[Infowarrior] - Cyborgs, Software Spies and Shadow Wars: Our 5 Years (Un)covering the Hidden Pentagon

[Richard Forno]

(c/o MM)

Cyborgs, Software Spies and Shadow Wars: Our 5 Years (Un)covering the Hidden Pentagon

	• By Noah Shachtman
	• http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/02/dr-anniversary/
	• February 21, 2012 | 
	• 2:46 pm | 
	• Categories: Blog Bidness
 
I’d like to pretend there was some master plan, that the site you see before you crept out of our skulls fully formed. But the truth is, when Sharon Weinberger and I launched Danger Room five years ago this week, we were just winging it. We wanted to write about the things we thought were cool: the Pentagon’s super-soldier project; China’s cyborg pigeons; the Navy’s puke rays and lightning guns. So we did.

Sure, we had a few explicit goals. Most of them were quickly abandoned. We slowed down the cracked-out pace. We stopped covering martial arts and quit posting music videos just for the fuck of it.

But a few things stuck. We looked on the costs and the politics and the strategies that came with the latest gear; the internet already had plenty of stroke sites for military hardware. We never accepted the idea that a “blog” couldn’t have original reporting. We maintained a sense of the absurd, to keep the steady stream of killer robots and shady defense contractors and Third World invasions from turning into a crushing gloom. And, without ever explicitly giving ourselves a direction, we kept returning to the parts of the defense world that were largely obscured from the public view: the remote labs, the secret experiments, the mercenaries, the manhunters, the idea factories, the psychological operators, therapping terrorists, the special forces raising tribal armies.

Over time, we called it the Hidden Pentagon, or the Defense Underground. A world where people earnestly try to build flying cars, collect terrorists’ scents, turn soldiers into yogis and twist Twitter accounts into honeypots. A place where it’s perfectly rational to dispatch social scientists on combat missions, transform the airwaves into weapons, and launch Shadow Wars around the globe. A reality in which militants arekilled by the the push of a button two continents away, entire towns are under constant surveillance, the most disruptive spies are software, andwe’re not even allowed to read the laws that are supposed to keep us safe.


To keep it all from getting too phantasmagoric, we tried to maintain Danger Room as a voice of reason in a world gone nuts. When Washingtonpanicked over cyberwars that weren’t or Korean missiles that couldn’t, we told D.C. to chill. When the military swooned over networked tanks or stealth destroyers or ICBMs that targeted terrorists (if they didn’t start World War III), we did our best to slap some sense into them. When policy-makers wallowed in fear of another 9/11, we told them to grow up and refuse to be terrorized.

We also made sure to see the world’s conflict zones through our own eyes: dropping howitzers over Afghanistan, coming under fire in Helmand province, surviving a bomb attack in Logar, outrunning militants on the streets of Chad, exploring Gadhafi’s bunkers in Libya, witnessing drone strikes in Israel, festering in our own stink in Iraq.

Along the way, we picked the brains of the military brass — from the head of Darpa (on our very first day) to the Defense Secretary to theChairman of the Joint Chiefs to the commander of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. We even got ourselves a full-time reporter working out of the Pentagon.

Finally — and, really, this should have been item number one — we broke news wherever and whenever we could: The rules that effectively killed frontline blogging; the seemingly shady deals done by top Pentagon officials; the previously unknown commando force eyeing Iran; thecomputer virus that infected the cockpits of the U.S. drone fleet.

Occasionally, that news even made a difference. Spencer Ackerman’s series on government Islamophobia prompted the White House to order a review of all counterterror training materials. A few weeks after this blog got started, Sharon and I posted an internal memo showing that the Marine Corps had slow-rolled urgent requests for armored vehicles in Iraq. It didn’t take long for the Secretary of Defense to order thousands of the vehicles built, giving hundreds of thousands of troops better protection against improvised bombs.

Not bad, for a bunch of reporters just riffing. Not bad, for a little website without a plan.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.