[Newspoetry] Marines Attack California (fwd)
gillespie william k
gillespi at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Tue Mar 16 09:09:30 CST 1999
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 1999 19:32:22 -0600
From: Mike Lehman <rebelmike at earthlink.net>
To: william <gillespi at uiuc.edu>,
"rebelmike at earthlink.net" <rebelmike at earthlink.net>
Subject: Marines Attack California
ARMED AND DANGEROUS
War games come to Monterey
But state commission nixes beach
invasion
By Sarah Foster
© 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
MONTEREY, Calif. -- It was to be the opening
scene for the largest operation of the
controversial Urban Warrior maneuevers held
to date -- a week of joint Navy-Marine Corps
exercises intended as a way to test new
technologies, equipment and systems which
the military says are necessary for warfare of
the next decade.
Sponsored by the Marine Warfighting
Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, the project --
which involves hundreds of Marines and
civilian actors, is titled Operation Sea Dragon.
At 7 a.m., Saturday, five hovercraft -- launched
from six ships parked 3 miles off the coast --
would land 200 Marines in full combat gear on
the beach just north of the Municipal Wharf
No. 2, near the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey, to begin a day-long exercise in
urban warfare. At the beach and the
Postgraduate School they'd search for actors
playing the part of terrorists and a presumed
chemical or biological weapon capable of
wiping out large numbers of people.
Discovering that it's not there, the Marines
would convoy through the city in nearly 50
Humvees, 5-ton trucks and light armored
vehicles to the Presidio -- formerly a military
installation, and still the site of the Defense
Language Institute -- for a series of staged
confrontations and searches of buildings.
Helicopters would land other Marines on
Soldier Field (a football field) to assist in the
exercise. Eventually, the chemical weapon
would be found, the terrorist taken, and the
Marines would exit, job done. The operation
was expected to take up to 10 to 12 hours, from
start to finish.
Original plans for Operation Sea Dragon called
for an air assault as well, involving 10
helicopters and 10 jet fighter aircraft
conducting mock strafing runs and troop
insertion exercises at the Presidio. Helicopters
were to land on the beach.
It didn't happen. At least not as planned.
On Thursday, the California Coastal
Commission, citing environmental concerns,
voted 7-0 against the amphibious assault
scheduled for the following day. The
commission said the exercise threatened such
endangered species as snowy plovers, sea
otters and gray whales. The vote was advisory
only, but the military -- stunned by the
unanimous rejection -- scrubbed this first stage
of the operation and agreed to a much
scaled-back scenario.
Instead of hovercraft, helicopters transported
the troops from the ships to the local airport,
and hauled by bus to the exercise sites.
Giving an international flavor to the operation
-- besides what's in the obvious script -- was
the participation of an undisclosed number of
the Dutch and British military. Reportedly they
fought as part of the contingent of Marines. The
exact number was not disclosed.
Community opposition to the planned
exercises has been intense, and military and
local officials found themselves confronted by
people on all points of the political spectrum:
from those who fear the increased involvement
of the military in traditional police activities, to
those concerned about deployment of U.S.
troops overseas on peacekeeping missions, to
those who oppose any kind of military for this
country. And there was anger that the city
council had not notified the community. In fact,
the city council never actually voted on it, but
simply tacitly agreed to it last July, following a
brief report by city manager Fred Meuer.
"I am psychologically devastated by this," says
Monterey resident Charlotte Carter, an activist
in the Republican Party. Carter has been on
radio talk shows discussing these exercises and
similar ones taking place around the country.
"I fear for my city, my country, and my state --
and devastated that our city fathers are doing
this to us," she said. "This was a covert activity.
It was planned, and it was not going to be
announced."
According to Carter, if word hadn't gotten out,
"It would have been just like Kingsville, maybe
worse."
Kingsville, Texas, was one of several locales in
that state of recent urban war games conducted
by the Army Night Stalkers, at which live
ammunition was used. WorldNetDaily
reported extensively on these.
Operation Sea Dragon is sponsored by the
Marine Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico,
Virginia.
Once the public was alerted to what was
happening in Monterey and began to
complain, city officials considered turning it
into a public relations bash, with bleachers set
up along the beach so people could watch the
landing. That project was never realized.
Demonstrations were expected, and a group of
100 or so protesters did spend the morning
along the highway beside the beach with signs
and banners. But the action of the Coastal
Commission apparently blunted resistence as
much as it had pulled the teeth on Operation
Sea Dragon. About 500 observers came to the
Presidio via shuttle buses to watch the
exercises, which were open to the public. They
sat in bleachers, waiting for the helicopters to
land -- which were expected "any time now." It
never arrived.
The scenario took place in the buildings and
grounds on three sides of Soldier Field. Col.
Mark Triffault, director of the Joint Information
Bureau, explained the scenario to reporters.
"We've been invited by a friendly foreign
nation to find a terrorist who has brought in a
chemical or biological bomb," he said.
"Opportunities have been built in to test
various technologies and techniques."
Actors had been hired to play such parts as
friendly villagers, terrorist sympathizers, and
terrorists. There were two sides: green and
orange -- for those who wanted to follow the
plot.
"This is an experiment. You play as you
practice, and we're practicing here so we can
play successfully in the future," Triffault said.
"A humanitarian role -- such as in Somalia --
can change in a minute to a mid-intensity
conflict."
The war games began.
A group of robed and turbaned individuals
started screaming and running at one side of
the field -- a "terrorist" was firing blanks with a
high-powered rifle, dodging behind a
building. Marines in camis appeared -- they
were shooting rifles, too. There was a lot of
gunfire -- a lot of confusion. Media people
followed, cameras and notepads in hand, and
were caught up in the melee. The press pool
was no small group, but a faction itself of
several dozen persons -- happily clicking and
rolling their cameras in the midst of chaos. The
scene shifted from one locale to another --
reporters and photographers trailing in the
wake of the actors and Marines.
The entire operation was what a tournament
must have been like in the Middle Ages -- with
action not only between combattants on a field,
but along the sidelines and in the stands. Here,
a woman wheeled a baby in a stroller, scarcely
noticed the helmeted Marines racing past her
with their rifles. Just a observer. Over there, a
man tried to keep two dogs (on leashes) from
barking at the terrorists -- or were they friendly
villagers.
About a hundred protesters from various
peace groups arrived shortly after the games
started, with their banners and signs. They
remained behind a yellow tape, and were
peaceful throughout the exercise. After a few
minutes, they didn't even bother to chant or
sing -- but stood watching the players.
The terrorist ran into a building. We knew he
was a terrorist because a young recruit with a
microphone said he was. He was on hand to
explain to the media what was happening. It
was something about the "weapon" being taken
into the building, and Marines were doing a
building to building search for it.
"SARGE" appeared -- a unmanned vehicle
that's been developed for reconnaisance. It
looks like a small jeep with a turret, and the
acronym stands for Surveillance And
Reconnaissance Ground Equipment. It's a
remote control, all-terrain vehicle the comes
with satellite navigation, laser range finder and
surveillance equipment to monitor a battlefield
-- or in this case, the area where the terrorist
and his friends were.
SARGE was one of the 34 new kinds of Star
Wars equipment being tested.
There was the mobile Counter-fire System,
which mounts on an armored vehicle, and uses
accoustic sensors to home in on sniper shots
and return fire within two seconds. On a ship
parked in the ocean, a mainframe computer
enabled commanders to monitor and control
the movements of their troops through satellite
signals to transmitters the Marines were
wearing.
Combatants wore laser-tag flak vests. When the
flash of light from a fired blank hit the vest, it
sounded an alarm he could hear telling him he
was "dead."
A grenade exploded -- and there were a lot of
civilian casualities. An ambulance arrived --
and the Marines tried to get them aboard, some
of whom -- all role playing -- refused to go, and
had to be forcibly transported. Presumably
these were terrorists.
The media and the crowd began to lose
interest. So, it seemed, did the players.
When it was announce the helicopter drop was
cancelled, people began to leave and the event
was pretty well wrapped up by 1:30.
Urban Warrior will continue in Oakland and
Alameda. Protests and demonstrations are
planned.
It would be easy to dismiss the cancellation of
the beach head "invasion" as a capitulation of
the Coastal Commission to environmentalist
demands, and to view opposition to the Urban
Warrior program as essentially left-wing.
Certainly the Center for Non-Violence in Santa
Cruz and the Veterans for Peace have taken the
lead in organizing the resistance.
But the alert about the war games was not
sounded by a peace activist. Indeed, these
groups knew nothing about it until a woman
who was monitoring a regulatory board
meeting came upon the information -- and that
was in December. By then the city of Monterey
had tacitly signed off on it -- with not even a
vote on it.
Kathy Fosmark does not consider herself an
activist. She is a fisherman's wife, whose father,
uncles, and brothers were also fishermen. But
she is acutely aware of the destructive actions
by government on that industry. In early
December she attended a meeting of the
Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary
Advisory Board -- which she had heard was
considering more restrictions on fishing in the
marine sanctuary, a huge swath of coastal
ocean stretching from Point Reyes north of San
Francisco to Point Conception, just north of
Santa Barbara -- an area roughly a third of the
California coast.
At the meeting information was handed out
about Urban Warrior's Operation Sea Dragon,
and the board agreed to support it.
Fosmark took the material to her friend,
Republican Charlotte Carter, who in turn faxed
it to the media. Stories began to appear, and an
opposition developed.
Fosmark is emphatically not "anti-military" --
her father fought in the Second World War and
was part of the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
But like many Americans she is concerned
about the use of Marines in police actions
around the world -- especially with Clinton as
commander in chief -- and the use of American
cities as training grounds.
"I love and respect the military," Fosmark told
WorldNetDaily. "But I find it very strange what
they're being asked to do. It's very scary to
think that they're doing this kind of
anti-terrorist activities in our towns. A lot of
people do not agree with Clinton, who is in
charge of our military. He is the person who
makes the choices of where our military goes.
Right now we're in Kosovo and a lot of other
places -- and we're bombing people and
countries. I don't know if conservative America
agrees with what he's doing -- but I worry that
we're bringing terror here. We could be getting
the backlash because of our actions -- I'm
worried for our future."
Fosmark recalled having lived in the Monterey
area all of her life, and never seen military
exercises like the ones planned -- and
Monterey has had a military presence for
decades.
"They've never come on the beach in
hovercraft, never taken over a part of the town
-- and they planned it all in secret," she said.
Brian Willson, of Veterans for Peace, concurs
with Fosmark, noting the convergence of
people of different political persuasion.
"It (Operation Sea Dragon) has provoked
repsonses from a broadbased group of people
who normally would not speak to each other,"
he said. "There are various concerns being
expressed, from fears about using the armed
forces in domestic law enforcement to
environmental concerns to visceral concerns
about seeing Marines in combat readiness in a
local town."
Wilson said he could not recall such a
broadbased coalition in recent years as has
been crystallizing in response to the various
urban warfare games going on around the
country.
"This kind of concern about the federal
government's activities started on the (political)
right with Waco and Ruby Ridge," he said.
Wilson deplores the agreement of liberal
politicians to the program.
For instance, there's Democratic Congressman
Sam Farr.
"He's very liberal," says Wilson, "Yet he's
totally for this on the premise that we must
prepare our armed forces for both domestic
and international terrorism and to help train
local police and fire personnel for terrorist
threats.
"He doesn't see any linkage between the
sending of missiles all over the world, in
violation of international law, and enraging the
whole Moslem world. If you do this -- well,
yeah, you'd better get ready for terrorist
attacks."
Yesterday, the Marines left Monterey for a
four-day continuation of Operation Sea
Dragon. Protests are expected when hundreds
of Marines stage a mock landing at those cities.
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