World governments may be militarizing biology and other life sciences to make strange and disturbing weapons. A 2007 report by the British Medical Association warned of a “slippery slope” in using drugs as weapons that could lead to “intentional manipulation of peoples' emotions, memories, immune responses or even fertility.”

Biologists are allowing this militarization to happen, according to Malcolm Dando in Nature, through an alarming lack of engagement. For example, research into the hormone oxytocin—which has been shown to increase people’s trust when taken in a nasal spray—could easily be co-opted by the military. Existing chemical weapons treaties are inadequate, according to Dando, and biologists need to step up and make sure their research isn’t used to harm.

Source: Nature 

After risking their lives for American troops in Afghanistan, translators are often abandoned and mistreated. The largest suppliers of translators to the U.S. military, a company called Mission Essential Personnel (MEP), sees one of its translator die and two severely injured every month, on average. In an exposé by the investigative site CorpWatch, injured employees are speaking out against MEP, accusing the company of withholding compensation and care from injured or killed employees and their families.

One former MEP employee, Basir Ahmed, told CorpWatch that he was fired after a suicide bombing in the Khogyani district of northeastern Afghanistan severely injured him. Mission Essential Personnel fired Ahmed, accusing him of being frequently late and sometimes not showing up to work—charges that he insists are trumped up. Ahmed tells a story of being moved from hospital to hospital, being forced to wait in the dead of winter for medical visits, and of promised compensation arriving months late. CorpWatch reports:

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

You can watch a video from the report below:

Source:  CorpWatch  

“When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul.” So writes Harper’s contributing editor, Jeff Sharlet, in a deeply-reported, equally troubling essay (not yet available online) chronicling the rise of the evangelical right in the U.S. Military since the Vietnam War.

At the end of the piece, titled “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military,” the reader is left with the strong impression that if tens-of-thousands of recruits, along with certain high-ranking officers—including General David Patraeus—get their way, evangelical Christians will bring the “Lord of all’ to the entire armed forces. The U.S. Constitution be damned.

According to Sharlet, there is a “small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officers corps” who see themselves not as subversives or radicals, but as “spiritual warriors” and “government paid missionaries.” Within this “fundamentalist front,” the best organized group is the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, which has 15,000 active members at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate of 3 percent. The group equates military duty with Godly duty and routinely casts the world in stark terms of good and evil. The men and women in American uniform are the Lord’s to do with what he pleases. Everyone else is, literally, on the side of Satan.

While reading the piece, I couldn’t help but recall that in 2006 the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report warned that white supremacists and neo-Nazis were infiltrating the U.S. military, joining up with “the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force” in order to walk away with valuable combat training and weapons skills. The magazine followed up in its Winter 2008 issue, concluding that since its original report, military officials “seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.”

Of course, there’s more than a fine line between Neo-Nazism and evangelical Christianity. Yet, it deeply concerns a number of military personnel, both conservative and liberal, when any group, no matter their religious or political agenda, is allowed to bring their beliefs to work. As Sharlet writes, “a soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—no one wants men with guns telling them who to vote for—and for the military itself. And officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe; conscience is its own order.”

Yet, as the Harper’s story makes clear, preaching the word—which sometimes morphs into harassment and abuse of nonbelievers—is becoming both more common among the rank-and-file and too often ignored by commanders all the way up to Obama himself. It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that lifelong republican Mikey Weinstein, a former graduate of the Air Force Academy, a ten year veteran of JAG, and former assistant general counsel in the Reagan White House, is serving as president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a small, scrappy organization whose primary mission is to protect soldiers who don’t walk the evangelical line from harassment. He tells Sharlet that his enemy is “weaponized Christianity.” And he believes this “country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of religious rights of our armed forces members.”

Ultimately, what makes Sharlet’s story so haunting is the on-the-ground reportage. The writer weaves together a host of troubling anecdotes to make his case, including the opening scene (from which the story gets its name) about a National Guard Infantry Unit stationed in Samarra on an Easter Sunday. They begin the day eating breakfast while watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. They end the day in a Bradley Assault Vehicle, its armor decorated in red Arabic script that’s meant to agitate the enemy. Its rough translation: “Jesus Killed Mohammed.”

The story concludes at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, long-considered ground zero for the military’s evangelical movement, where Sharlet asks a cadet what he would do if he ever received an order that contradicted his faith. What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way?

“He shook his head. ‘Who are you to question why God build up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?’ A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if [he] wasn’t a man committed to be earnest at all times.”

Image of the US Air Force Academy chapel by Mark Gallagher, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source:  Harper’s, Intelligence Report

As the death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to rise, robots are looking like an increasingly attractive alternative to human soldiers. Sending robots into battle is politically easy, because it ostensibly avoids some of the human cost of war. There is, however, a hidden, paradoxical cost of waging war with robots, P. W. Singer writes in the Wilson Quarterly: “By appearing to lower the human costs of war, they may seduce us into more ­wars.” 

Technological advancements now allow everyone to watch combat footage from anywhere, and sometimes to be a part of it. Soldiers may be able to drive to work, launch some missiles from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and then drive home in time for dinner. Singer, the author of the book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, connects that to the popularization of “war porn” videos, some of which show UAVs launching missiles at people. The footage allows viewers to “watch more but experience less,” according to Singer, which “widens the gap between our perceptions and war’s realities.”

Even supporters of the robotic soldiers concede that the technology can lead to overconfidence. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb is quoted by Singer saying, “Leaders without experience tend to forget about the other side, that it can adapt. They tend to think of the other side as static and fall into a technology trap.”

Excessive optimism is already a psychological bias that leads countries into war, Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon wrote for Foreign Policy in 2007. One doesn’t need to look beyond the predictions of a “cakewalk” in Iraq to know the problems of overconfidence in the lead up to a conflict. The distance allowed by military robots could exacerbate this psychological bias.

The hidden costs of these robotic warriors doesn’t mean the military should abandon technological advances, according to Singer. In an excerpt from the New Atlantis, Singer writes, “High technology is not a silver bullet solution to insurgencies, but that doesn’t mean that technology doesn’t matter in these fights.”

Americans are facing tightening budgets as the economy continues to worsen. The American military budget, on the other hand, continues to balloon. Next year, the Department of Defense will have a budget of more than $600 billion (pdf), “roughly equal to the rest of the world,” according to retired Air Force Colonel Chet Richards, writing for the Center for Defense Information. “Because we are not facing the possibility of conflict with the rest of the world put together,” Richards writes, “it’s clear that some adjustment is appropriate.”

The $600 billion estimate is conservative, according to Lou Dubose of the Washington Spectator. Including supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense programs at the Department of Energy and Department of Veterans Affairs, and defense-related interest on the national debt, Dubose estimates that the 2009 defense spending will be closer to $1 trillion dollars. 

Dubose suggests that the incoming Obama administration should cut back on military spending, scrapping expensive programs like the F-22 jet fighter, which Dubose describes as an out-of-date “winged white elephant.”

Some argue that a cutback in spending would be a mistake. Writing for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page Martin Feldstein writes that government stimulus money should be dedicated to military spending. “A substantial short-term rise in spending on defense and intelligence,” according to Feldstein, “would both stimulate our economy and strengthen our nation's security.”

A better use of that money would be to spend it on green jobs and education, Phyllis Bennis writes for Foreign Policy in Focus. More money should also be dedicated to finding jobs for soldiers once they return home. “War production doesn't create real economic health,” according to Bennis, and the United States is already spending enough on the wars.

Blackwater, the private-security firm winning a suspiciously high number of contracts in Iraq, has also been at the center of some of the war’s most horrific events. Yet the company continues to reap billions of dollars in government contracts and staff their highest positions with retired officials from the military, CIA, and other government agencies. They are uniquely positioned to reap the maximum benefit from both the public and private sector.

The agency is currently embroiled in a lawsuit brought by the widows of three soldiers killed when a plane operated by sister company Presidential Airways crashed in Afghanistan. Last year Blackwater attempted to have the case dismissed under a provision that soldiers can’t sue their government, at whose behest Blackwater was serving. When that didn’t work, the firm took a strange new tack: Rather than be tried in an American court, it requested that the case be tried under Islamic law, or Sharia, which doesn’t hold companies in its jurisdiction responsible for their actions. If this request is honored, it would effectively dismiss the lawsuit.

Talking Points Memo highlights the obvious irony of an ostentatiously patriotic company with well-known right-wing ties preferring Muslim law to the good old-fashioned U.S. legal system, and AlterNet snarks: “If this becomes well-known, the GOP's corporate base will become fundamentalist Muslims faster than you can say Mecca Oil & Gas.” Meanwhile, DailyKos posts the mock-hysterical headline, “Blackwater Wants to Establish A Sharia Caliphate Here in the U.S.A.”

Erik Prince, Blackwater’s CEO, argues that his company’s request is a reasonable one since the plane—carrying U.S. military personnel and operated by a U.S. corporation—crashed in Afghanistan, which is governed by Sharia. This logic is patently absurd, but Blackwater has proven it can get away with murder in the past, and this is just more evidence that the agency wants it both ways: When it’s to Blackwater’s advantage,  it’s a governmental entity, acting on behalf of the U.S. Armed Forces; as soon as that becomes inconvenient, it plays the private-sector card and attempts, often successfully to circumvent the law. Pretty slippery, and plenty scary.

Think everybody who drives a hybrid car must either be a hypocritical celeb or a guilt-ridden boomer? Think again. The U.S. Army has been fiddling with hybrid cars to make the next generation of fuel-efficient military vehicles, says this army researcher. Maybe the military is as sick of the Hummer as the rest of us are.

Thanks, ecogeek! —Brendan Mackie