Source: American Free Press
Keith Johnson
The Alternative Futures Symposium in
Chantilly, Va. was all part of the U.S. Army’s Unified Quest 2012
exercise, the latest in a series of annual war games that in recent
years has focused on America’s response to a global financial meltdown
in which average citizens took to the streets en masse.
Keith Johnson
The Alternative Futures Symposium in
Chantilly, Va. was all part of the U.S. Army’s Unified Quest 2012
exercise, the latest in a series of annual war games that in recent
years has focused on America’s response to a global financial meltdown
in which average citizens took to the streets en masse.
In November 2010, CNBC’s Eamon
Javers had this to say about last year’s exercise: “Ever since the crash
of 2008, the defense-intelligence establishment has been paying a lot
of attention to global markets and how they can serve as a threat to
U.S. national security interests.”
Javers went on to report: “The Army is
having a very interesting yearlong exercise called Unified Quest 2011.
In that war-gaming series, the Army is looking at the implications of a
large-scale economic breakdown in the U.S. that would force the Army to
keep domestic order amid civil unrest and deal with global fragmented
power and drastically lower budgets.”
According to Javers, 30 military
officials from the Marine Corps War College were concerned enough to
visit the trading floor of JP Morgan in October 2010 to study volatile
markets and the economy.
Inside Defense magazine also
reported on Unified Quest 2011 in a November 2010 article entitled “Army
Officials Think Through the What-ifs of a Global Economic Collapse,”
wherein it was revealed: “Officials picked the scenario of a worldwide
economic collapse because it was deemed a plausible course of events
given the current global security environment. In such a future, the
United States would be broke, causing a domino effect that would push
economies across the globe into chaos.”
According to Army Lt. Col. Mark
Elfendahl, these were some of the conclusions drawn during a three-day
session connected to that exercise: “The Army would have to
significantly alter its ‘investment portfolio,’ focusing on light and
inexpensive forces . . . an increased focus on domestic activities might
be a way of justifying whatever Army force structure the country can
still afford.”
“The only silver lining,” concluded the
article, is that “the Army would have an influx of qualified recruits as
the result of an unemployment rate of 25 and 30 percent.”
Tracing the government’s contingency plans back even further—to 2008—we find The Washington Post and Russia Today
both reporting on the Pentagon’s plans to train 20,000 troops by 2011
to help as a response to threats of a possible mass terror attack or
civil unrest following an economic collapse.
In July, Shepard Ambelas wrote for the popular alternative news website The Intel Hub
that the Pentagon’s 2008 announcement dovetails “into the current troop
and equipment movements around the country reported by truckers as well
as many troop sightings by citizens.”
Ambelas added: “The military is already
taking an active role in numerous domestic policing activities in close
to a dozen states including Florida, Tennessee, California, Alabama and
Pennsylvania.”
It may be no coincidence that President
Obama’s recent announcement to have all troops return from Iraq by the
end of 2011 coincides with the anticipated economic collapse.
Will those troops now be deployed on the
streets of America? An even more relevant question might be: Will those
troops exact the same toll on this nation as they did to the one they
just left?
