Re: <nettime> A miniature city waiting for attack (military urbanism)

["brian.holmes {AT} wanadoo.fr" <brian.holmes {AT} wanadoo.fr>]

One night on the road when the campground at lovely Morro Rock near San Luis
Obispo was full, I found myself in an odd, impersonal sort of campsite a few miles
further down the interstate, where to my surprise (and I don't really know what
must have gone through my French companion's mind) we were awakened in the middle
of the night by gunshots, explosions, the ra-tat-tat and boom-boom-boom of warfare
in peaceful 1990s California. Now at last I know exactly where this came from.
Though I obviously had immediately figured out that these were army exercises, or
at least, after the first few minutes!

Michael H Goldhaber wrote:

> "Three small buildings"! A joke! The danger is that these nitwits will
> take their wargames there to be a realistic exercise and plunge the
> world into future Iraqs. We only aid that by taking this seriously.


Unfortunately those nitwits do take their games seriously and they have a lot of
help from the Israelis after the invasions of Jenine and Nablus -- I watched
videos gathered by Eyal Weisman where an Israeli officer explained, in a kind of
Derridean way, that everything has to do with how you interpret a city. You can
interpret the walls, for instance, as solid, or as permeable- In Nablus they
intererpreted them as permeable, bored systematically through them, and were able
to attack and destroy the Palestinian resistance from behind. They seem to have
applied a swarming doctrine, gathering around the city, pulsing inward,
retreating, and then pulsing again from other directions. It is a commonplace to
say that the Israelis have replaced the British as the chief purveyors of urban
battle strategy, but I wonder if anyone on the list has good bibliography on that
subject.

best, Brian


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