[wordup] Bruce Sterling: Death to America

[Adam Shand]

You have to make it through to the last item.  The downside is perhaps
the coolest tag line I've read in a long long time.

Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, 
	and/or collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial
	capitalism.
Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.
Downside: <snip> US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to 
	you on DVD. 

Gotta love it.

Adam.

Via: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/10/61345/8100
From: http://wired.com/wired/archive/10.04/strategies.html

Death to America

It ain't gonna be easy, says Bruce Sterling, but that won't stop enemies
from trying. Thirteen strategies they might use to knock the eagle out
of the sky.

1. BUILD YOUR OWN

Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation,
telecom, the works.

Upside: Legal. Can be accomplished largely using commercial products and
services. American contractors might even build a lot of it for you.

Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke. Looks
suspicious. Takes years. Yankees in good position to blow your assets to
smithereens.

2. DECAPITATION

Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a
truck nuke.

Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties
among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale. Can be
repeated in other cities.

Downside: Nukes hard to build. Sets dangerous precedent that puts your
own cities at risk. US space assets still up there, available to US
allies even if US no longer exists. Loss of Congress and Washington
bureaucrats might be dangerous tonic to US military.

3. ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE

Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling
spacecraft circuitry.

Upside: Inexpensive, quick, ruthless. Disables civilian assets,
including pagers and TV, by stripping circuits on ground. To evade
detection, bomb can be disguised as something benign, like a commercial
satellite.

Downside: Some military sats hardened against radiation. Might destroy
your own space hardware, if you have any. Unlikely to destroy distant
sats; might destroy very little, in which case you've gone nuclear
against a superpower.

4. SPACE PARASITES

Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to
expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on
signal.

Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable.

Downside: Hard to test. Americans likely to build fleet of nanosats
teensier and sneakier than yours.

5. SANDBAGGING

Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them
into Swiss cheese.

Upside: Ultracheap. Slowly suffocates space power. Might be done
persistently in tiny quantities by some unorthodox launch method, say
electromagnetic rail-gun launch or Jules Verne space cannon.

Downside: Space too big to pollute. Armor countermeasures possible.
Retaliation by all space users likely. Sand sifts down into atmosphere
after a while.

6. SPOOFING

Method: Mimic American datastream. Hack satellites, own them.

Upside: Bloodless, sexy, wired. Gains huge military advantage.

Downside: Requires vulnerable ground stations plus better hacking,
crypto, and dongle skills than NSA and Air Force. Still can't launch,
repair, or replace space assets.

7. JAMMING

Method: Deploy huge electromagnetic noisemakers that thwart US
communications.

Upside: Disables guided missiles, turns smart bombs into dumb bombs.
Good for locals who communicate via fiber optics.

Downside: Ineffective beyond theater. Noisemakers make obvious targets.

8. ATTACK GROUND STATIONS

Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground
stations.

Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment.
Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified.

Downside: Secret mobile backup facilities likely to exist. US has large
techie population, can train more space geeks.

9. DENIAL AND DECEPTION

Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on
surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage
everything.

Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive
munitions.

Downside: Windowless cave quarters bad for soldier morale. Constant,
consistent deception hard to maintain. Avoiding surveillance increases
cost of all operations.

10. ESPIONAGE

Method: Bribe or co-opt Yankee sat personnel, obtain manuals, secrets.

Upside: Cheap, traditional. Proven success with Pollard, Walker, Falcon
and Snowman.

Downside: Satellites return to US control once mole is discovered.

11. DEATH RAY

Method: Build laser or particle beam. Blind or cook satellites from
ground.

Upside: Unexpected, shocking, repeatable. Appealing to Aum
Shinrikyo-style tech-literate madmen.

Downside: Ambitious, expensive, hard to conceal. Requires huge power
source. Works only in clear weather. Invites swift conventional
retaliation.

12. WAR BY OTHER MEANS

Method: Abandon conventional warfare. Go nuclear, descend into
terrorism, or both.

Upside: Everybody's doing it.

Downside: Going nuclear is expensive, destabilizing, dangerous.
Terrorists lack secure bases, logistics, traditions, esprit de corps;
"masterminds" hard to distinguish from deranged amateurs. American
social, economic, cultural pressures irresistible. Your war may devolve
into reading Noam Chomsky while sipping Coke.

13. WAIT IT OUT

Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, and/or
collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial capitalism.

Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.

Downside: Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top
challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums
spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange
drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your
discontent, sell it back to you on DVD.