Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened,
Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
29 May 18
Once upon a time, dystopian fiction was left to the novelists: Aldous
Huxley, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Philip K. Dick. And once upon a
time, the futuristic dreams of the military were distinctly upbeat. They
were of generals leading armies to victory, of air power causing the morale
of enemy nations to collapse (with surrender on the menu), of admirals
dominating the seven seas with a fleet beyond compare -- 11 aircraft
carriers included -- that would awe the rest of the world.
That was then; this is now. These days you're likely to hear the word
"victory" in Washington about as often as "peace." In fact, according to the
Washington Post, the futuristic phrase of the moment at the Pentagon, the
one regularly on the lips of "senior officers," is the dystopian "infinite
war." In translation: almost 17 years after the administration of George W.
Bush launched its Global War on Terror and American military conflicts began
to spread across the Greater Middle East, Asia, and Africa, no end is in
sight. Ever. And that's not just a passing phrase in the Pentagon's arsenal
of words. As TomDispatch regular Nick Turse makes clear today, as early as
2016, the Pentagon's fantasists were already producing dystopian scenarios
of the first order, bloodcurdling tales of a forever-war-fighting future as
an over-muscled replication of the present never-ending war on terror. They
were already, that is, beginning to write their own Brave New World (of
War), their own 2084, their own The Lieutenant's Tale, their own Do Drones
Dream of Electric Terrorists?; they were, in short, creating stunningly
well-funded gravestones for the American (and global) future. But let Turse
tell you the rest.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Narco-Corruption, ISIS 3.0, and the Terror Drone Attack That Never Happened
Pentagon Documents Detail Dystopian Dangers
For almost 20 years, U.S. drone warfare was largely one-sided. Unlike
Afghans and Yemenis, Iraqis and Somalis, Americans never had to worry about
lethal robots hovering overhead and raining down missiles. Until, that is,
one appeared in the skies above Florida.
But that's a story for later. For now, let's focus on a 2017 executive order
issued by President Trump, part of his second attempt at a travel ban
directed primarily at citizens of Muslim-majority nations. It begins: "It is
the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from terrorist
attacks."
That sentence would be repeated in a January report from the Department of
Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), "Protecting the
Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States." Meant to
strengthen the president's case for the travel ban, it was panned for its
methodological flaws, pilloried for its inaccuracies, and would even spur a
lawsuit by the civil rights organization, Muslim Advocates, and the watchdog
group, Democracy Forward Foundation. In their complaint, those groups
contend that the report was "biased, misleading, and incomplete" and
"manipulates information to support its anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim
conclusions."
To bolster the president's arguments for restricting the entry of foreigners
into the United States, the DOJ/DHS analysis contained a collection of case
summaries. Examples included: the Sudanese national who, in 2016, "pleaded
guilty to attempting to provide material support to ISIS"; the Uzbek who
"posted a threat on an Uzbek-language website to kill President Obama in an
act of martyrdom on behalf of ISIS"; the Syrian who, in a plea agreement,
"admitted that he knew a member of ISIS and that while in Syria he
participated in a battle against the Syrian regime, including shooting at
others, in coordination with Al Nusrah," an al-Qaeda offshoot.
Such cases cited in the report, hardly spectacular terror incidents, were
evidently calculated to sow fears by offering a list of convicted suspects
with Muslim-sounding names. But the authors of the report simply looked in
the wrong places. They could have found startling summaries of truly
audacious attacks against the homeland in a collection of U.S. military
documents from 2016 obtained by TomDispatch via the Freedom of Information
Act. Those files detail a plethora of shocking acts of terrorism across the
United States including mass poisonings, the use of improvised explosive
devices (IEDs), and that "People's Armed Liberation (PAL) attack on U.S.
Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, [by] a
drone-launched missile."
That's right! A drone-launched missile attack! On CENTCOM's Florida
headquarters! By a terrorist group known as PAL!
Wondering how you missed the resulting 24/7 media bonanza, the screaming
front page headlines in the New York Times, the hysterics on Fox & Friends,
the president's hurricane of tweets?
Well, there's a simple explanation. That attack doesn't actually happen
until May 2020. Or so says the summary of the 33rd annual Joint Land, Air,
and Sea Strategic Special Program (JLASS-SP), an elaborate war game carried
out in 2016 by students and faculty from the U.S. military's war colleges,
the training grounds for its future generals and admirals.
PALing Around with Terrorists
The 2016 edition of JLASS-SP was played out remotely for weeks before
culminating in a five-day on-site exercise at the Air Force Wargaming
Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It involved 148 students
from the Air Force's Air War College, the Army War College, the Marine Corps
War College, the Naval War College, the Eisenhower School for National
Security and Resource Strategy, the National War College, and the National
Defense University's Information Resources Management College. Those
up-and-coming officers -- some of whom will likely play significant roles in
running America's actual wars in the 2020s -- confronted a future in which,
as the script for the war game put it, "lingering jealousy and distrust of
American power and national interests have made it politically and
culturally difficult for the United States to act unilaterally."
Here's the scene as set in JLASS-SP: while the U.S. is still economically
and militarily powerful into the next decade, anxieties abound about
increasing constraints on the country's ability to control, dictate, and
dominate world affairs. "Even in the military realm... advances by others in
science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by
both state and non-state actors, proliferation of nuclear weapons and
long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks have
increasingly constricted U.S. freedom of action," reads the war game's
summary.
While the materials used are "not intended to be an actual prediction of
events," they are explicitly meant "to reflect a plausible depiction of
major trends and influences in the world regions." Indeed, what's striking
about the exercise is how -- though scripted before the election of Donald
Trump -- it anticipated many of the fears articulated in the president's
December 2017 National Security Strategy. That document, for instance,
bemoans the potential dangers not only of regional powers like Russia,
China, Iran, and North Korea, but also of "transnational threats from
jihadist terrorists and transnational criminal organizations," undocumented
immigrants, "drug traffickers, and criminal cartels [which] exploit porous
borders and threaten U.S. security and public safety."
The JLASS-SP scenario also prefigured themes from that 2018 DOJ/DHS report
supporting the travel ban in the way it stoked fears of, above all, a major
"foreign-born" -- especially Muslim -- terror threat in the United States. A
2017 Government Accountability Office report would, however, conclude that,
of "the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since
September 12, 2001, far right-wing violent extremist groups were responsible
for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were
responsible for 23 (27 percent)."
Two years after the war game was conducted, in a time of almost metronomic
domestic mass killings, President Trump continues to spotlight the
supposedly singular danger posed by "inadequately vetted people" in the
U.S., although stovetops and ovens, hot air balloons, and burning pajamas
are far more deadly to Americans. Indeed, since 9/11, terrorism has been a
distinctly low-level risk to the American public -- at least when compared
to heart disease, cancer, car crashes, fires, or heat waves -- but has had
an outsized effect on the perceptions and actions of the government, not to
mention its visions of tomorrow.
Tomorrow's Terror Today
An examination of the threats from international and domestic terror groups,
as imagined in JLASS-SP, offers unique clues to the Pentagon's fears for the
future. "Increasingly," reads the war game's summary, "transnational
organizations, businesses, non-governmental organizations, and violent
extremist organizations challenge the traditional notions of boundaries and
sovereignty."
That drone-launching terror group, PAL, for instance, is neither Islamist
nor a right-wing terror group, but an organization supposedly formed in 2017
in hopes of defeating "globalism and capitalism throughout the world by
rallying the proletariat to orchestrate the overthrow of capitalist
governments and global conglomerates." Its ideology, an amalgam of
increasingly stale leftist social movements, belies its progressive ranks, a
rainbow coalition consisting of "most of the globe's ethnicities and
cultures," all of whom seem to be cyber-sophisticates skilled in
fundraising, recruiting, as well as marketing their particular brand of
radicalism.
As of 2020, the audacious drone strike on CENTCOM's headquarters was PAL's
only terror attack in the tangible world. The rest of its actions have taken
place in the digital realm, where the group is known for launching
cyber-assaults and siphoning off "funds from large global corporations,
banks, and capitalist governments around the world."
Even though PAL went from a gleam in the eye of its founder, the
Bond-villain-esquely named Otto Cyre, to terrorist power-player in just a
few short years, the pace of its operations didn't please its hardest core
members who, the war game scenario says, broke away in late 2020 to form yet
another organization devoted to even more rapidly eroding "confidence in
governmental and institutional bodies by staging events that demonstrate the
'impotency' of the establishment." That splinter group, United Patriots
Against International Government (UPAIGO) -- in this war game all terror
groups have Pentagon-style acronyms -- concentrates on "spectacular but
deniable actions," a scattershot campaign of often botched but sometimes
lethal efforts that include:
* November 2021: a cyber-attack on the Angarsk Refinery in the Russian
Federation, which resulted in a two-week shutdown causing a sharp rise in
the price of oil and gas just prior to the 2021-2022 winter heating season.
* April 2022: a failed attempt to assassinate, by IED, the chief of U.S.
Pacific Command. Two members of the commander's security detail and the
command's political advisor were killed in the attack while others,
including civilians, were injured.
* January 2022: a failed plot to detonate a dirty [radioactive] bomb,
employing medical waste and homemade explosives, at Philadelphia
International Airport.
* 2023 fire season: as fires raged in the western United States, UPAIGO
established relief efforts designed to compete with the U.S. government's
response, in order to "undermine confidence in government agencies."
* June 2024: an attack, in coordination with members of the Irish National
Liberation Army (INLA), on a U.S. flagged air carrier transporting U.S.
military personnel at Shannon Airport in Ireland. Militants fired two
surface-to-air missiles at the aircraft, which was damaged but managed to
land successfully."
PAL and UPAIGO are, however, hardly the only terror threats facing the
United States in the 2020s, according to JLASS-SP 2016. PAL's fellow
travelers, for example, include the fictional versions of the real Irish
National Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC). There's also the Environmentalists Against Capitalists Organization,
or EACO, "a lethal environmental anti-capitalist terrorist group with global
connections." Formed in 2010 (though not in our actual world), EACO,
according to the war gamers, evolved into an increasingly violent
organization in the 2020s, carrying out not just cyberattacks on
corporations but also a full-scale bombing campaign "targeting executive
board meetings of large corporations, particularly in industries such as
oil, coal, natural gas, and logging." The group even took to planting IEDs
on logging roads and employing tainted food as a weapon. By 2025, EACO was
implicated in more than 400 criminal acts in the U.S. resulting in 126
deaths and $862 million in damages.
Then there's Anonymous. In the Pentagon's fictional war-game, this
real-world hacktivist group is characterized as a "loose organization of
malicious black-hat hackers" that employs its digital prowess to "distribute
bomb-making instructions, and conduct targeting for options other than
planes, trains, and automobiles." In the past created by the military's
imagineers, Anonymous was declared a terrorist organization after it
conducted an August 2015 digital attack on Louisiana's power grid with
something akin to the Stuxnet worm that damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran.
That cyber-assault was meant to protest the state's restrictions on online
gambling -- an affront, according to the fictional Anonymous, to Internet
freedom. (In the real world, Louisiana lawmakers actually just deep-sixed
online gambling without an apparent terrorist response.) Taking down that
power grid "resulted in the death of 15 elderly patients trapped in a
facility denied air conditioning as a result of the power outage."
Also included among domestic terror groups is Mara Salvatrucha 13 or MS-13,
the Los Angeles street gang, born of the American-fueled Central American
civil wars of the 1980s, that was transplanted to El Salvador and has since
returned to the United States. This violent American export -- the product
of deportations in the 1990s -- has paradoxically become a key justification
for President Trump's crackdown on immigration. "MS-13 recruits through our
broken immigration system, violating our borders. And it just comes right
through -- whenever they want to come through, they come through," said
Trump earlier this year during a White House roundtable focused on the gang.
"We've really never seen anything quite like this -- the level of ferocity,
the level of violence, and the reforms we need from Congress to defeat it."
In the real world, the U.S. branch of MS-13 operates in loose local cliques
under a franchised name, dabbling in small-time drug dealing, gun-running,
prostitution, and extortion (primarily of recent immigrants). Many of its
crimes are committed against its own affiliates or members of other gangs.
The president nonetheless baselessly claimed that MS-13 has "literally taken
over towns and cities of the United States." He also continues to portray
the gang, which reportedly makes up less than 1% of the estimated 1.4
million gang members in the U.S., as a sophisticated international cartel.
And that's precisely how MS-13 was also portrayed in the fantasy world of
JLASS-SP. In that war game, Mara Salvatrucha has developed "the resources to
wage full-scale insurgent campaigns in Central America and the capability to
cause serious disruption in the United States and Canada," while rumors
swirl of contacts between its members and foreign militants. "If cooperation
between foreign terrorist groups and MS-13 ever blossomed, the potential for
terrorist attacks within the borders of the United States would increase
significantly," the war game scenario warns.
President Trump has been accused of conflating members of MS-13 with
undocumented immigrants (and referring to both groups as "animals").
Regardless, there's no question that he kicked off his presidential run in
2015 by disparaging Mexicans. "They're bringing drugs. They're bringing
crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people," he infamously
declared. The JLASS-SP documents reverse Trump's formula by first noting
that "most illegal immigrants crossing into the United States are just
trying to make a better life for themselves," only to suggest that the
U.S.-Mexican border also "serves as an infiltration point for terrorists."
Unlike in the real world, where such fears circulate primarily as a
conspiracy theory, in the Pentagon's future fantasy there is "substantial
evidence... that terrorists from the Middle East and North Africa transit
the Mexican-U.S. border." Worse yet, radical Islamists even "camouflage
themselves as Hispanics" to cross the border. The military's fantasists
point to "a flood of name changes from Arabic to Hispanic and the reported
linking of drug cartels along the Texas border with Middle East and North
Africa terrorism."
That represents a Trumpian-style nightmare-cum-fantasy even the president
hasn't yet dreamed up -- a Hispanic-surnamed, cartel-supported group of
Islamist terrorists. But by the 2020s, according to the Pentagon's
futurists, such worries are well-founded. And this will occur at the same
time that Mexican and South American drug gangs have grown so rich and
powerful they can regularly buy protection from U.S. government officials.
"Popular opinion in the United States is beginning to believe the
'Narco-corruption' is affecting the 'rule of law' north of the border,"
according to their scenario, with the cartels spending $20 billion in 2022
alone to buy off U.S. officials or get candidates of their choice elected.
That same year, allegations of election tampering in mayoral races across
the American South come to light and the number of corruption convictions of
U.S. Border Patrol agents and law enforcement officials skyrockets. Perhaps
most shocking is the discovery of a "vast irrigated grow site" (evidently a
massive marijuana farm) tended by "a dozen Mexican farmers armed with
AK-47's" in -- wait for it! -- "remote areas of Illinois."
Mexican farmers, El Salvadoran gang members, Islamists masquerading as
Hispanics, eco-terrorists, and anti-globalization militants aren't the only
threats foreseen by the military's futurists. Much-ballyhooed reports of the
defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, like the much-hyped defeat of
its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, turn out to be premature. In the 2020s,
the re-re-branded group, now known as the Global Islamic Caliphate, or GIC,
draws "support from Sunni-majority regions in Syria and Iraq; refugee camps
in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey; and internally displaced persons in Syria
and Iraq," while continuing to launch attacks in the region.
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has grown in reach, size,
and might. By 2021, the group has 38,000 members spread across Algeria,
Mali, Mauritania, and Niger with bases reportedly located in Western Sahara.
On May 23, 2023, AQIM carries out the most lethal terror attack in the U.S.
since 9/11, detonating massive truck-bombs at both the New York and New
Jersey ends of the Lincoln Tunnel, killing 435 people and injuring another
618. The bombing prompts President McGraw -- you remember him, Karl Maxwell
McGraw, the independent Arizona senator who rode his populist "America on
the Move" campaign to victory in the 2020 election -- to invade Mauritania
and become mired in yet another American forever war that shows every
indication of grinding on into the 2030s, if not beyond.
The Age of Terrorism
In the real world, the lifetime odds of an American dying from "walking" are
one in 672. The chance of being killed by a foreign terrorist? One in
45,808. By an illegal immigrant terrorist? One in 138 million. And the odds
of being killed by a "chain migration" immigrant sometime this year? One in
1.2 billion! In other words, you have a far greater chance of being killed
by a dog, a shark, lightning, or the government via legal execution.
This is not to say terrorism isn't a major threat to others around the world
or that terror groups are not proliferating. Since 9/11, the number of
terrorist organizations recognized by the U.S. State Department and battled
by the Pentagon -- from Africa to the Middle East to Asia -- has grown
markedly.
"States are the principal actors on the global stage, but non-state actors
also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated
capabilities," reads an unclassified synopsis of the Pentagon's 2018
National Defense Strategy. "Terrorists, trans-national criminal
organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have
transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption."
In the fictional future of the Pentagon's JLASS-SP 2016, this menace only
expands to include various hybrid threats and new homegrown groups with
increasing capabilities for death and destruction.
While it may be "the policy of the United States to protect its citizens
from terrorist attacks," as President Trump's 2017 executive order declares,
the Pentagon envisions a future in which such policies are increasingly
ineffective. In their dystopian war-game future, more than two decades of
fighting "them over there so we do not have to face them in the United
States of America" (as former President George W. Bush put it in 2007)
proves unequivocally futile. In this sense, the Pentagon's fantasies bear an
eerie resemblance to the actual present. In the dystopian scenario used by
the Pentagon to train its future leaders, today's forever wars have proven
ineffective and future threats are to be met with new, similarly
ineffective, forever wars.
In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Trump
declared that we're living in the "age of terrorism." His solution: wielding
"unmatched power," loosening the rules of engagement, and establishing an
unfettered ability to detain, question, and "annihilate" terrorists.
All of these tactics have, however, been part of the Pentagon's playbook
since 2001 and, according to the military's best guess at the future, will
lead to an increase in terror groups and terror attacks while terror
networks and terrorist ideologies will grow in strength, resilience, and
appeal. Almost two decades in, it seems we're still only in the opening days
of the "age of terrorism" and, if the Pentagon's war-gamers are to be
believed, far worse is yet to come.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation
Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His latest book is
Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead: War and Survival in South Sudan.
His website is NickTurse.com.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred
McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S.
Global Power, John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror
Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian novel Splinterlands, and Nick
Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead.
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