Following the success of the “social fabric” infiltration event at NYC’s Open Engagement on May 16-18, where several “social practice” artists presented on how US soft power can better infiltrate unruly and dissident cultures, CARPA has now moved into the center echelons of US global power: the White House itself. CARPA is among the instigators of the first Maker Faire at the White House, which, according to the official statement, celebrates “America’s students and entrepreneurs who are inventing the future by using new tools and techniques.” As the statement from the White House articulates, the event focuses on how “the rise of the Maker Movement represents a huge opportunity for the United States.” However, the nature of this opportunity is written between the lines, obvious only to the selected few.

The strategic timing of this Maker Faire has been highlighted by several security volunteers at Carpaleaks. Not only is this a time of spreading unrest in the Middle East with declining US leverage in the conflict, but also the date, June 18th, is (according to the White House) “to be a nationwide Day of Making when communities across America share and celebrate their involvement.” As a sign to the White House allies in the Free West, June 18th is also the anniversary of the first flight of the F-117 Nighthawk Stealth bomber, widely celebrated amongst warmongering tech fetishists in the NATO-craft communities. The stealth plane made its first widely-publicized attacks in the Gulf War of 1991, a time of unquestioned “Pax Americana” crafted by Free American hands.

Using the widely celebrated “day of stealth” as the new “nationwide Day of Making” sends a message on the true meaning of the Maker Faire at the White House: it is a day of craft mobilization across the US. The Coalition of the Willing Makers are to once again erect a global peace under the hand-crafted gun of the Free West.

The DARPA-sponsored Maker Movement in the troubled Middle East follows in the footsteps of the wildly successful 2013 Maker Faires in Saudi Arabia (Al Khobar), Jerusalem, and Cairo. It newly implements the strategy of cultural imperialist artists who work from the many CIA-sponsored Artist-In-Residence operations in the troubled region. With the new Maker Strategy by the Department of Defense, CARPA has introduced a whole series of new safe houses in the region. These sites are often nicknamed “Makerspaces” or “Hackerspaces” in CIA terminology (the CIA operated “Makerspace” in Abbottabad played a key role in organizing the killing of Osama Bin Laden). Equipped with American power tools and closely controlled by the NSA, each one is ready to produce any weaponized designs sponsored by CARPA’s close collaboration with the the DIY wing of the NRA.

Homemade mortar launcher from one of the Makerspaces in Aleppo

The development of CIA Maker Strategies in the Middle East has not least been visible in the wars in Libya and Syria, which are rife with DIY weapon systems (many inspired by the small prototype models co-instigated by CARPA).

In an interview on the White House blog, Dale Dougherty, CEO of Maker Media, also confirms what the CARPA teams are working on: killer robots hidden as toys, in the form of “an autonomous solar-powered toy that comes alive by day.” “Making is a great way for parents to engage with their kids,” Dougherty states. It is “an activity that is both fun and educational” — producing rockets, robots, and other advanced weapons systems. Similarly, Dougherty suggests that the act of making is a means to “gain control.” He references US heroes like Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford to suggest how the Maker community may reach positions of imperial power, as pragmatist politicians or heavy-handed industrialists, thereby assuring US domination in their operational fields. Of course, Steve Jobs is also celebrated as the man who put “empowering” NSA surveillance tools in every house in the developed world. “We consider them Makers,” Dougherty says of these imperialist social practice artists. These Makers, through increased efforts from the White House, will soon draw any still-innocent craft community into their political web.

We all know that interest in civil-engineer education is on a all-time low in the US, but using the hashtag #NationOfMakers, weapon manufacturers across the US and its NATO allies can follow the development of a new generation of war engineers, celebrating our future of endless civil wars.

Dougherty claims that the President is “fired up” about the Maker event in the White House, and we surmise that the treacherous CARPA agents are also satisfied with this connection between social practice, craft, and war-in-the-making as a form of democratisation of design.

The best-selling book on weaponised making

CARPA has lived a quiet life in the shadow of its bigger and more famous sibling, DARPA, so it is time for us to reveal some of the background on how CARPA has become such an important player in the last years and influential in the latest development of military tactics and warcraft in the US army and its NATO allies.

Sun Tzu’s classical book The Art of War is required reading for all officer cadets around the world. Sun Tzu’s lesser known book The Craft of War has long gone unnoticed, but is today in the bookshelf of every commanding officer. The book inspired not only Machiavelli but also Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz and his eminent work Vom Kriege (On War). Clausewitz’s especially famous metaphor “fog of war” comes originally from The Craft of War, and is actually is a mistranslation. In the original Chinese, the phrase refers to fumes from the kiln, masking the process wherein the characteristics of toughness, strength, and translucence of porcelain crystallize through kaolinite mineral mullite within the fired body of the clay. Clausewitz’s metaphor, however, came to represent the friction of warfare, both in action and organisation, and thus, in a way, still resembles the porcelain process as a warcraft. Today, there are porcelain-making courses for superior officers at the US Army Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, because the army has yet to improve upon the material’s high resistance to chemical attack and thermal shock. Porcelain also embodies the praised characteristics of the US Leader Development and Education (CAC-LD&E).

The connection between craft and military training may seem like a coincidence, but the United Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) at Fort Leavenworth was run by General David Patraeus between 2005-2007, and many officers under Patraeus also happened to cultivate great craftsmanship of North British-styled woodcarving as well as a great interest in design. Patraeus’s crew shares this interest with the classes of Brigadier General (Ret.) Shimon Naveh, the founder and former head of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI), who was invited to be part-time consultant and Artisan In Residency at the US Army’s School of Advanced Military Studies in 2007. To Naveh, the “operational art” of war can prevent forces from becoming harmfully “addicted to the present fight” (not unlike the studio crafts’ killing-loop) to instead apply new forms of war-craft, answering to the challenges of the contextual materialism at hand. Naveh and Patraeus also shared an interest in the military implementation of design and craft thinking in operational architecture, using references of famous design theorists such as Buchanan, Krippendorff, Margolin and Thackara, and (not the least) Deleuze and Guattari.

It also seems as if Patraeus promoted David Pye’s book “The Nature and Art of Workmanship” (1968) as required reading for all superior commanding officers in Iraq. Pye was an internationally recognised craftsman and professor of Furniture Design at The Royal College of Art in London 1964–1974 as well as an early proponent of the craft-led thinking which today has transformed a lot of military training into Pye and IDEO-inspired “Design Thinking”, especially since the launch of the US Army Field Manual 5-0 on The Operations Process released in March 2010, following FM 3-24 on Counterinsurgency, released in December 2006, the latter coauthored by Patraeus. The success of these two field manuals, developed in close collaboration with CARPA, builds on the earlier foundation of the field manual FM 5-426 on Carpentry, a publication from 1995 deeply inspired by the thinking of Pye and a guiding example for Patraeus and his followers who developed the successful strategies for the counter insurgency “surge” in Iraq.

All these manuals are available for download at the TRADOC-manual archive.

CARPAleaks intends to expose the deep connections between contemporary craft and US armed conflict. CARPAleaks takes as its mission not only to defend the independence of the free crafts against the Craft-Military-Industrial-Complex and the development of aggressive and craft-based “soft-power” as a force of US military domination. We must also defend the crafts from becoming a cultural weapon, like the fine arts, their “artist-run-initiatives,” and their neo-liberal aggression of “social engagement”.

Defend freedom, defend the independent crafts!