itself with support from drug traffickers. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Can the US Pacify the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 5, 2010; Ryan Grim, “Karzai Releasing Scores Of Drug Traffickers In Afghanistan, WikiLeaks Cables Show,” Huffington Post, December 31, 2010.
9 Tim McGurk, Time, August 2, 2004; cf. USA Today, October 26, 2004.
10 James Risen, New York Times, December 11, 2010. Both traffickers were ultimately arrested by DEA officials: Noorzai in 2005, and Khan in 2008. The U.S. probably came to prefer Khan over Noorzai, because he was more closely allied to Abdul Wali Karzai, another drug trafficker and CIA asset, as well as a central figure in the power apparatus of his brother Hamid Karzai, the U.S. client president of Afghanistan.
11 Time, November 29, 1993; Scott, American War Machine, 14-15; Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 23, 1996.
12 It is too early to report the ultimate fate of Noorzai and Khan after their arrest and indictment by the United States. But it is clear that Guillén Davila’s arrest and indictment never led to conviction or imprisonment. On the contrary, he appears to have continued to enjoy CIA favor in Venezuela. (Scott, American War Conspiracy, 14-15).
13 Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-58.
14 “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Scott, American War Machine, 246-47. In another essay I will develop the thesis that what I call surplus repressive power – power developed exclusively by one society for the repressive dominance of others — is doomed, in this and other ways, to encourage the proliferation of its enemies. My point here is a more modest and general one. Maybe save the sentence for the later work?
15 Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and its Discontents: U.S. Double-Mindedness About Massacre,” in Adam Jones, ed. Genocide, War Crimes and the West: Ending the Culture of Impunity (London: Zed Press, 2004).
16 “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008.
17 Scott, Road to 9/11, 241-42.
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