VLVL: Big Brother & the War that Never Ends

[pynchonoid]

Thanks, Dave, for your fine notes; I'm hoping, now
that the off-topic literary discussion has apparently
ended, that more folks will join in the Vineland
discussion, and sorry that my current projects and
travel limit my ability to take a more active role.

In response to your mention of 1984-style
surveillance, and as a reminder (if any is needed) of
the way Pynchon uses his artful prose to reveal some
of the ugliest truths (keeping Marcuse in mind:
"Because art's form--which is always an idealization,
accdording to Marcuse--is at odds with the subject
matter it encompasses, it is able to 'break the
monopoly of established reality. . . .In this rupture,
which is the achievement of the aesthetic forjm, the
fictitious world of art appears as true reality"
--Robert Hobbs, quoting Marcuse's _The Aesthetic
Dimension:  Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics_,
in _Mark Lombardi Global Networks_, p. 39, published
by Independent Curators International to accompany the
eponymous exhibition, which is worth seeing in NYC
before it closes on Dec 18 and worth looking for
elsewhere):

Persistent ISR Would Allow U.S. Military to Function
as Strike Force
 By MEGAN SCULLY

The U.S. military must cast an intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance net over the world to
keep a watchful eye on the current threat — a smart
and patient enemy with access to commercial
technology, a senior Army official said Nov. 17. 

“We have to put a globe, if you will, a sphere, over
the world from an intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance capability standpoint,” said Edward
Bair, Army program executive officer for intelligence,
electronic warfare and sensors. “We must be able to
see, be able to hear, be able to smell, be able to
feel what’s going on anytime, anyplace in the world.” 

Maintaining persistent ISR around the globe would
allow the military to continue to function as a
“strategically relevant, continental United
States-based projection force,” Bair said during the
Defense News Media Group conference, ISR Integration
2003: The Net-Centric Vision, in Arlington, Va.

 The “sphere over space” would include joint force and
national ISR assets working in tandem to give a
complete picture of a specific operation or region.

 The assets should be “available to whoever gets on
the network,” Bair said. “It shouldn’t matter to you
or the commander making decisions where that
information came from as long as you know the
relevance and timeliness of that information.”

 Joint assets would then make up a complex sensor grid
populated by human intelligence, ground-based signals
intelligence, unmanned aerial vehicles, unattended
ground sensors, and robotic and unmanned sensors.

 One of the military’s biggest ISR challenge lies in
taking information gathered by troops on the ground
beyond the “local level” to the theater level, Bair
said. An expanded network of human intelligence
information would allow commanders to look for
patterns and trends to “see what might be happening.” 

Another primary challenge is converting the
information gathered by the various sensors into
actionable intelligence for all commanders, not just
those from a certain division or corps, Bair said. 

“How do we take that information and make it available
to a bunch of different commanders making decisions,”
Bair said. “That’s our No. 1 shortcoming.” 

The Distributed Common Ground System eventually will
serve as the filtering tool that will ensure
information is available to ground commanders,
enabling them to make “decisive decisions at the right
place, right time,” he said. 

<http://www.defensenews.com/conferences/isr1103/2405322.html>



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