403-221 B.C.: The Logistics of Deception 6

Weapons are tools not just of destruction but also of perception—that is to say, stimulants that make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the sense organs and the central nervous system, affecting human reactions and even the perceptual identification and differentiation of objects.
—Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989)

All war is based on deception.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Between the two world wars, the visual logistics of the photograph and cinema (as described by Paul Virilio in War and Cinema) were joined by the expanding repertoire of the “logistics of sound,” its networked ecology, with the advent of interwar mass radio transmissions and the carceral archipelago of performance spaces, the distributed system of audiospecular enclosures deployed for entertainment and propaganda purposes and known more widely as cinema. The history of war, as traced by Virilio, revolves primarily around the mutation of perception over territorial and economic concerns; its evolution accelerates an osmosis between biological and technical nervous systems. Just as Virilio found the logistics of military perception within the history of cinema, especially with the emergence of cybernetics in the postwar period, we can locate, updating an ancient history of acoustic warfare, an undercurrent of research into sonic tactics guiding a symbiosis of noise, bodies, and machines. Across the continuum of war, from sonar to nonlethal acoustic weaponry, this logistics of perception in its vibratory, resonant, affective, and virtual sonic dimensions is now assuming new permutations in cultures mutated by the impact of global terrorism and asymmetric warfare.

This logistics of (im)perception does not merely seek to intervene in the “normal” functioning of psychophysiological circuitry, but, in McLuhanist terms, also involves perceptual prosthetics: an extension or an amputation. Conceived differently, for philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the focus shifts from what a body is, even in its technologically extended sense, to its powers—what it can do. The body of sonic warfare is therefore always a speculative question, which does not return home to a pregiven human, corporeal demarcation. The episodic history of sonic warfare’s perceptual assemblages can therefore equally be found in electronic and electromagnetic cartography, the distributed nervous system of technical sensors that feed it, and the flood of information these systems produce.

In the cybernetic phase of martial evolution, which emerged out of the detritus of World War II, turning this data flood into workable knowledge became as important as the efficiency and accuracy of weapons systems. The logistics of perception has been confronted by the ravenous information hunger of military systems, generating a chain reaction of problems in the gathering, transfer, and processing of data. The more sophisticated the military’s distributed nervous system, the more overpowering the sheer weight of information to be dealt with.1 And as an unavoidable corollary, the more overexposed the battlefield becomes, the more appearance gives in to an array of camouflage, decoys, jamming, smokescreens, and electronic countermeasures. To be perceived is to be “taken out.” So investment in forces co-evolves with the investment in their concealment. Stealth, secrecy, and the logistics of perception signal, for Virilio, that the war of images has in fact superseded the war of weaponry. Whether we agree with Virilio’s historical argument or not, his insight is to draw attention to how the evolution of weapons and armor is paralleled by the co-evolution of visibility and invisibility and, by implication, of audibility and inaudibility.

In the late 1920s, a series of strange structures started appearing in Kent on the south coast of England. The plan of the British air force was to set up a chain of “concrete ears” along the coast that would peer out over the channel of water that separated the island from the Continent. It was a plan never completed. Looking like prehistoric satellite dishes and resembling the concrete styles catalogued in Virilio’s very Ballardian book of photography, Bunker Archeology,² these structures were sound mirrors used as acoustic detection early-warning devices designed to pick up sounds from approaching enemy aircraft.³ There were three types of sound mirror. With the circular, concave 20- and 30-foot-diameter concrete bowls, movable, cone-shaped metal sound collectors were used, connected by tubing to stethoscopes worn by the operators. The other type were strip mirrors, curved in elevation and plan of 26 by 200 feet. With these structures, microphones were placed on a concrete forecourt in front of the mirror and wired to a nearby control room. All the sound mirrors were located in positions that attempted silence. A 1924 report suggested that the sound mirrors were ten times more sensitive than the human ear, and they were tested by blind listeners in 1925. Yet operation problems due to noise from the sea, wind, local towns, and ship propellers rendered the structures onto the sad scrap heap of twentieth-century dead media. Some of these lonely, decaying structures persist to this day and can be seen at Abbots Cliff between Dover and Folkestone, West Hythe, and on the Dungeness shingle at Denge. Yet these concrete ears lay the foundation to the virtual front of vibrational warfare and the much more successful radar systems deployed in World War II.

As Virilio has argued, the emergence of radar and sonar (sound navigation and ranging) as vibrational and electromagnetic techniques of rendering objects perceptible in electronic warfare has developed to the extent that now, “the projectile’s image and the image’s projectile form a single composite.”⁴ Since radar signals have poor penetration of water, the seabeds and surface of the planet are populated by both passive and active ultrasound (above 20 kilohertz) devices (including sonar platforms, sonobuoys, hydrophones, towed arrays) equipped to scan the suboceanic depths and provide the data required for a sonic tracing of the hydrosphere, differentiating the acoustic signature of enemy craft using “pinged” high-frequency signals from ambient noise. Of course, like all other techniques of warfare, this sonar scanning implies a whole repertoire of countermeasures related to signal jamming and tactics of deception through acoustic camouflage and the use of decoys.⁵

Sonic deception operates as a tactic of simulation. The resort to deception as a means of fighting without fighting, nonconfrontation or the minimization of armed engagement, is a strategy that has drawn much inspiration from Sun Tzu’s ancient treatise, The Art of War. With reference to this text and Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, both of which became increasingly known to the Occident in the twentieth century, François Julien has explored some of the general tendencies of Chinese strategic thought and their divergences from Western military philosophy. Julien noted that Chinese martial concepts often revolve around what he terms the potential or propensity of things: “Warfare has often seemed the domain of the unpredictable and of chance (or fatality) par excellence. However, from early on, Chinese thinkers believed that they could detect in warfare’s unfolding a purely internal necessity that could be logically foreseen and, accordingly, perfectly managed.... Chinese strategic thought stands as a perfect example of how one can manage reality and provides us with a general theory of efficacy.”⁶ Rather than moral concerns, it was efficacy, and the preparation for a future configuration of events through predetermining them as much as possible, that provided the basis for the strategic importance of nonconfrontation. Julien draws attention to the concept of shi, or “potential born of disposition,” as the engine of such strategic notions. Here disposition refers to the conditions encountered that, whatever they are, must be turned to maximum advantage with minimum effort through the extraction of their potential. Disposition can derive from the shape of objects or topographical gradients. Such thinking, which revolved around the notion of shi, displayed an “extreme commitment to penetrating the real nature of all determining factors and doing away with all possible illusions” as it was “only through shi that one can get a grip on the process of reality”⁷

Julien points to the central structural difference between key Chinese and European military thought. For the ancient Chinese thinkers such as Sun Tzu, shi was the essential concept of military strategy, whereas for modern military thinkers such as Clausewitz, “means” and “end” were essential.⁸ Julien describes the Western model as revolving around a “heroic or tragic vision” of the “‘head on clash,’ or confrontation carried to the crisis point in a situation offering no escape.”⁹ The Chinese model Julien refers to, and to which there was no doubt a multiplicity of competing approaches, preferred fluid adaptation to the changing terrain, preparedness for this constant shifting ground, and the renewal of potential produced by the mutating environment. At the same time, in this model, the enemy would be forced to become relatively fixed, subordinating its energy to constantly avoiding being taken by surprise, and therefore preventing the enemy from taking control of the situation. Against the Occidental heroic vision, Julien notes that for the Chinese, “a true strategist always wins ‘easy’ victories.... True strategical skills pass unnoticed.”¹⁰ Adherence to shi, on the other hand, provides a way of leading the conflict to resolve itself with the least possible heat.¹¹ In summary, this central structural difference results in a number of key contrasts between the two martial approaches: probability versus propensity, “decisive and direct” action versus “indirect destruction,” “appropriate means and predetermined ends” versus “the setup and its efficacy,” and the achievement of aims versus “the shaping of effect.”

For Julien, “whereas tragic man clashes irrevocably against superior powers, resisting all surrender ..., the Chinese strategist prides himself on his ability to manage all the factors in play, for he knows how to go along with the logic behind them and adapt to it. The former fatally discovers, all too late, his ‘destiny’; the latter knows how to anticipate the propensity at work so that he has it at his disposal.”¹² From the perspective of ancient Chinese military thought, even the Clausewitzian concept of friction is unnecessary. Friction, Julien argues, “was conceived as a means to account for a troublesome gap in Western strategic thought: the disparity between the plan drawn up in advance which is of an ideal nature, and its practical implementation which renders it subject to chance. The Chinese concept of shi, inserting itself into the distinction between what Westerners have opposed as ‘practice’ and ‘theory,’ and thus collapsing that distinction, shifts ‘execution’ toward something that, given the propensity at work, operates of its own accord and excludes any uncertainty or inadequacy: neither deterioration nor friction is involved.”¹³

Across the twentieth century, the exploitation of propensity as developed in Chinese strategy, alongside developments in cybernetics, mathematics, physics, and biology, has served to destratify Western military strategy and practice. Thinkers such as Sun Tzu, and his emphasis on deception, have become core to both Western military elites and guerrilla networks waging asymmetric conflicts.