Urban Warrior Exercises In No. California May Face Showdown, or Not

Well, Ive had to type in this first article by hand. Big groan!

Saw the front page headlines yesterday, in the print version, when visiting a CA beach area. The web-site for the newspaper is still under construction (http://www.santa-cruz.com).

Diane

Santa Cruz County Sentinel

War Games Showdown Looms -- Marines Face Coastal Commission Hearing On Urban Warrior Exercise

March 10, 1999

By Dan White
Sentinel staff writer

The U.S. Marines must face the state Coastal Commission before it can storm Monterey this weekend.

The commission will hold an 11th-hour public hearing Thursday on the Marines declaration that their urban warrior exercise Saturday wont harm the coastal environment.

If the commission accepts the negative declaration, the Marines will be ready to go. Rejection, on the other hand, could lead to a bureaucratic mess.

One option, commission staffer Mark Delaplaine said Tuesday, in that the commission could seek a restraining order to delay or stop the event, which has drawn protests from peace groups, environmentalists and the Santa Cruz City Council.

But the commissions authority over the event is something of a grey area. The Coastal Commission is a state agency that regulates development of the coastal zone, extending three miles out to sea and two miles inland.

Does the commission have veto authority? No Delaplaine said, Can (the Marines) completely ignore us? No.

Delaplaine is recommending the commission accept the Marines negative declaration. But he said he cant speak for the board and cannot predict how it will act.

The event involves an amphibious landing and a mock assault on play-acting terrorists holed up at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. The goal is to capture make-believe chemical weapons. Vehicles and military personnel will then proceed two miles across town to the Presidio of Monterey.

It has been billed as a way to heighten anti-terrorist measures in urban settings. Protesters, who plan non-violent resistance, say maneuvers will hone the militarys ability to quell domestic upheaval.

Delaplaine said the Marines did not submit their environmental statement to the commission until February, one to two months late.

The Marines gave no explanation for the delay, Delaplaine said. He said this would make it hard for the Marines and the commission to work out alternatives and compromises if a disagreement comes up at Thursdays commission hearing in Carmel.

But were used to that. It happens all the time. At least they submitted it before the event. That was useful at least to some degree.

Numerous calls to Marine and Navy Postgraduate school representatives were not returned Tuesday.

The Marines plan already has the stamp of approval of the state Department of Fish and Game and the Monterey Bay Marine Sanctuary, although sanctuary officials have added some conditions intended to protect marine life.

Scott Kathey, spokesman for the sanctuary, said the military has agreed to keep helicopters a minimum of 1,000 feet above the bay instead of the planned 500 feet to minimize wildlife disturbance. He also said the Marines will keep away from the Monterey harbor so they dont interfere with recreational fishermen. Salmon fishing seasons opens the day of the exercise.

Kathey said he understood the military still needed state approval.

It is a federal agency coming into state sovereign waters to conduct an activity and if the state doesnt approve, they cant proceed.

Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan said she needs to hear the views of the public at the hearing before she can form an opinion on the Marines environmental statement.

But the Marines have reason to be concerned about the Thursday meeting.

We can make a determination that presumably overrides this, Wan said. She added that the Marines could appeal the decision to the federal Secretary of Commerce, who would serve as a mediator.

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), March 11, 1999

Answers

For the San Francisco Bay Area side of the story ...

Troops Come in Peace, Marines Emphasize
`Urban Warrior' exercises begin Saturday

Henry K. Lee, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 9, 1999
)1999 San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/03/09/MN88544.DTL

Military officials said yesterday that a combat simulation dubbed Urban Warrior will cause only minimal disruption when Marines hit the shores of Monterey and the East Bay in the coming week.

At a media briefing at the former Oak Knoll Naval Hospital in Oakland, where the bulk of the daylight exercises will take place, officials tried to allay fears of environmental damage and soldiers running roughshod and glorifying violence.

``It's not going to be `Saving Private Ryan' come across the beach kind of stuff,'' said Lieutenant Colonel Gary Schenkel, operations officer with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.

The operation, a large-scale test of 21st century warfare in a coastal urban environment, begins Saturday in Monterey with an amphibious landing, helicopter assault and mass-casualty drill.

From March 15 to 18, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance and urban combat exercises will take place in Oakland and Alameda, and reconnaissance operations will be conducted at the Concord Naval Weapons Station and Moffett Field.

Protesters and residents near the sites of the exercises have lodged concerns about the noise made by guns and helicopters.

In a demonstration yesterday, a Marine fired blank ammunition from an M-16 rifle from both inside and outside the Oak Knoll hospital building. The shots, which were relatively muted, probably will not be heard by nearby residents, officials said.

The large CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter will be used only at the former Alameda Naval Air Station, now called Alameda Point. Smaller AH-1 Huey and H-46 Sea Knight helicopters will fly over Oakland, at least 1,000 feet above the ground.

Marines also will test global positioning systems among the highrises in San Francisco's Financial District.

Capping the events will be an exposition from March 19 to 21 at Jack London Square that includes military bands and Harrier jet and parafoil demonstrations.

Oak Knoll will stand in as a friendly foreign country -- dubbed ``Country Green'' -- that asked the Marines to assist it in fighting an enemy nation, code-named ``Country Orange.'' Urban Warrior is based in part on recent U.S. military operations in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia.

Soldiers from the 23rd Marine reserves in San Bruno, along with civilians hired through a casting company, will make up the enemy element. But the events will be largely unscripted.

The armed services are working with local law enforcement personnel to make sure that planned protests are accommodated. ``That's why we wear the uniform, to protect the rights under the Constitution,'' Schenkel said.

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), March 11, 1999.

Buried towards the bottom of this long, informative article, is the question ...

Are our armed forces now preparing for future domestic unrest following say, a mass Y2K panic?

And theres a brief mention of Texas and the Delta Force exercises.

Diane

From the Monterey Coast Weekly ...

Marine Invasion

http://www.coastweekly.com/

Click on ...

Two If By Sea 03/11/99

As the date approaches for the Marines' Urban Warrior training exercise in Monterey, many people wonder how things got this far.

By Sue Fishkoff

If all goes according to plan, this Saturday, the U.S. Marine Corps' 1st Expeditionary Force, backed up by the Navy's 3rd Fleet, will conduct the Urban Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment in Monterey. And, as "D-Day" approaches, more and more residents are asking-- perhaps too late--why this has been allowed to take place.

In what is acknowledged as the largest such military training exercise in a North American city, Monterey will act as a fictional foreign country that has asked the Marines for help in a terrorist attack. About 200 Marines will land Saturday morning at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) beach and will spend the day "looking" for a mock chemical or biological weapon, first at the NPS and then at the Presidio, where they will be joined by another 150 Marines brought in by helicopter. Monterey's police, fire and public works departments will take part in the exercise, which will end at about 4pm, when the Marines take off for Oakland and another four days of training.

The Marines say this exercise is part of the military's effort to train for the kind of warfare they expect to encounter in the 21st century, focusing on the testing of new computerized command and control communications technologies. Military operations in the future "won't be like Desert Storm," explains Lt. Cmdr. Jack Hanzlik, spokesman for the Navy's 3rd Fleet. "We'll have terrorist-type acts operating within civilian environments."

To that end, over the past two years, the Army's Special Forces have conducted urban warfighting exercises in 21 U.S. cities. The Marines have conducted Urban Warrior exercises in four cities; Monterey will be the fifth.

Link

http:// www.mcwl.quantico.usmc.mil/

(Hot Link: Urban Warrior Detailed information from the USMC point of view.)

As increasingly more citizens and officials come out in opposition to the landing, Monterey may turn out be to the most contentious.

Growing Concerns

Although the Marines began discussing their plans with the city of Monterey and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary late last summer, the public only became aware of it in late December, when the first media reports trickled in. As more details became known this year, more and more concerns were voiced by residents wondering why this kind of exercise was being planned for Monterey Bay, with so little public input.

There are political concerns: Who authorized this? Why was it reviewed only by staff, on both the Monterey City Council and California Coastal Commission levels, instead of coming up for full discussion by those bodies? Why was there no public meeting before permission was granted?

There are environmental concerns: Why is this kind of large-scale military exercise taking place in a federally protected National Marine Sanctuary? Their hovercrafts will be zooming through a kelp bed, past otters, sea lions, harbor seals and other wildlife; Marines will be landing on our fragile dunes, where protected species live and nest; combat helicopters will be flying at low altitudes over the bay, where large concentrations of marine animals congregate.

The National Parks Services blocked Urban Warrior from taking place March 14-18 at the San Francisco Presidio, part of the federally protected Golden Gate Park. Why haven't our own Sanctuary officials raised their voices in protest?

Finally, there are concerns involving the protection of civil rights: Why are the U.S. Marines practicing counter-terrorism tactics in a U.S. city at all? If Monterey police and emergency officials participate in the exercise, doesn't that violate the federal ban on military training of civilian law enforcement personnel?

Opposition to the exercise has been growing, particularly in the past two weeks. More than 50 critics showed up at a Monterey City Council meeting March 2, taking the mic to vent their opposition. A non- violent demonstration and candlelight vigil are planned for this Friday, with acts of civil disobedience planned to take place during the actual exercise Saturday. Monterey Police Captain David Fortune says that all 62 sworn officers and 22 civilians in the department have been put on alert, and he's notified the sheriff's office that he might call for reinforcements from other county police departments. The department also has an Incident Response Team trained to deal with civil disobedience. "We don't know what the reaction will be," Fortune says. "We hope it will be peaceful." Meanwhile, he adds, "Pray for rain."

The world media will be here, including TV crews from Germany, the UK and ABC Nightline. "We're the only service that has tried to hold these things in cities, that's why they're interested," explains a Marine spokesman.

David Dilworth, co-chair of Responsible Consumers of the Monterey Peninsula, is prepared to ask for a last-minute federal injunction, on the grounds that the U.S. Marines are violating procedural requirements that a federal agency must follow when operating in a marine sanctuary. Dilworth, who says he "has a lot of respect for the military," claims the Marines did not seriously examine alternative sites, as they were required to do, and will be disturbing the bay's marine life. Dilworth can only ask for a federal injunction 24 hours after the Marines file their required "notice of determination." If they file at the last minute, Dilworth says, they'll avoid the injunction.

Everyone agrees, in fact, that it's highly unlikely Urban Warrior will be halted at this late date. The Coastal Commission will hold the community's first public meeting on the exercise this morning (Thursday, March 11), starting at 9am at the Carmel Mission Inn. Commissioners will review its potential environmental impact and listen to public comments, but Mark Delaplaine, the commission's supervisor of federal consistency, admits there's very little likelihood they will call for an injunction now.

"It is going to happen Saturday," predicts Delaplaine. "There's no possibility I can see of it being postponed."

But if the exercise is halted, it may be because of a six-inch-tall, sandy colored, black-capped shorebird called the Western Snowy Plover.

Environmental Issues

Protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, the snowy plover is now in its nesting period, and there are plenty of them at the NPS beach. "They blend right into the sand," says Mike Parker, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in San Francisco. "There's no way a Marine running down the beach would notice them. We have vehicles run over them all the time."

Blocking a full-day joint Marine-Navy military training exercise because of the snowy plover is kind of like the feds arresting mobster Meyer Lansky for tax evasion. It may not be the main reason you want them stopped, but it gets the job done.

"We protect our otters and sea lions with more stringent regulations than our civil rights," notes one critic of the Marine exercise.

Indeed, until today's Coastal Commission meeting, the only public input possible were written comments on the Marine's own draft Environmental Assessment (EA), copies of which are still available at the Monterey and Seaside public libraries. Comments were restricted only to those environmental points covered in the EA, and just a handful of residents bothered to send in letters.

Now that public concerns are being vented, other groups are jumping on the bandwagon. The Sanctuary folks, who previously saw no reason to haul the Marines onto the carpet, just last week changed their tune.

At the beginning of February, Sanctuary regulatory coordinator Scott Kathey explained to this newspaper that "as long as the Marines do what they say they'll do, the impact on the ocean will be minimal." But on March 3, the Sanctuary sent an eight-page list of environmental challenges to Marine headquarters, citing concerns including disturbance of sea life and discharge of waste in the bay.

The Sanctuary's letter states: "The [proposed military exercise] is not exempt from Sanctuary regulatory prohibitions. This finding is a change from our earlier position."

Chief among several environmental concerns are, Kathey says, the noise that will be generated by low-flying helicopters. The Marines have agreed to raise their flying altitude from 500 ft. to 1,000 ft. above the bay, acceding to Sanctuary demands, but Kathey says the Sanctuary is still concerned about the operation's proximity to large congregations of marine animals, particularly otters, brown pelicans, harbor seals, sea lions and gray whale mothers and young who are migrating north through our waters.

The plan to put "spotters" in the amphibious landing craft and on helicopters, to watch out for marine mammals and divert the vehicles, is impractical, the Sanctuary writes. "Military pilots and aircrews are not trained marine mammal observers," the letter states. They "will be preoccupied with the flight mission," and even if they see whales or other marine life, "the response time for even a single helicopter, much less a formation, would be inadequate to gain the necessary altitude to avoid disturbance."

The Sanctuary also questions why the Marines chose Monterey, pointing out in their letter that Monterey fails to meet three of the site selection criteria identified by the Marines themselves: The Marines said they wanted a city with more than a million people, a working port, and tall downtown buildings, none of which Monterey has.

Kathey says he and other Sanctuary officials were first briefed by the Marines last August. The Navy briefed them later, and that concerns him as well. "We get these separate briefings from them, although they're both within the Navy," Kathey says. "That's one of the reasons why we want to get written confirmation. The Marines and the Navy have made a lot of verbal commitments to us over the last few months, and we want to make sure everyone's reading off the same sheet of music."

Sanctuary officials are constrained in what they can do about banning such military exercises in Monterey Bay. Activities can only be banned if they clearly contravene stated federal regulations. "We administer the [National Marine Sanctuary] Act, but we can't close off the ocean," Kathey explains.

And the Sanctuary, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is caught up in the unwieldy bureaucracy of the Department of Commerce to which it belongs, says Vicki Nichols, executive director of Save Our Shores. "There are many things that happen in Washington that prevent the Sanctuary from acting as an autonomous body," she maintains.

Nevertheless, Nichols says that this particular one-day military training exercise is low on her list of environmental priorities. "There will certainly be some environmental impact, and we question the appropriateness of this activity within a national marine sanctuary, but that's not as much of a concern to me personally as the whole concept of a military operation in Monterey," she says.

An Administrative Matter

How was approval secured for Urban Warrior? The Marines' first point of contact was the office of Monterey City Manager Fred Meurer, and his deputy Fred Cohn, sometime late last summer.

"The Marines expressed a desire to coordinate activities with us," Cohn says. In fact, he explains, the military does not need a city's permission to conduct exercises, so long as whenever military personnel are on non-military territory, they follow the laws of the land. In this case, the Marines will only be on public land when they're travelling through city streets up to the Presidio. Even if the city did not cooperate with them, Cohn says, "as long as they stop at the red lights, they have as much right as anyone else to drive on our streets."

But because Monterey is cooperating, and will provide police escorts and traffic control, the potential traffic problems will be much less, Cohn asserts.

The Monterey City Council first heard about the operation at its Jan. 5 meeting, as a staff report item. Councilmembers recall there was no discussion, and no concerns expressed. The first public outcry came only at the council's March 2 meeting.

"This was organized with no public involvement," says Richard Criley, longtime local ACLU leader. Stressing that the ACLU has not taken an official position on this exercise, he warns, "The military does not have a good record of staying within the bounds of civilian command and control. When the public is not involved in the decision-making on something like this, it tends to reinforce suspicions about the motivation."

Former County Supervisor and Coastal Commission member Sam Karas faults the city for not holding public forums. "After12 years on the Board of Supervisors, I've found that whenever you have controversy, you need to have a public meeting for people to air their feelings," he says.

Karas is also skeptical about the Marines' claim that their exercise will not cause undue local disturbance. He points to Marine training exercises carried out in the Los Padres forest south of Big Sur two years in a row in the early '90s. "We had a problem with them," he states. "They left the place in a mess. The worst thing was the helicopters. They flew very low, some of them barely above rooftops."

Even Congressmember Sam Farr chastised the Monterey City Council for not involving the public at an earlier date, in a prepared statement read out loud at the March 2 council meeting. "I do not condemn the military exercise per se, and I do understand its purpose, but I believe there was an obligation to alert the community-at-large," Farr stated, pointing out that he, too, should have been consulted. "The community has a right to provide input to activities that occur on its streets."

On March 2, the Santa Cruz City Council passed a resolution condemning the Urban Warrior exercise in Monterey Bay. That same day, the issue wasn't even on the Monterey City Council's agenda.

"People requested it be put on the agenda, and they refused," charges Peter Lumsdaine, of the Resource Center for Non-Violence in Santa Cruz.

Councilmember Ruth Vreeland, who says she and other councilmembers considered the military exercise a routine administrative matter when they first heard about it from staff in January, says that after the March 2 meeting, she believes the council made a mistake. "After last Tuesday, we learned that it should have been on the agenda," she admits, saying that she tried to have it placed on the agenda late as an emergency measure, but couldn't get it through the bureaucratic hoops in time.

Now she believes the City Council, Coastal Commission and Sanctuary officials should have held a joint community forum. "We should have done this earlier and done it together," she asserts. "You can learn from hindsight."

Monterey Mayor Dan Albert, however, was and still is, flabbergasted at the public outcry. Quite frankly, he says, he considers the training exercise as a purely administrative matter that could easily be handled by city staff. City streets are closed off periodically when TV commercials or films are shot locally, and no one raises a fuss about that, he points out. "In my judgment, I didn't think what they were going to do would be [seen as] such a big thing," he says.

And besides, he continues, the military has a long, friendly relationship with the city of Monterey, dating back to the city's very founding. "We have a history of a military presence in our city since the beginning," he says. And there's a quid-pro-quo here that Albert finds only fair. "We have two military installations here, two very prestigious schools. They're good citizens, they do all kinds of things to help out the city. So when they want us to be of assistance to them, I really didn't find that objectionable.

"I personally felt it was important for them to have this training exercise. I don't think it will be much of an inconvenience to the city of Monterey, nor will it be that destructive to the environment."

The city of Oakland hopes to reap $4 million during the four days Urban Warrior moves to its city, mostly money spent by the Marines billeted there. Monterey is not expecting any financial windfall from the operation. That wasn't even a consideration, Albert says. The cost to the city will also be insignificant, amounting to the salaries of a couple dozen public safety employees, some of who may have been working that day anyway.

And no, the mayor does not believe anything would have changed if the City Council had held public meetings on the proposed operation earlier. "I don't know what the difference would have been," he says. "When I heard the public speak the other night, I didn't hear anything that would have changed my mind."

Training For What?

The Marine Corps views its Urban Warrior training exercises as preparation both for fighting in an urban environment, and offering humanitarian assistance after a disaster, such as a flood or earthquake. "The exercise is not designed as an invasion," says Lt. Cmdr. Jack Hazlink of the Navy's 3rd Fleet. "The script is the Marines are called in to support local agencies in a disaster situation."

But some critics of the operation suspect it may have more far- reaching goals than those outlined in official Department of Defense documents.

Although Marine and Navy spokespeople maintain they're training solely for overseas operations, some critics see the exercise as hovering dangerously close to illegal domestic involvement. "We see the Navy- Marine Corps teams as becoming America's 911 service in the future," states Hanzlik. Maybe that's not appropriate, some critics suggest. In a local disaster, including terrorist attacks, local law enforcement are supposed to handle things first, before turning to state and finally federal law enforcement back-up, such as the FBI and National Guard. Only as a last resort are active military to be called in.

Phil Butler is a retired U.S. Navy Commander and former instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School, who was a POW in North Vietnam for eight years. With 20 years in the service, Butler says he is "very supportive of the military." And he says that domestic law enforcement handled our nation's two terrorist bombings--the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma federal building--just fine.

"The last thing they need in any of these places is a bunch of 18- and 19-year-old cowboys roaring up in hovercrafts and helicopters," Butler says. "In this country we rely on our police force, and we keep the military out of domestic affairs. That's how people's civil rights get violated."

Dick Criley agrees. "The explanation for the scenarios they're enacting here are either so ridiculous you can't believe it, or they violate the line between civilian and military rule," he says. "They don't make sense, except as practice for military intervention in the law enforcement practice of a local community."

Criley and Butler recall the 1960s, when the U.S. military was called in to quell demonstrations protesting the Vietnam War. Are our armed forces now preparing for future domestic unrest following say, a mass Y2K panic?

"These exercises represent the same old story of [U.S. troops] supporting the Haves against the Have-nots," says Brian Willson, co- chair of the Monterey chapter of Veterans for Peace. "They are unique because of their venue, conducted in civilian urban communities rather than on military training bases. The targets, however, remain the same, whether here or abroad."

Butler blames Monterey city leaders for giving the Marines the green light. Although the Marines don't technically need a city's permission to hold an exercise, they wouldn't come in if they weren't wanted. "If the city had said no, the Marines would go to Camp Pendleton, where they ought to be doing this," he says.

Even though live ammo is not used in training exercises, the violence, speed and confusion means that people often get hurt. On Feb. 8 in Kingsville, Texas, the Army's Delta Force inadvertently set a fire station alight during a nighttime training exercise, an exercise so secret even the town's mayor didn't know about it.

"It's an invasion of our civil rights and an invasion of our privacy to do this in our peaceful community," Butler says. "And it's dangerous."

Despite the late-blooming protests, it seems likely that when Saturday morning dawns, Urban Warrior will hit our shores. Some folks will turn out to watch, either at Monterey's Wharf #2, or up at the Defense Language Institute. A couple of dive shops will reroute SCUBA classes, fishing boats will avoid the special water lane set up for the Marine landing crafts, but other than that, most of the city will go about its business.

"I don't anticipate this having a big impact on the city," says Monterey business leader David Armanasco, who sat on the Coastal Commission until just last week. "I don't think visitors will even know about it. I see it as a non-event for most people. Life is going to go on quite normally."

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), March 11, 1999.

Don't you have anything better to do?

-- This is (getting@ridiculous.com), March 11, 1999.