The current counterinsurgency operation there shows that the military is our only institution that works.

During the the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines — universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower.” — Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1

Amidst the din of competing needs that make up domestic politics in America it can be difficult to determine the best course of action. Will taking “entitlements” away from the poor encourage growth and promote prosperity, or would it be better to simply lower taxes on the rich? The worst part is that no matter which path is chosen there will be doubters. It is much easier to find consensus in foreign adventures: nothing removes doubt and silences dissent better than the discovery of a “good” war.

America has fought more good wars than any nation in the world. If we cannot figure out what to do about health care or the environment, our virtue is preeminent when it comes to wars. A week after hundreds of marines were killed in the Beirut Barracks bombing, and America turned tail, Reagan sent other marines to bring the sonorous ring of freedom to Granada’s reddening sands. The first George Bush did well for himself in driving Manuel Noriega from Panama and Iraq from Kuwait. Bill Clinton, for his part, fought ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and enforced the no-fly zone over Iraq with weekly or monthly attacks. Surpassing all these in the justness of his vision was the second George Bush who was able to discover and prosecute two just wars on a scale much greater than anybody since Lyndon Johnson avenged the cowardly Gulf of Tonkin attack.

Sitting president Barack Obama, embroiled in domestic strife, and new to the office, has not had a chance to discover his own just war; instead, he has had to content himself with a revaluation of values that redefines the wars of his predecessor. The Iraq war, it turns out, is a “bad” war; the war in Afghanistan, by contrast, a “good” one. So, consistent with his campaign promise, we will soon (in the indefinite future) be winding down our Mesopotamian legions, and surging (this is actually Obama’s second Afghanistan surge, the first occurred in the spring of 2009) our Afghan legions. Is it the right thing to do? Nobody seems to know for sure, but it is much more invigorating to argue about this than, say, health care reform.

With all eyes focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, a smaller “good” war seems to have escaped our notice: the war in Salinas, California, where veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are now employing the methods of counterinsurgency warfare to combat Salinas’ problem of gang violence:

“This is our surge,” said Donohue, who solicited the assistance from the elite Naval Postgraduate School, 20 miles and a world away in Monterey. “When the public heard about this, they thought we were going to send the Navy SEALs into Salinas.”

In fact, the cavalry arrived in civvies, carrying laptops rather than M-16s and software instead of mortars. In this case, the most valuable military asset turned out to be an idea: Change the dynamic in the community and victory can follow.

“It’s a little laboratory,” said retired Col. Hy Rothstein, the former Army career officer in Special Forces who heads the team of 15 faculty members and students, mostly naval officers taking time between deployments to pick up a master’s degree. Their effort in Salinas counts as extracurricular and is necessarily voluntary, given the constitutional bar on the military operating within U.S. borders.

The military “advisors” in Salinas are training the local law enforcement in state of the art counterinsurgency techniques. Salinas, and its 150,000 inhabitants, will be a laboratory for a grand experiment. The logic is simple, if insurgencies bear similarities to the problems posed by urban gangs, then they should be met with similar tactics:

Rothstein, a veteran of counterinsurgency efforts in Colombia and Central America, notes the “significant overlap with how you deal with insurgencies and how you deal with cities that are under siege from gangs.” Going after insurgents, he said, involves “trying to capture the allegiance and control of the population. Gang members are trying to do the same.”

We must, in short, win their hearts and minds. Nobody seems to blink at the idea of declaring war on an American town. And maybe war is the wrong term: there are no cluster bombs or helicopter gunships in Salinas’ future, at least not yet. Instead there is “an idea.” The idea being that we must abandon the old ideas of law enforcement, and turn to the more dynamic and powerful ones promoted by military technocrats. So, if the tools that Salinas’ proconsuls will use to tackle this problem are not military armaments, they are something better: the military technologies that are guiding us to certain victory throughout the oil bearing regions of the world. In short, we will defeat the gangs with the most powerful weapon of all, computer software:

To help, the advisers brought to Salinas the powerful computer software commanders used in Iraq. U.S. forces there started out nearly as blind as Salinas police claim to be in facing a population where, by the mayor’s count, 10 percent to 15 percent of families include a gang member.

The military’s software tracks crimes and links suspects and their associates by social, geographic and family connections. “It looked pretty wazoo,” said Fetherolf, impressed.

Certain adjustments were required: “Commander’s Intent” became “Mayor’s Intent.” But parallels leapt out immediately to Major James M. Few, who on smallwarsjournal.com wrote: “The frightening realization is that I’ve walked this dog before.”

“I don’t want to use the word ‘psychological operations’ because that’ll really make people go crazy,” said Rothstein, who teaches a “classified seminar” on information operations in Monterey. “But the idea is, talking to the public thwarts negative messages. All that is part of a strategic communication plan that has to inform everything you do.”

If the software is simply an advanced database that will track suspects according to social, geographic and family connections, then it is hard to understand the need for secrecy. The secrecy is, itself, a form of psychological warfare, twofold in nature: first, it projects authority; and second, it hides the mundane and arbitrary nature of authority. Nothing demonstrates authority quite like a secret to be kept and guarded. The secret creates authority more quickly than any overt act. We know what you do not. And the greatest secret of all, familiar to anybody who has ever looked at a declassified document, is the mundane and arbitrary nature of secrets. This is partly the result of bureaucracy. So much paper is created that it is easier simply to declare it all secret than to sort the classified from the unclassified. At the same time, the power of the secret has nothing to do with its content and everything to do with being able to maintain secrets. Once revealed, the secret always seems stupid or obvious.

The war comes home: enemies foreign and domestic.

Controlling the outward flow of information about police and military actions, as Rothstein notes, is also a form of warfare, a “psychological operation.” The Pentagon has spent millions on just this sort of information management, going so far as to create an Information Operations Task Force tasked with “message control,” once known as propaganda. The Bush administration and Bush Pentagon excelled at message control. If Obama’s administration seems less adept in this area, his Pentagon has not been affected by the recent regime change. Secretly, they continue to control the message.

Nothing demonstrates authority quite like a secret to be kept and guarded.

The result is a hall of mirrors that will delight conspiracy theorists of both the left and the right. Is there actually a war going on in Salinas, they will ask, or is this article simply part of one more psychological operation meant to promote the idea of military operations within U.S. borders? Are the black helicopters circling Salinas part of the new world order crackdown or part of a militarist anti-immigrant shakedown?

A better mode of inquiry is to ponder why the military is now involved in solving domestic social problems at all. At least that question has a clear answer. We no longer have civilian infrastructure that is sufficient for dealing with our social problems. For the last forty years, democrats and republicans alike have destroyed the social infrastructure that was meant to deal with the problems associated with the urban poor. All our money went instead to pay for military initiatives. So, it is by a perverse sort of logic that the military is now seeking to solve non-military problems.

This is the American way of solving problems. We declare wars. After Johnson lost the war on poverty, we realized our limitations, and decided never to make that mistake again. Now, instead of fighting poverty, we now attack its symptoms, which are generally people and their behavior. The widely ridiculed drug war, which attacked the more entrepreneurial among the poor, was the earliest example of this. The police were militarized and given constitutional sanction for targeting and arresting those found loitering in poor neighborhoods. When the drug war failed, it was survived by the war on gangs. The fact that the gangs being targeted were all drug gangs was simply elided. Now, thanks to anti-hispanic and anti-immigrant anger, perhaps we are ready to take it to the next level, and declare war on the poor themselves, which seems to be what those involved in the Salinas counterinsurgency would like to see:

Leonard A. Ferrari, provost of the Naval Postgraduate School, embraced the project from the start, hearing in Donohue’s plea an opportunity for a school “in transition from just a defense institution to a national homeland and even a human security institution. The Justice Department estimates 1 million gang members nationwide. If the Apollo program gave the mattress industry memory foam, the $1 trillion invested so far in Iraq and Afghanistan could pay a dividend in American streets.

“The idea was, not just Salinas,” Ferrari said, “but is there a national model for this?”

In the pre-technocratic world, policy drove technology. Now it is the reverse: Technology and tactics drive policy. The gods be praised: the propaganda and population management technologies that we have developed to fight the poor and angry abroad will work just as easily against unruly segments of our own population.

Salinas today, tomorrow the world.

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