U.S. Army Plans To Battle Anti-Government Dissidents In “Megacities”

by PAUL JOSEPH WATSON | SEPTEMBER 2, 2014

The U.S. Army is preparing to fight political dissidents who challenge the power of the state as “megacities” become the battleground of the future, according to a new report in the Army Times.

The article details how the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) worked with US Army Special Operations Command, the chief of staff’s Strategic Studies Group and the UK’s Ministry of Defence earlier this year to wargame the future of armed combat, which will revolve around the neutralization of groups “who can influence the lives of the population while undermining the authority of the state,” a chillingly vague description which could easily be applied to political dissidents.

The plan foresees an unprecedented realignment of U.S. military strategy focused around putting “boots on the ground” in megacities to deal with “politically dispossessed” populations while relying on “more lethal and more autonomous” methods.

“It is inevitable that at some point the United States Army will be asked to operate in a megacity and currently the Army is ill-prepared to do so,” asserted a report by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno’s Strategic Studies Group, while Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster warned that the Army will increasingly have to expand its presence to battle an enemy which operates in “other contested spaces like organized crime and politics.”

The report also notes how the Army will utilize directed energy weapons which “would allow U.S. to have direct-fire capabilities with significant logistics reduction, and to counter enemy long-range missile capability.”

The article also cites a recent report by the Australian Army which identifies the fact that “these cities represent the battlefields of the future.”

Confirmation that the U.S. Army is preparing to fight disaffected groups and individuals who attempt to ‘undermine the authority of the state’, which could apply to a whole host of perfectly legal political activities, is particularly concerning given the recent militarized police response to unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

A 2012 study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland which was funded by the Department of Homeland Security lists Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty” and “suspicious of centralized federal authority” alongside violent terrorist groups.

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