American Way of War (26 page)

Despite being in his grave for a number of years, as the undead of the toy world he would rise again. In 1977, paving the way for his return, George Lucas brought the war flick and war play back into the child’s world via the surprise hit
Star Wars
and its accompanying three-and-three-quarter-inch-high action figures that landed on Earth with an enormous commercial bang. Between them, they introduced the child to a self-enclosed world of play (in a galaxy “far, far away”) shorn of Vietnam’s defeat.

In 1982, seeing an opening, Hasbro’s planners tagged Joe “a real American hero,” and reintroduced him as part of a set of
Star Wars
-sized small action figures, each with its own little backstory. Hundreds of millions of these would subsequently be sold. The Joe team now had an enemy as well—another team, of course. In this case, though the cold war was still going full blast in those early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it wasn’t the Russians. As it happened, Hasbro’s toymakers did a better job of predicting the direction of the cold war than the CIA or the rest of our government. They sensed that the Russians wouldn’t last and so chose a vaguer, potentially more long-lasting enemy, a bogeyman called “terrorism” embodied in Cobra, an organization of super-bad guys who lived not in Moscow, but in—gasp—Springfield, U.S.A. (Hasbro researchers had discovered that a Springfield existed in every state except Rhode Island, where the company was located.)

In story and style, the Joes and their enemies now left history and the battlefields of this planet behind for some alternate Earth. There, they disported themselves with bulked-up weaponry and a look that befitted not so much “real American heroes” as a set of superheroes and supervillains in any futuristic space epic. And so, catching the zeitgeist of their moment, at a child’s level, the crew at Hasbro created the most successful boy’s toy of that era by divorcing war play from war American-style.

Twenty-seven years later, Joe, who lost his luster a second time in the 1990s but never quite left the toy scene, returned yet again with his new movie and assorted products. Whether the latest iteration proves to be another lucrative round for the franchise depends not just on whether enough American boys turn out to see him, but on whether his version of explosive action, special effects, and futuristic conflict is beloved by Saudis, Poles, Indians, and Japanese. Today, for Hollywood, when it comes to shoot-’em-ups, the international market means everything.

Abroad,
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
opened smashingly in South Korea, and, in its first week, hit number one in China and Russia, as well. It took in nearly $100 million overseas in its first twelve days, putting its U.S. take in the shade.

Whatever his fate, Joe, we know, can’t die. On the other hand, that once supreme all-American tale of battle triumph shows little sign of revival. Admittedly, the new G.I. Joe movie does mention NATO in passing, and one member of Joe’s force is said, also in passing, to have been stationed in Afghanistan. In addition, the evil arms maker’s company produces its superweapons in the obscure but perfectly real former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, where the United States now rents out a base to support its Afghan operations. Otherwise, the film’s only link with real-world battlefields comes from the Pentagon-loaned Apache helicopters and Humvees, and the fact that some of the military extras lent by the Pentagon were unable to see the film when it opened because they were then stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Soon after the film begins, a caption announces,
Star Wars
-style, that we’re “in the not too distant future,” and immediately you know that you’re in Hollywood’s comfort zone, a recognizable battle landscape that is no part of what once would have been the war movie. Also recognizable is that loaned Pentagon equipment and the fantasy weaponry mixed so seamlessly in with it—“That’s a Night Raven!”—make the film an “advertainment” for the techno-coolness of the U.S. military. The Pentagon, you might say, is perfectly willing to make do with post-historical battle space. It may be ever less all-American, but it’s where the recruitable young are heading.

For Hollywood, deserting actual American battlefields isn’t the liberal thing to do, it’s the business thing to do. In fact, those planning out the film for Hasbro and Paramount reportedly wanted to transform the Joes into an international special ops force based in Belgium, where NATO is headquartered. However, fan grumbling at the early teasers Paramount released (and evidently a Pentagon reluctance to help a less-than-American force) caused them to pull back somewhat.

Still, one thing is certain: if the American car has gone to hell, Hollywood’s products still rule the globe. And yet, in that international arena, American-style war, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, is a complete turnoff and real-world all-American triumph just doesn’t fly anymore. That’s certainly part of what’s happened to the American war film, but far from all of it. After all, how long has it been since all-American mythology and
imagery—the bluecoats’ charge, the marines’ advance—has brought a mass audience to a movie screen. The last such film, in 1998, was
Saving Private Ryan
, and it was already an anomaly. Today, as close as it gets is the parallel universe that passes for World War II in Quentin Tarantino’s
Inglourious Basterds
.

It seems that American audiences are largely in accord with the international crowd. They may not want their Joe force stationed in Belgium, but they don’t want to see real war American-style on a recognizable planet Earth either. They voted with their feet most recently on a bevy of Iraq films. Given the couple of hundred years that made triumphalism a kind of American sacrament, it’s nothing short of remarkable that the young are no longer willing to troop to movie theaters to see such films. If you think of Hollywood as a kind of crude commercial democracy, this can be seen as a popular measure of imperial overstretch or the decline of the globe’s sole superpower.

Only recently has a mainstream discussion of U.S. decline begun in Washington and among the pundits. But at the movies it’s been going on for a long, long time. It’s as if the grim reality of our seemingly never-ending wars seeped into the pores of a nation that no longer really believes victory is our due, or that American soldiers will triumph forever and a day. There may even be an unacknowledged element of shame in all this. At least there is now a consensus that we fight wars not fit for entertainment.

As a result, war as entertainment has been sent offshore—like imprisonment and punishment. Hollywood has launched it into a nether-world of aliens, superheroes, and robots. Something indelibly American, close to a national religion, has gone through the wormhole and is unlikely to return.

Joe lives. So does war, American-style, the brutal, real thing in Afghanistan and Iraq, at Guantánamo and Bagram, in the Predator- and Reaper-filled skies over the Pakistani tribal borderlands, among the Blackwater (now Xe) mercenaries and the tens of thousands of other private military contractors who outnumber U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But the two of them no longer have much to do with each other.

If the Chinese, and South Koreans, and Saudis, and enough American young men vote with their feet and their wallets, there will be another
G.I. Joe film. And if Washington’s national security managers have anything to say about it, there will be what’s already regularly referred to as “the next war.” Film and war, however, are likely to share little other than some snazzy weaponry, thanks to the generosity of the Department of Defense, and American kids who will pay good money to sit in the dark and then perhaps join up to fight in the all-too-real world. In this way, an entertainment era ends. The curtain has come down and the children have gone off elsewhere to play.

Meanwhile, behind that curtain, you can still faintly hear the whistle of incoming mortars, the rat-a-rat of machine guns, the sounds of actual war that go on and on and on.

For drone freaks (and these days Washington seems full of them), here’s the good news: drones are hot. Not long ago (2006 to be exact), the air force could barely get a few armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air at once; in 2009, the number was thirty-eight; by 2011, it will reputedly be fifty, and beyond that, in every sense, the sky’s the limit.

Better yet, for the latest generation of armed surveillance drones, whole new surveillance capabilities will soon be available. Their newest video system, due to be deployed next year, has been dubbed “Gorgon Stare” after the creature in Greek mythology whose gaze turned its victims to stone. According to Julian Barnes of the
Los Angeles Times
, Gorgon Stare will offer a “pilot” back in the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA, the ability to “stare” via twelve video feeds (where only one now exists) at a 1.5 square mile area, and then, with Hellfire missiles and bombs, assumedly turn any part of that area into rubble. Within the year, that viewing capacity is expected to double to three square miles.

What we’re talking about here is the gaze of the gods, updated in corporate labs for the modern American war-fighter—a gaze that can be focused on whatever moves just about anywhere on the planet, 24/7, with an instant ability to blow it away. And what’s true of video capacity will be no less true of the next generation of drone sensors—and, of course,
of drone weaponry like that “5-pound missile the size of a loaf of French bread” meant in some near-robotic future to replace the present 100-pound Hellfire missile, possibly on the Avenger or Predator C, the next generation drone under development at General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. Everything, in fact, will be almost infinitely upgradeable, since we’re still in the robotics equivalent of the age of the “horseless carriage,” as Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution assures us. The first nanodrones will, according to Jane Mayer of the
New Yorker
, be able to “fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

When it comes to drones, the air force and the CIA are no longer the only games in town. The navy wants in, too. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, reports Jason Paur of
Wired
’s Danger Room blog, is looking for “a robotic attack aircraft that can land and take off from a carrier.” According to Paur, the X-47B, which theoretically should be able to do just that, could be checking out those carrier decks by 2011 and be fully operational by 2025.

Not only that, but drones are leaving the air for the high seas where they are called unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). In fact, Israel—which, along with the United States, is leading the way on drones—reportedly has already launched USVs off the coast of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The United States can’t be far behind, and it seems that, like their airborne cousins, these ships, too, will be weaponized.

Soon, it seems, the world will be a drone fest. In his first nine months, President Obama authorized more drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal borderlands than the Bush administration did in its last three years in office.

In Washington, drones are even considered the “de-escalatory” option for the Afghan War by some critics. Among the few people who don’t adore them are hard-core war-fighters who don’t want an armada of robot planes standing in the way of sending in more troops. Vice President Joe Biden, however, is a drone-atic. He reportedly wanted to up their missions, especially in Pakistan, rather than go the full boots-on-the-ground route.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates jumped onto the drone band-wagon early. He has long been pressing the air force to invest less in expensive
manned aircraft—he’s called the F-35, still in development, the last manned fighter aircraft—but more in the robotic kind.

Coming back to earth for a moment, what drones do is put wings on the Bush-era Guantánamo principle that Washington has an inalienable right to act as a global judge, jury, and executioner, and in doing so remain beyond the reach of any court or law. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, has suggested that the U.S. drone attacks might constitute war crimes under international law: “[T]he CIA is running a program that is killing significant numbers of people and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international laws.” But that will matter little. When it comes to drones, you don’t have to be a prophet to predict the future, since we’ve already experienced it with previous wonder weapons.

Militarily speaking, in fact, we might as well be in the film
Groundhog Day
, in which Bill Murray’s character is forced to live out the same twenty-four hours again and again, with all the grimness of that idea and none of the charm of that actor. We’ve repeatedly seen advanced weapons systems, like the atomic bomb, or mind-boggling technologies of war hailed for opening near-utopian paths to victory and future peace. Take “the electronic battlefield” in Vietnam, which was supposed to be an antidote to brute and ineffective American airpower. That high-tech, advanced battlefield of invisible sensors was to bring an end to the impunity of guerrillas and infiltrating enemy armies. No longer capable of going anywhere undetected, they would have nowhere to hide.

In the 1980s, we had President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, quickly dubbed “Star Wars” by its critics, a label that he accepted with amusement. “If you will pardon my stealing a film line—the Force is with us,” he said in his usual genial way. His dream, as he told the American people, was to create an “impermeable” anti-missile shield over the United States—“like a roof protects a family from rain”—that would end the possibility of nuclear attack from the Soviet Union and so create peace in our time, or, if you were of a more critical turn of mind, offer the possibility of a freebie nuclear assault on the Soviets. In the Gulf War, “smart bombs” and smart missiles were praised as the military saviors of the moment. They were to give war the kind of “precision” that would lower
civilian deaths to the vanishing point and, as the neocons of the Bush administration would claim in the next decade, free the U.S. military to “decapitate” any regime we loathed. All this would be possible without so much as touching the civilian population, which would, of course, then welcome us as liberators. And later, there was “netcentric warfare,” that Rumsfeldian high-tech favorite. Its promise was that advanced information-sharing technology would create an uplinked force so savvy about changing battlefield realities and so crushing that a mere demo or two would cow any “rogue” nation or insurgency into submission.