2. I Geopolitics as a ‘Flat Discourse’
“Geopolitics is a flat discourse. It largely ignores the
vertical dimension and tends to look across rather
than to cut through the landscape. This was the
cartographic imagination inherited from the military
and political spatialities of the modern state”
Eyal Weizman (2002).
3. II Burrowing and Aerial Hegemony
• “The orbital weapons currently in play
possess the traditional attributes of the
divine: Omnivoyance and omnipresence”
Paul Virilio (2002)
• ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’: US air and
space near-hegemony on air and space
surveillance
• Vertical, penetrative gaze and killing power
• Move towards ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’,
‘persistent surveillance’ and ‘persistent
area dominance’: robotised destruction
linked to networked sensors and GPS
• Combined with rise in ‘asymmetric war: US
forces and allies vs. non-state insurgents and
militia
4. III Three Aspects: (i): Verticalised, Urbanised, War
• Ralph Peters (1997) ”The long term trend in
open-area combat is toward overhead
dominance by US forces. Battlefield awareness
may prove so complete, and precision weapons
so widely-available and effective, that enemy
ground-based combat systems will not be able
to survive in the deserts, plains, and fields that
have seen so many of history’s main battles.”
The United States’ “enemies will be forced
into cities and other complex terrain, such as
industrial developments and inter-city sprawl”
• City a refuge from orbital and aerial hegemony
e.g. urban insurgencies in Iraq
5. (ii) Burrowing and the ‘War on Terror’
• Underground warfare not new. But subterranean realm revivified as space
beyond the gaze and killing power of RMA technology
• Feature of all circuits, organizations and activities deemed illicit, illegitimate
or threatening under the banner of the ‘war on terror’: ‘illegal’
immigration, covert border crossings, non-state insurgencies, smuggling and
weapons R and D and nuclear programmes of ‘axis of evil’ states
6. Surveillance and the Subterranean
“So, as global surveillance becomes more pervasive enabled by
open markets and advances in satellite technology, and with
alarming mass exoduses of immigration pounding the newly
fortified borders of the 1st world -- in some sort of epic labor
backlash to the hypocrisies of a globalized world economy (where
borders are dissolved for the flow of capital) -- will we see a
greater underground network of secret tunnels and escape routes
develop? Improvised border crossings and insurgency bunkers, an
illicit infrastructure of underworld populations burrowing down
deep below the radar? Is the urbanism of the next century a
subtopian network of illicit colonizers and underground settlements
able to slip past the God-eye of rampant global panopticonism, and
hijack the world economy?”
Brian Finoki, Subtopia Blog
7. Brian Finoki: “border or escape tunnels are merely the fledgling appendages
of a leviathan bunker system much too great to imagine connecting together
inside a hollowed earth”
• US Mexico Border: Drug smuggling
tunnel inside a warehouse in San
Diego just outside the airport in
Tijuana, Mexico. The 21st discovered
in four years. Opened in to one of the
longest and most sophisticated crossborder tunnels ever discovered.”
• Between 3,789 feet long and 89 feet
deep.
• “This makes the fourth tunnel
discovered this month along the
Tijuana-San Diego border, and, yet,
you get the sense that investigators
have merely only scratched the surface
of what's beginning to look like an epic
subterranean labyrinth of dank
corridors, trapped whispers, and lots
of lonely long turns.” Finoki
8. Logical Response to IDF “Besieging
Cartography” in Occupied Territories
• Undeniably risky but lucrative business for teams
of Palestinian construction workers and refugee
entrepreneurs.
• “ It is interesting to gauge the increased visibility
of these tunnels as Hamas makes its political
move from the underground to a greater
institutional position on the surface of
Palestinian society.” Finoki
9. Used to Justify a Politics of Surface Erasure and Urbicidal war
11. Western/ Israeli Militaries: Urban Warfare and Tunnel
Warfare Training/ Doctrine/Weaponry
• (Re)Learning lessons of
past
• Developing new robotic
systems
12.
13. III The US Counter Underground Facilities (CUGF) Program
• Rumsfeld, Thursday, Oct. 11, 2001 “It is one of the
interesting things that, given the end of the Cold
War and the relaxation of tension and the increase
in proliferation and the availability of dual-use
capabilities, that a lot of countries have done a lot
of digging underground”
• J.D. Crouch, Bush’s assistant Secretary of Defense,
in February 2002: “Without having the ability to
hold those [underground bunker] targets at risk”,
“we essentially provide sanctuary”
• Palpable anger that globe-spanning US power can
be defeated by the simple act of digging and
pouring concrete.
17. Low Altitude Airborne Sensors System (LAAS)
• Extract such basic information as the
amount of electrical power being used
by occupants of the underground
installation. (According to Darpa
researchers, power usage can be
determined from the type and amount
of effluents being emitted from vent
holes.)
• We really need to address the
classification problem, said Duckworth.
Can we separate hospital from hostile
bunker when both are on emergency
power?”
• Software using sophisticated proprietary
algorithms will take the raw data from
the sensors, along with the information
developed from individual analysis of
that data and use it all to generate a
hit list ranked by probabilities.
21. (iii) 2002 Nuclear Posture Review
• S p r i n g 2 0 0 3 S e n a t e , w h i c h h a s
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, approved
development of a “Robust Nuclear Earth
Penetrator” approved with “mini nuke”
warhead
• In July 2005, the US Senate sanctioned $4
million to revive the Robust Earth Nuclear
Penetrator (RNEP) research programme.
• Will detonate 30m underground: use blast,
shockwave and vibration to destroy
underground facilities and equipment
• “a 1kT nuclear explosion, buried 30m
underground, will destroy heavy equipment
within about 160m of its burst while light
equipment will only be destroyed if the tunnel
is within the rupture zone.” Gordon, Jane’s
Weekly, 2002
22. Drawing from 1960s
‘Plowshare’ Program
• Planned to use nuclear explosions
to widen the Panama Canal,
construct a new sea-level
waterway through Nicaragua, cut
paths through mountainous areas
for highways, and connect inland
river systems.
23. • To actually destroy an alleged military complex 1000ft underground, for
example, the Stanford physicist Sidney Drell has estimated that a ‘bunker
busting’ nuclear warhead would need to be at least 100 kilotons in size (or
more than six times the size of the Hiroshima bomb). Even if it was exploded
deep underground, such a bomb would release over 1.5 million tons of
radioactive fallout into the atmosphere with a capacity to kill or devastate a
huge urban population (ibid.).
24. Conclusions
• Exploitation and targeting of subterranean critical, but neglected, aspect of
contemporary political geographies and geopolitics
• Need a critical, vertical geopolitics or (geo)politics of verticality
• Understand how vertical omnipotence of US and allies, and the burrowing
amongst those deemed illegitimate or enemies, interact within the context of
the ‘war on terror’, the ‘new normal’ and growth of ‘network centric
warfare’
• Part of wider recasting of everyday urban sites and spaces as militarised
battlespace, as discourse of ‘national security’ merge with those of ‘public
safety’
• Also targeting of urban subterranean bu non-state terrorist agents (Tokyo
gas attacks; London tube bombings etc) and the securitisation of urban
subterranean.
• Also how the very act of subterranean burrowing is delegitimised and
portrayed as intrinsically dark, evil, cowardly whilst, at the same time, the US
itself undergoes one of the biggest subterranean bunker programmes since
Cold War
25. Above all, any act to directly target aerial gaze is the ultimate
threat and is punished massively
