The First Earth Battalion was the name proposed by Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon, a U.S. soldier who had served in Vietnam, for his idea of a new military of supersoldiers to be organized along New Age lines. A book of the same name was published in 1982.
According to the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by journalist Jon Ronson, Channon spent time in the 1970s with many of the people in California credited with starting the Human Potential Movement, and subsequently wrote an operations manual for a First Earth Battalion. The manual was a 125-page mixture of drawings, graphs, maps, polemical essays, and point-by-point redesigns of every aspect of military life. Channon imagined a new battlefield uniform that would include pouches for ginseng regulators, divining tools, foodstuffs to enhance night vision, and a loudspeaker that would automatically emit "indigenous music and words of peace." [1] [2] A movie based on the book—released in Autumn 2009—starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey, fictionalized the First Earth Battalion as the New Earth Army.
Channon believed the Army could be the principal moral and ethical basis on which politics could harmonize in the name of the Earth. He declared that the First Earth Battalion's primary allegiance was to the planet Earth. [3] Channon envisioned that the First Earth Battalion would organize itself informally: uniforms without uniformity, structure without status, and unity powered by diversity, and members would be multicultural, with each race contributing to "rainbow power". [4] He also proposed as a guiding principle that members of the First Earth Battalion seek nondestructive methods of conflict resolution because their first loyalty is to the planet. [5]
Channon adopted the term "warrior monk" for potential members of the First Earth Battalion. [6]
According to the book Mind Wars by Ronald McRae, each member of the First Earth Battalion would be sworn to uphold a credo of "high commandos and guerrilla gurus":
A commando is a combatant, or operative of an elite light infantry or special operations force, specially trained for carrying out raids and operating in small teams behind enemy lines.
The Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – 'Gondola Wish', 'Stargate', 'Grill Flame', 'Center Lane', 'Project CF', 'Sun Streak', 'Scanate' – until 1991 when they were consolidated and rechristened as the "Stargate Project".
Jon Ronson is a British journalist, author, and filmmaker. He is known for works such as Them: Adventures with Extremists (2001), The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004), and The Psychopath Test (2011).
Ski warfare is the use of ski-equipped troops in war.
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Albert "Bert" Newton Stubblebine III was a United States Army major general whose active-duty career spanned 32 years. Beginning as an armor officer, he later transferred to intelligence. He is credited with redesigning the U.S. Army intelligence architecture during his time as commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) from 1981 to 1984, after which he retired from active service.
Psychological operations (PSYOP) are operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of governments, organizations, groups, and large foreign powers.
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James B. Channon was a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, New Age futurologist, and business consultant. He was primarily known for authoring the First Earth Battalion Operations Manual, a popular book pointing the way toward a New Age transformation in the U.S. military. The graphic-heavy publication was inspired by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.
Bert "Yank" Levy was a Canadian soldier, socialist, and military instructor who was the author/pamphleteer of one of the first manuals on guerrilla warfare, which was widely circulated with more than a half million published. During his career, Yank served with irregular forces in several parts of the world throughout the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in the Spanish Civil War, and was a significant figure at the Osterley Park training school for the British Home Guard during World War II. Similar combat training was provided to forces in the United States and Canada, and he was an itinerant lecturer and provocateur on the subject.
John B. Alexander is a retired United States Army colonel. An infantry officer for much of his career, he is best known as a leading advocate for the development of non-lethal weapons and of military applications of the paranormal. He has written and lectured on UFOs. He characterizes his career as having "evolved from hard-core mercenary to thanatologist". Alexander figures prominently in journalist Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare At Goats (2004), which was later made into a Hollywood film starring George Clooney (2009). Ronson continued to draw on Alexander's former status and knowledge in several related Channel 4 documentaries, where Ronson examined the subject of New Age ideas influencing the U.S. military.
The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) is a non-fiction book by Jon Ronson concerning the U.S. Army's exploration of New Age concepts and the potential military applications of the paranormal. The title refers to attempts to kill goats by staring at them and stopping their hearts. The book is a companion to a three-part TV series broadcast in Britain on Channel 4—Crazy Rulers of the World (2004)—the first episode of which is also entitled "The Men Who Stare at Goats". The same title was used a third time for a loose feature film adaptation in 2009.
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The Men Who Stare at Goats is a 2009 satirical black comedy war film directed by Grant Heslov, adapted by Peter Straughan, and starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey. It was produced by Clooney's and Heslov's production company Smokehouse Pictures. The film is a fictionalized version of Jon Ronson's 2004 book of the same title of an investigation into attempts by the U.S. military to employ psychic powers as a weapon — which, in turn, is a companion to a British miniseries Crazy Rulers of the World.
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