Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

ENMOD by Default

Well before US Navy researcher Dr. Pierre St. Amand made his statement equating weather and weaponry in 1966, the relationship between warfare and environmental change has been an essential factor in war. Archimedes wanted to use the sun’s rays, which could be concentrated off highly polished Grecian shields, to set Roman ships afire. The troops of imperial Rome in turn sowed salt into the fields of Carthage, sterilizing the earth, and producing an early example of eco-nomadism that forced a total migration from the city to avoid starvation. [21] Queen Elizabeth beat Spain on the high seas due in part to a storm. Napoleon Bonaparte lost Russia because of bad weather, and was thereby prompted to ask Urbain Leverrier, the astronomer who discovered Neptune, to foretell winter storms along shipping and military paths. During the war of 1812, the US Army Surgeon General created a directive to keep climatological records to assist war efforts, creating the first electronically networked weather stations in the US. And during the Buffalo Wars of the 1840s, the US realized that eradicating the buffalo economy would help clear the plains of their human foes and end the indigenous American’s way of life (Halacy 31). The US civil war is given credit for expanding the network of weather observing stations. And even though President Lincoln resisted increased funding for the new science of weather forecasting, there were already 500 telegraphic nodes by the outbreak of the war in 1861 (Whitnah 10). The civil war thus set the stage for longer-term increases in congressional funding for weather technologies, and for the US Army signal service to assume responsibility for meteorological knowledge in 1870. By 1881, the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization (NOAA) reorganized climate science outside the military budget, though both the NWS and NOAA are traditionally headed by military officers and remain quasi-military organizations (Fine 211).

World War I, the first total war of the twentieth century, depended upon the use of wind patterns and humidity levels to deliver airborne mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine. But because wind knowledge was in its infancy, gas warfare had only moderate effectiveness (about four per cent of casualties). [22] The first such attack was made possible by German Nobel Prize scientist Fritz Haber (1868–1934), the inventor of chemical fertilizer, and only later the father of chemical warfare. By World War II, environmental variables and the art of war were fully and officially intertwined. By 1956, the giant brain of the US-Army financed Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was announced, creating new possibilities not only for calculating bomb trajectories and kill ratios but also for providing the computational power necessary to produce the kind of mathematically based, multi-layered atmospheric forecasting that Professor Bjerknes and the Bergen school of proto-meteorology could only speculate about at the turn of the nineteenth century. Spurred on by the Russian Sputnik, the US Naval Research Laboratory took the first official steps to put a weather satellite into the earth’s atmosphere. With support from the US military’s Research and Development Corporation (RAND), and with participation from 8 federal agencies including the Army, Navy, and Air Force, 1966 saw the world’s first operational weather satellite system. At this moment, climate and war went global in a scientific sense, and the atmosphere could be observed every 12 hours from a single orbiting machine. [23] Between 1967 and 1972, the tactic of environmental modification (ENMOD) was fashioned in a sustained and developed way. Attempting to extend the monsoon season in Southeast Asia, the US military dispersed several tons of silver iodide from its C-130s and F-4 Phantoms in order to produce heavy rain over the centuries old Ho Chi Minh trail. Operation Popeye, as the program was known, ran ENMOD missions over neutral Cambodia and Laos (in violation of international law), as well as in North and South Vietnam. Popeye was active to the tune of 2,600 flights, 47,000 units of cloud seeding material, and a cost of $21.6 million. [24] Not to be outdone by the Romans in Carthage, the DOD also attempted ENMOD missions against Cuba in 1969 and 1970. The goal was to cause clouds to drop their rain before reaching the island, producing a genocidal crisis of starvation and drought. [25]

Thus the earliest historical examples of unconventional warfare—whether accidental or deliberate—were climatological in nature. And as this history has not been fully written, we can offer here a set of working distinctions, useful for making some final points about the aerial empire, between the manner in which weather has been called upon during the Cold War to enhance the military arsenal, and beyond that, the manner in which climate change is altering the dynamics of war doctrine in a multi-polar post-Cold War epoch. To bring the list of past ENMOD activities mentioned above into a contemporary context, we must distinguish between the instrumental uses of climate change and a new science of environmental security that both seizes upon the event-opportunities of the coming eco-catastrophes, and translates the aleatory dynamics that produce atmospheric and geographical extremes into an emergent war analytic. To understand the current stakes of climate change as a military force multiplier, we must make the distinction—crucial for understanding what I called above the shelf life of the human being—between ENMOD by design, which is the pre-planned fabrication of climate change à la Popeye; and ENMOD by default, which is the turning of environmental crises into an autogenic form of weaponry that works its violence not only against but also eventually without the need for human beings.

In the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union, who had its own long standing ENMOD programs, publicized previous US activities in Indochina. Since 1977, then, the final version of the treaty defines ENMOD to encompass:

However, the conditions under which this treaty was ratified, a major point of contention between the opposing Cold War blocks, was the US insistence that “each State Party to the Convention undertakes not to engage in military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to another State Party” (emphasis mine). By attaching the definition of “severe” to the time-space caveats of “widespread and long-lasting,” the DOD aligned US delegates to the UN introduced a provision that would allow for a future deployment of environmental war. They managed to put key loopholes around the most important variables in war: as we have seen above in the context of emergent war technology, the control of space and time. These variables began to be re-introduced in a serious way as recently as 1996. In a paper, collectively authored by 7 Air Force Officers, called “Weather as Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025,” the idea of “full spectrum conflict” presents weather manipulation as a “more important weapon than the [atomic] bomb” (House 5). “Air Force 2025” measures hurricane energy in terms of bomb capacity, noting that a worthwhile “tropical storm is equal 10,000 one megaton hydrogen bombs” [House 18]). The 45,000 lightning strikes that hit the planet daily are said to contain “electro-potential…with offensive military benefit” that might be induced by “atmospherically buoyant…microscopic” computer drones, designed to seed the sky with the chemistry necessary for “aimed and timed lightening strikes” (House 27). The connection between this version of electro-potential and brain wave interface is not an immediate one, since the latter interface, insofar as it absorbs the human in the war machine, is more akin to ENMOD by default. With specific focus on the ionosphere (the atmospheric layer 1200 miles above earth where radio waves are reflected as a natural mirror), AF 2025 also evokes the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Established in 1992 and based in Gokona Alaska, HAARP is an array of 180 tower transmitters, 72 feet in height mounted on thermopiles spaced 80 feet apart in a 12 by 15 rectangular grid. [26] Put simply, HAARP is an ionospheric heater designed to excite low atmospheric particles, the largest such machine ever built. [27]

Thus ENMOD by design is by no means off the military table (and note: the American Meteorological Society now endorses an ENMOD approach to curb global warming), but it is not as fully apparent in (publicly assessable) doctrinal discussion in the way that ENMOD by default currently is (“Re-engineering” 7). The time-and-space caveats attached to the 1977 UN ENMOD convention have taken on unprecedented significance given the current climate change reality, which is no longer overtly dodged by the current US ruling apparatus (military, government, corporate). Rather, climate change is embraced as a target enhancing operational environment, the purest form of ENMOD by default. This adaptation to, indeed embracing of, planetary risk makes military strategy out of a forgone conclusion of anthropogenic climate catastrophe. However, anthropogenesis—a crucial qualification—does not at all translate to the preservation of the human being. Consistent with both military technology and national security policy, ENMOD by default disintegrates the efficacy as much of human will as of the human being as such. Humanity may appear to determine war in the aerial empire, but we are by no means in control of the new dynamics of planetary violence. At 350 ppm, we are at—and are surpassing—a level of “dangerous anthropogenic interference” (DAI), with CO2 levels to approach 450 parts per million by 2012 (Kolber 42). [28] (China’s toleration proves higher, at 550 ppm and even 750 ppm.) Ice caps are melting, sea levels rising, faster than the conservative International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted in 2007. At the current pace of extinction more than half the earth’s animal species will be gone by the end of the century, and according to a 2009 MIT Integrated Global Systems model, it will be too late to stem eco-catastrophe much sooner than predicted. IPCC panel head Rejendra Pachauri cites 2012, the expiration date of the US rebuked Kyoto Protocol, as the planet’s next tipping-point (qtd. in Vanderheiden xi). The same 2009 Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) document that we cited by way of introducing drono-spheric SkyOps several moves above also displaces the human-centered notion of ENMOD by deliberate design à la Operation Popeye with a far more complicated (if not also suicidal) strategy of ENMOD by default: adaptation to, as much as mobilization of, the destructive power unleashed by coal-produced CO2 gases. Here the term climate change moves the problem of ecology from the limited context of anthropogenesis toward a more perversely expansive morphogenic realm of agitated particles, chance compounds, and aleatory aggregates that are given human purpose only in the wake of this or that event of mass crisis. The ecology of war is seen here as a way of fighting so-called cross-border wars that are not merely trans-national (as across national lines) but are also infra-national (as within nations) because war is phylogenic now. Climate change becomes an accelerant and a multiplier of military force (TSC 4) that eventually turns on its masters.

We have seen the mutation of space and acceleration of time as noted in the SSI climate change materials already at work in brain-machine interface technologies (BMI), and in the drono-sphere, examined above. Here, recall, we found a set of innovative war applications that fused machinery and meat. Let’s also emphasize that, given the blurriness of contemporary security doctrine and the twenty-first century war machine, we also detected an elaborate data-driven war analytic that no longer cares to divide war from peace, foe from friend, risk from security, alterity from homeland, state power from civility, and so on and so forth with the traditional divisions of Western modernity. The notion of climate change as a form of tactical enhancement may also be applied to the way in which fractals and chaos are being considered with renewed pervasiveness in emergent military systems. A 1996 Navel War College paper, “Chaos Theory: the Essentials of Military Applications,” provides a theoretical foreshadowing of drone technology, using chaos analysis in a precisely analogous way that De Landa’s uses the term machinic phylum. In the temporal sense, chaos is defined, apropos James Gleick’s well-known work, as “behavior that is not periodic, [but is] apparently random , where the system response is still recurrent (the pendulum still swings back and forth) but no longer in a predictable way” (James 14; emphasis original). [29] By the chance synchronizing of aleatory time signatures that both cut across and recombine biotic and non-biotic strata (for example, climate change and human beings), computer technology produces similar mutations of space. Like fractal media, chaos theory allows us to identify “ transitions between various dynamics, that are common to many systems” (14). But again these dynamics cannot be visualized in an intelligibly useful way without the mathematical reading ability brought about by electronic machine vision. Algorithms turn chaos into otherwise invisible new phylogenic lines. Consistent with fractal media, the chance event is seized upon to coordinate unforeseen alignments between unlike entities, as drone vision produces a probable calculus—Las Vegas style—of a virtual battlefield that we cannot simply model in advance. “Chaotic flow generates time intervals with no periodicity of apparent pattern” (15), which is the operational equivalent of security predicated on proximate and perpetual war. And most importantly for understanding the relations of violence in the aerial imperium, the intra-systemic dynamics of chaos gain military application by modeling weapons on climate at several levels. Climate change is conceived of in the literal sense with ENMOD by design. In turn, ENMOD by default eventuates in a stage of war that transcends humanity’s capacity to control what we might as well summarize as an atmospheric army about to go rogue. Chaos theory seeks military benefit by reorganizing war according to the asymmetrical systems of “weather dynamics and clouds.” And on the order of the machinic phylum, twenty-first century war is predicated on non-linear similar turbulence events, wind patterns, storm systems, lightening-bombs, ecological weapons, that are literally tipped by mechanical “swarms where battlefields are filled with new clouds that carry lethal capabilities” (James 79).

Climate change is a new—and will become the predominant—means of waging if not also of modeling war. The atmosphere has now become a weapon both by design and by default. And to the same extent, related technologies such as BCI and fractal media efface and reabsorb the human being. This effacement/reabsorption happens, in the first instance, as the war machine has wedged a new machinic phylum across carbon- and non-carbon based life forms; secondly, and more dramatically, this process of effacement/absorption happens in the sense that humanity has stacked the odds against its long-term survival. The victory for this or that side of the global human population is no longer a presumptive goal in the context of an aerial imperium. As mentioned above once before, there are 50 million environmental refugees in 2010, and according to UN estimates there will be more than 200 million by 2050, marking an epoch of population culling if not also a set of re-divisions within the human species (Glenn and Gordon 2). In the eco-suicidal register that is coterminous with ENMOD by default, humanity itself becomes a side, a losing side, within a meshwork of trans-biotic agency that wins by enveloping its human other. Rather than being apparent as a category that might be divisible into simply national oppositions, so-called transnational war means that the human being is becoming barely traceable as a fading bio-political ideal. With the 1925 Geneva protocols against chemical warfare in mind, the International Committee of the Red Cross “urges [us] to…remember our common humanity” (International Committee of the Red Cross 3). Within the aerial empire, remembering humanity may be all we are going to have.