War, Mathematics, and Simulation: Drones and (Losing) Control of Battlespace

The projection over the inhabited world of a simulational model of the contested space is a constitutive part of this tendency. In the military logics and technologies powering this projection, the inhabitants of the spaces of concern in the global war on terror are better understood as environmental elements or threats in what Robert Sargent has called the “problem space.” This is his term for the environment or situation the simulation designer seeks to model conceptually as a key prerequisite to programming the simulation so that it can provide an effective means to seek experimentally for a solution (Sargent 2005, 135). In a similar “experimental” manner, in Afghanistan and elsewhere a specifically designed spatiotemporality is enacting a performative reinvention of the lived experience of both inhabiting and contesting the control of space in time.

If, as these writers have shown, this projection of and over “enemy territory” has clear precedents in European colonialist strategies and procedures, what is unprecedented today is the digitally enabled expansion and intensification of this spatiotemporal reanimation of the world. This reanimation must be understood as a key contributor to a transformative and troubling pathway toward the automation of military force projection across the globe. I will analyze the nature and implications of this reanimation of the world in digital modelings of the enemy in and as milieu, a milieu as tiny as the space around a single “target” and as large as the world, existing both in a brief “window of opportunity” and within a permanent real-time of preemptive, pan-spectrum surveillance.

In this chapter I will first spend some time tracing the sources of this performative military-technological tendency back to the part-mythical, part-historical origins of Western civilization in ancient Greece. I will argue that the contemporary intensification of a technical and conceptual, military and digital projection of the battlefield “problem space” finds there its progenitors in the origins of geometry and mathematics, in strategic and tactical innovations and their philosophical, aesthetic, and political accommodation in the classic foundations of Western society. Stretching back into prehistory, wargames with pebbles were already playing a part in building these foundations. As John Onians has proposed, their proto-simulational techniques and artifacts for imagining territory and contesting control over it offered models and means for conceptual developments in geometry and mathematics (Onians 1989). This dynamic between the material, technical and the conceptual in the production of a zone of control continues to animate traffic between wargames, simulational forms and the implementation of robotic weapons systems in real geophysical conflict zones today.

In examining contemporary and envisaged drone deployments I am also concerned with what they can reveal about the technical tendency animating them. Tracing them back to the beginnings of Western culture shows that the material course of drone “advances” shares key features with wider trends in global digital technocultural becoming. “We”—“we” living in and enjoying the benefits (as well as suffering the toxifying effects) of today’s real-time, online, ubiquitous media environment—perhaps too readily treat this environment as more or less distinct from and unrelated to the lived experiences of those in the contested spaces subject to military supervision and intervention. Documentaries such as Unmanned: America’s Drone War (2014) make it clear that many of those living under drones share much of “our” experience of the global media environment. This commonality of experience and aspirations—however unequally distributed—is also fundamental to the ethics of the humanitarian and social justice activism concerning drone use in targeting killings. This activism insists on the continuing legitimacy of human rights protections for noncombatants and agitates for adherence to the existing legal definitions of the spatial and temporal limitation of military conflict (see Stanford International Human Rights & Conflict Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic of New York University 2012).

And there is a third, increasingly apparent dimension of the commonality of technical tendency and material lived experience that draws together drones and contemporary digital technoculture in the emerging global future. It is perhaps most apparent in developments toward commercial deployment of automated systems for security, surveillance and other uses (such as Amazon’s delivery drone gimmick) as well as in their regular appearance in the latest releases of AAA shooters such as the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises. But inasmuch as drones are also a leading-edge innovation in the computerization and online networking of manufactured objects in general, they can be seen as overflying a generalized implementation of automated, permanent, real-time surveillance and regulation of lived experience that is unprecedented in human history.

The scale, historical scope, and diverse overlappings of the technical tendency “inscribed in the material development of the [drone] weapon-system” represent a challenge to critical thought. In what follows, I will set out an approach to thinking “tendentially” about military drones with an eye on the wider technocultural dynamics with which they are composed. In the course of this I will need to consider longer and shorter wavelengths of this tendential development toward the reinvention of war—which is also the reinvention of peace—and how these wavelengths overlap and crystallize today in the poststrategic, postpolitical potential of drone deployment by the United States, Israel and other “advanced Western powers.” The materialization of a tendency is never its complete realization, and it offers other possibilities and other anticipations of the tendency. This gap of incompletion between the actualized devices, procedures, and systems and the tendency is the space and the time for reflection, review, critique, and renegotiation. If today it seems to be ever the shorter and smaller, it is nonetheless critical to inhabit it with a less operational mode than that described in Sargent’s principles of simulation design. A properly critical engagement is less concerned with improving the validity of the conceptual modeling of the “problem space” of the real world and more concerned with how the problem space has been defined, according to what logics, what questions, and supporting what inherent tendency. It is through posing and answering these questions that the possibility of altering its course arises.

Tendency, Composition, and Ethnocultural Development

The expansion of drone operations is my principal concern and I will examine it in detail in subsequent sections. As their highest profile representatives (in the mainstream media as much as in wider academic and political debate) the unmanned aerial vehicles known commonly as drones can stand in for the wider gamut of robotic weapons developments across the armed forces and security agencies. These include the Samsung SGR1 armed machine gun system permanently monitoring the zone between the two Koreas, the bomb-disposal robots (such as the Cobham tEODor) used on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the various experiments in remotely operated naval surface and submarine devices. The SGR1 and similar automated targeting and firing systems like Raytheon’s Phalanx CIWS (Close-in Weapon System) and its land-based variant the C-RAM (Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar), are sometimes excluded from categorization alongside the unmanned vehicles, understood to be part of the preceding “generations” of automatic weapons such as the “smart” missiles using infrared, radar or laser guidance. As M. Shane Riza argues in reflecting on an encounter with the C-RAM, however, the lines are blurred between automatic and autonomous weapons, and it is necessary to pay attention to the extent to which the automation of target acquisition and weapons fire has already become endemic in the warfighting conducted by the militaries of the advanced powers even before the recent phase of unmanned systems (Riza 2013, 2–4).²

As a further development of the doctrine and implementation of “air superiority,” it is no surprise that drones are at the forefront of developments (and debates) concerning the expansion of automated and remotely operated weapons. As Philip Lawrence noted in Modernity and War, control of the skies is a key principle of total war in the modern industrial age, an age in which “control of the future” has become the “watchword” (Lawrence 1997, 62). As Chamayou points out, the drone’s eye in the sky sees all, adopting the prescient perspective of God, reaching out over the territory of the enemy in a preemptive precondition for the desired total control of the enemy threat (Chamayou 2013, 57). To anticipate and interdict the enemy’s capacity to act represents the key strategic functions of airpower: surveillance and strike. As I will examine later, the use of drones has expanded rapidly over the last decade and evolved in such a way as to put the coherence of this strategic goal in question through a rapid implementation in simulational, semiautomated systems that are largely (but not unanimously) supported by a rationalizing voluntarism in military and political circles.

It is important to understand this expanded implementation of remote and automated weapons systems, however, as continuing developments that were set in train by earlier trajectories of technical and cultural-political compositions of discourses, practices, and inventions. For it is in the dynamics animating the composition of these that a material tendency finds its motive force. In Technics and Time 1, Bernard Stiegler characterizes history as the product of a composition of human and technical forms. Stiegler’s conception of the central role of technical development in human history draws on André Leroi-Gourhan’s notion of the constitutive role played by the technical tendency of “exteriorization” in the evolutionary process of “hominization” through which human beings arrived at their most successful, globally extended form (Stiegler 1998, 62). The human evolves through a process of technical developments that export functions and capacities that were “interior” to the pre-human biological genetic organism. At a certain (for Stiegler unlocatable but nonetheless attained) threshold, this process formed a new dynamic that takes becoming human beyond a strictly natural evolution to an ethnocultural becoming that proceeds in tandem with this exteriorizing technical tendency.

Human history subsequently develops and diversifies through a series of “adjustments” vis-à-vis the technical in the dynamics driving the various spheres or systems of human society such as the political, the religious, and the economic. Their complex interplay unfolds on the basis of the technicity of the human as technical, exteriorized becoming. Stiegler employs Bertrand Gilles’s notion of adjustment (and maladjustment) between systems by way of formulating an account of the challenges posed by the sophistication and reach of industrial and increasingly complex and automated modern technology (Stiegler 1998, 41–43). In the industrial age of standardized production and the emergence of technology as the application of “scientific,” rational principles to manufacturing processes, the technical system becomes increasingly dominant because of the speed of its innovation, the impact of its enhanced productive capacity and the ensuing global spread of its influence. As both concept and material form(s), technology is in this regard a specific historical (and Western European) development of technics. Technics refers in Stiegler’s work to all those techniques and artifacts exterior to any individual consciousness and upon which its individual development as part of a collective, cultural identity is based. Culture is in this regard always a “technoculture” of sorts inasmuch as it is transmitted and evolves on the basis of this exterior archive and resource. The becoming technological of technics represents, however, a radical globalizing shift in the dynamics of this technocultural evolutionary process for the West and across its colonial extension.

Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technology, Stiegler qualifies this preeminence of the technological in modernity with a sense of the deeply compositional relations through which each sphere of existence develops in relation to the others (Stiegler 1998, 65). As the being (or becoming) who anticipates, the human plays a crucial role in the ongoing advance of the technical tendency as technological innovation and this means the human (via its other spheres of existence and concerns) retains a key potential to inflect its course. Stiegler’s analysis of the contemporary moment, however, is that we are witnessing a troubling destabilization of the balance of the composition of human and technical becoming. The complex, technologically framed scenarios in which the human anticipates the future of technology tends today to limit the extent to which nontechnological experience can inform or qualify that anticipation. Stiegler asks in what metastable, “organological” arrangement of human biological and technocultural “organs” and instrumentalities is this anticipation of things to come properly fostered? And what happens when its stability unravels? (1998, 78–81).³

Stiegler’s approach to this questioning deserves a more careful unpacking than I can provide here, but what is key to grasp is that it treats the technical as both a sphere of existence with its own dynamic and as inherently composed through and with the other spheres of human existence. The classic either/or of the technological determinism debate—technology as determining or as culturally and historically produced and rationalized—appears in this light as a misreading of the complex co-constitutivity of the technical and the cultural. The “what invents the who just as it is invented by it,” argues Stiegler in summarizing his position on the origin (and future) of the human and the part played by technics (177). This reposes the dilemma of technological determinism as one concerning the nature, politics, and ethics of the adjustments made by the cultural, political, and other systems to their composition with technological developments. The key question becomes how to adopt and modify the course of the tendential unfolding of new configurations of ethnocultural becoming.

I will argue that the radical overturning of political and cultural notions and practices of “territory” already recognizable in the trajectory of drone deployments indicates that a reconfiguration of the very conditions of human-technical evolution is on the horizon of their “material tendency.” In Stiegler’s view, the “human” in this composite term does not refer to a stable or transcendental entity, but to a contingent and at best metastable organization and promise of a particular kind or kinds of social and individual existence. It has to be argued over and argued for today. For instance, the legal activism against remote-controlled killings makes it readily apparent that the program of drone use is heading in a radically different direction to the project announced in declarations and conventions on “human rights.” As the human rights-focused Living Under Drones report demonstrates, the life of those who have to live under the ever-present surveillance and imminent threat of Hellfire missile strike posed by drones is reduced to one of survival. The social and cultural activities and practices that make life worth living as a human being are suppressed by a permanent threat from the air (Stanford International Human Rights & Conflict Clinic and the Global Justice Clinic of New York University 2012).

Tracings: Mathematics, War, and Technics in the Seat of Western Civilization

The contemporary Western involvement in Afghanistan and Pakistan incorporates two contrasting projects that share a common heritage as Western European in character. On the one hand, there are the ongoing legal and human rights agencies’ efforts agitating for a truly global realization of the human rights of a humanity whose universality was first proposed as a key theme of Enlightenment philosophical humanism. On the other hand, there is the experimental techno-militarist expansion of a (no less universalizable) operational battlefield in which human rights are increasingly irrelevant and provide no practical orientation for those acting on and within its limits. Each of these projects has key philosophical, political, scientific, and technical roots in ancient Greece. The legacies of ancient Greece represent for us today a wellspring of scientific, philosophical, and cultural-political advances of abiding significance for the West. These advances also had a history—strictly speaking a prehistory—of technical, ethnocultural, and political developments in Egypt, Assyria and the Mesopotamian region more generally. These included the invention of geometry in Egypt and the invention of writing and the gradual emergence of phonetic alphabetic scripts in Assyria.⁴ Nonetheless, ancient Greece names a singular period of transformations that crystallized in a philosophical and technocultural program, carried forward and modified by the Romans, whose significance for the subsequent histories of Western European ethnocultures is indisputable. Since the sixteenth century CE, this history is also a global history of European colonization of the “new world” and its aftermath, right up to today’s postcolonial, global world order.⁵ If, as I am proposing, the drone program is at the avant-garde of the West’s passage toward another technocultural (and technopolitical) shift in the wake of the long and catastrophic twentieth century of global war and social and economic reinvention, it does so in part as an inheritor of certain key compositions of technical, scientific and cultural-political development that characterized the “miracle” of ancient Greece.

John Onians makes this abundantly clear in “War, Mathematics and Art in Ancient Greece” (1989). He shows how the constant conflict between the Greek city-states was a significant driver of those developments in mathematics, art and architecture, philosophy, and politics so central to the legacy of ancient Greece. Indeed, he argues, war must be understood as the dominant motive force of their achievement (40). In contrast to the relatively more stable (internally at least) Egyptian or Persian civilizations, the status and significance of the advances in Greek philosophy, politics, mathematics, architecture, and sculpture must be thought of in relation to the importance of military considerations in securing or expanding the territory of the competing Greek city-states. Onians provides a variety of examples of linkages between advances in military techniques and technics and the conceptual and theoretical developments of Greek mathematics, art, and philosophical and political thought.

I am most interested here in tracing two of these linkages between military technics and conceptual “discoveries”: that which goes from the development of the phalanx battle formation to the formulation of abstract, mathematical laws of order and proportion; and the related dynamic connecting a proto-simulational modeling of the politico-strategic real with mathematical formalization and philosophical speculation. Between them, they mark a decisive turn toward the conceptual and technical complexes of automation and simulation I wish to examine in the deployment of drones.

The phalanx was a key tactical discovery of Greek military commanders for organizing the armed foot soldiery, the hoplitai (hoplites), into an effective rectangular formation maximizing the defensive capacity of the form as it maneuvered and engaged enemy units. It predates the celebrated philosophical and mathematical advances that were to follow in the classical period from the fifth to the fourth century BCE; by exactly how long is the subject of debate among scholars of ancient Greece, a debate that may be interminable given that the developments in question span the threshold of the pre- or protohistorical periods and the beginnings of recorded history. Researchers rely on different source materials to develop competing hypotheses concerning the nature, significance, and historical trajectory of the phalanx and its relation to the development of the Greek poleis (city-states) in the classical period. These sources include archeological evidence, geographical survey data, artistic and mythopoetic and dramatic texts (subjected to philological and literary analysis), and the non-contemporary accounts of later historians and philosophers of Greek and Roman antiquity. The scholarly orthodoxy—subject to revision and challenge in recent decades—has it that the phalanx developed quite rapidly in the seventh century BCE as a revolutionary transformation of eighth century mass battle tactics, associated with a new double-handled, heavier shield design (hoplon), and that this new approach to fighting land battles based on tight formations of armed infantry was adopted by most or all of the major Greek city-states in their frequent battles over territory and conflicting colonial aspirations (Hanson 2013).⁶

Training and discipline were required to maintain the phalanx’s effectiveness in battle as the shield’s substantial weight and method of holding it—by inserting the left forearm through a strap to grip a handle on the right side—indicate that the individual hoplite depended on the shield held by the warrior to his right for protection on his spear-carrying right side. The discipline was celebrated in Homer’s Iliad with metaphorical allusions to the fence and tower-like qualities of the battle formation in which the soldiers had become perfect compositional elements of a unified architectural entity (Onians 1989, 43). The earliest extant records of Homeric poetry are from the eighth century BCE, but the canonic texts may have crystallized in their enduring forms over the subsequent centuries (Snodgrass 2013, 89–90). While Homer’s mythic poetry relates accounts of battles from a legendary, heroic Bronze Age past, it has been interpreted by some classicists as reflecting the already mass character of Iron Age warfare of the archaic period preceding the classical period. Anthony Snodgrass discusses this recent movement to read the Homeric texts in terms of the context of their production. While skeptical of reading the Iliad and the Odyssey as fully coherent and consistent fictional portrayals of the historical state of warfare at the time of the writing down of the oral narrative tradition, Snodgrass states that at the least they provide a clear indication that mass war and formation fighting were significant features of conflict in the time the Iliad crystallized prior to the historical accounts of phalanx warfare in the fifth century and later (86).

For Onians, the Homeric allusions to the disciplined, architectonic character of the phalanx of tightly formed soldiers in the Iliad illustrates key combat-forged virtues for the subsequent development of Greek civilization and culture. In a similar vein, he proposes the “Geometric” style of eighth century BCE funerary pottery be renamed “Military” style since “the qualities they reveal”—armed men reduced to a repetitive patterns of shields and spears—“are precisely those valued in a war situation” (Onians 1989, 40).

In the fifth century Pythagoras and his followers inherited this appreciation of the value of “geometricality” passed down in the cultural tradition from a number of sources, including the pre-Socratic, cosmological writings concerning the foundational role eris (strife, conflict) plays in the universe and in human affairs. Pythagorean mathematics developed a metaphysics of polarized forces locked in eris, the secret ordering of which could be formulated and utilized.⁷ The primacy of number as a material cause of entities in the world, and the importance of mathematical patterns and order in the kosmos were central to Pythagorean doctrine and its philosophico-political practice. Onians tells us that kosmos (order) is a cognate term with kosmeo, “I arrange” or “I marshal,” and kosmetor, “supreme commander” (45). The configurations of important Pythagorean number patterns—mystical entity-principles derived in the uncovering of the cosmic order—resemble the phalanx and other “foundational” military groupings: the rectangle principle develops into a phalanx-like structure of rows of dots, while the Tetragonos corresponds to an alternative square tactical formation from around the same period (the fifth century). The most revered pattern, the Dekas, takes its name from that for a basic company of ten soldiers first mentioned in the Iliad (ibid.).

The “harmonious” order of the Pythagorean cosmos conceptualized in the musical movements of the planetary spheres is a further confirmation of the military inspiration for this mathematical conception of reality: Harmonia, daughter of the god of war Ares, was a term associated in Homer and Hesiod with the use of music in war and military training, and as a figure for the close linkages required in the phalanx and other battle formations (46). Onians asserts that “Kosmos and harmonia are two of the key terms in the Pythagorean program of reducing the universe to numbers primarily because they had long been associated with numerical order on the battlefield” (48). He goes on to discuss Pythagoras’s ill-fated venture in Croton—the city he chose as a base for his community—to train three or six hundred (both numbers having associations with the phalanx formation) male youths through an instructional regime incorporating military, political, and mathematical training aimed at improving the lot of the city following a recent military defeat (49).

Similar ventures will be undertaken or at least proposed by subsequent philosophers. Plato’s utopian Republic sets out the program of training for an ideal philosopher-warrior “best at philosophy and best equipped from birth for war” (Plato 543A). A metaphor—or rather, a Pythagorean translation of the aim of such training from Simonides, a contemporary of Pythagoras—is cited by Plato in Protagoras: “It is difficult for a good man to come into being, square [tetragonos] in hands and feet and mind, wrought without blame” (Onians 1989, 53). Training is the craft of shaping what is “wrought”—and here I would gloss Onians’s comment by noting that training is a kind of tekhne—that is, craft, technique, and skill in the fashioning of technical artifacts. Crafting the “good man” aims at an outcome corresponding as close to the ideal mathematical entity of the square as possible.

Tekhne is dedicated here to the ideality of the shape it struggles to bring into being imperfectly. Simonides’s comment typifies what Stiegler characterizes as the metaphysical development of the ancient Greek thought of technics in this period inasmuch as it removes from view the dynamics of technical development and the part they play in the very conceptualization of experience. Tekhne is not central to the key questions about the true nature of experience or being inasmuch as it concerns “means and ends” in the transitory, imperfect realm of material existence. What counts is the animating principle of the ideal form (Stiegler 1998, 1).⁸

The tendential analysis I am proposing here on the basis of Stiegler’s approach to technics sees the animating force as a compositional dynamic involving an interplay between material, technical developments and the “discovery” of abstract and generalizable concepts. Onians describes the way this movement toward the ideal realm of mathematical order, regularity, and abstract perfection in Pythagorean and later philosophical work on the application of metaphysical principles was accompanied by a conceptual movement that envisaged the human element as a building block in larger structures reflecting the ideal order. Onians’s evidence for this is aesthetic as much as it is textual, and he claims this is a major current of classic proportionality in Greek art and architecture (such as the Parthenon) that also resonates in literary and philosophical works. This relation of material forms and Greek thought can be explained readily in the terms of the Western philosophical tradition whose origins and influences are in question here as the necessarily imperfect, material exemplification of the transcendental ideal forms sought after by the fathers of Western philosophy. Beyond Onians’s acute demonstration of an influence that is soon glossed over or “repressed” in the course of Western history and culture, I find here a key instance of a tendential composition of material and conceptual development, a decisive mutual evolution of a technical tendency developing across tactical, strategic, architectural, and aesthetic domains and a conceptualization of war, the warrior and their relation to the polis as community and state.

The ability of the citizens both to equip themselves with the “hoplite panoply” of armor and weapons and to make themselves available to participate in the training for and conduct of mass formation warfare was central to their increased participation in the political assemblies and juridical institutions that replaced the dynastic monarchies of the major Greek city-states of preceding eras. In Victor Davis Hanson’s defense of the longstanding orthodox interpretation of the significance of the hoplitoi in the emergence of democratic forms of government in ancient Greece, the “revolution in military affairs” that led quite rapidly to the spread of phalanx warfare in the seventh century was a key causative force in the overturning of aristocratic monarchic rule across the Greek world (Hanson 2013). Dependence on larger numbers of soldiers drawn from the nonaristocratic and largely agrarian “middling class” of the poleis (who could afford the money and time to fight in the growing ranks of the phalanxes) translated into political challenges to aristocratic rule and in time to various kinds of timocratic or more inclusive democratic political structures, in all of which the right and obligation to fight was instrumental (259). The weight given to the hoplite revolution in Greek political transformation, the demographic constitution of the Greek communities and of their armies, the historical timing of the emergence of phalanx-based combat, and even the nature of phalanx tactics are some of the subjects debated in recent challenges to this orthodoxy (Krentz, Foxhall, and van Wees 2013).⁹ Evaluating these respective positions is beyond the scope of this chapter (and the expertise of this author). That political constitutions across Greece incorporated greater numbers of nonaristocratic members of the community, and that these members became increasingly central components of the frequent and long-lasting conflicts between the poleis in the late archaic and classical periods is not in dispute. Following Onians’s lead, it is enough for my purposes to cite one of the major sources of the orthodox position, Aristotle, who in his Politics asserts that “once the poleis grew and those with hoplite armor became strong, more people shared in government” (Aristotle 4.1297b20–24, cited in Hanson 2013, 259). While arguments continue as to precisely how to interpret Aristotle’s sociology of Greek political history, this is further evidence of the perceived significance of military developments for Greek civilization in the classical period.¹⁰

In the classical sources Onians mobilizes, the soldier is prepared by tekhne for conversion into an artifactual state. Through rigorous physical training and behavioral and intellectual habituation he learns to adopt an instrumental role as an element in larger structural formations that (ideally) will realize a harmonious architectonic materiality. Submission to this process entailed a willingness to submit to the potential sacrifice of life in return for a political citizenship that took various forms at different times in the course of the major Greek poleis in the first millennium BCE. From this perspective the celebrated Greek origins of Western democracy—reference point for the subsequent emancipatory, democratic movements of European modernity seeking to universalize political citizenship—can be thought of here as the negotiation of a right to rise above the condition of artifactual component of the state when not required for its military operations to expand or preserve itself. With the development of automated robotic weapons systems, the promise of a perfected artifactuality of the soldier implies the redundancy of this foundational negotiation between the modern democratic state and its citizens. I will return to this implication of a movement beyond this legacy of a political negotiation of the state’s power to wage war.

Alongside this mathematically conceived artifactual conversion of the citizen-soldier into an architectonic element of state power is an imaginative technical practice of conversion that begins before Greek mathematics but contributes to the mathematical transformations of war (and the ancient Greek polis) noted above. Today it is readable as a proto-simulational conceptualization of the technical and strategic implementation of war as governed by mathematical abstraction. Onians observes that it “is also surely likely that pebbles were used to show young men the different formations of the battlefield long before they were used to illustrate points of mathematics, as is suggested by their established use in board-games which simulated battles” (Onians 1989, 45). The becoming geometric, compositional element of the warrior in Pythagoras and Plato passes from pebbles to dots to the conceptual space of the mystical number patterns. In Onians’s conjectural reconstruction, the pebbles find their way, via a graphical translation into dots, from material forms for wargaming and training to symbols in a transcendental plane of number and shape.

These pebbles and board games evidence a simulational—as distinct from a more symbolic—representational technics as seen in other games and ludic artifacts from other civilizations with histories stretching back into prehistory. According to archeological evidence, mancala (“pit and pebble”) games appear early in ancient Egypt before spreading southward to West Africa and westward to Asia (Parlett 1999, 217). The Chinese beginnings of Weiqi (Go in Japan) recede into legend but are generally situated around the second millennium BCE (Parlett 1999).¹¹ Each of these traditions of games bears witness in different ways to the playful modeling of the labor of living and surviving through a process combining material and conceptual work. This modeling work involves a miniaturization and a selective representation of more complex spatiotemporal phenomena such as the seasons and seasonal variation, the nature and intentions of the enemy, movement in space, and the unpredictable concatenation of natural and human-authored events.

The abstract realm—of the imagined battle against the enemy conducted through the calculation of choices between possible moves—is conjured through and hence dependent upon the material realm in these ethnoculturally diverse compositions of experience and technical forms. The production of and play with the “pebble-representatives” in the prehistorical Greek wargames Onians mentions is such an exteriorization of experience through technical form and gesture. As Stiegler explains in a commentary on the development of number as a transcendental concept, no concept emerges in the absence of such an exteriorization (Stiegler 2011, 48–51). Immanuel Kant forgets this when discussing the transcendental realm of number (and by extension of mathematics), even as he himself writes the material marks that represent the transcendental concept.¹² These marks, Stiegler reminds us, have a material history of emergence, from objects to single marks to symbols representing larger numbers and the relations between different values. Onians proposes just such a history leading from game “counters” (as they are known today in their generic, arithmetical guise) to dots with a mystical numerical significance in the Pythagorean cosmology. Philip Sabin notes that “one can find instances as far back as Thucydides and Polybius using mathematical calculations to explore the relationship between the numbers, depth, spacing and frontage of troops within a battle line” (Sabin 2014, 5). Writing about the history of wargames in Germany from the medieval to the modern period of computer simulation, Philipp von Hilgers acknowledges that it was an ancient Greek achievement “to think strategies and numerical figurations together” (Hilgers 2012, 8).¹³

The inside and the outside—thought and technics—are born and develop together. Making things is dedicated to a future outside the maker where it will have significance, worth, and thus be worthy of being remembered, reflected upon, and reproduced. With the pebble game, this means being worthy of replaying for fun and/or for the lessons learned. This game for soldier-boys is already a future-directed, proto-simulational modeling of a “problem space” but is not yet subject to formalizing procedures based on mathematical regularities and algorithms making it repeatable across domains of practice and experience. Today’s board game and computer simulations of battle continue to develop iterations of their ancient pebble ancestor for fun and/or for the lessons learned—from amateur boardgaming practices, to serious military simulation and gaming, to the more commercial video games such as the Total War series. These wargames, with a “mathematical modeling of reality” as a fundamental component, have revisited the ancient battlegrounds of Greek and Roman antiquity to replay historical conflicts, have tested the hypotheses of the hoplite orthodoxy concerning phalanx tactics, and have utilized the inferential power of computer simulation to stage hypothetical conflicts between anachronistic military forces and orders of battle (Sabin 2014, 4).¹⁴ Simulation-based research on (and play with) historical, contemporary and future conflict continues today and continues to play a significant role in military and strategic-political spheres as well as in commercial and popular entertainment.

These board games and computer simulations are the nearest descendants of the ancient practices and artifacts of simulating war in a contemporary technoculture that is at the other end of the tendential trajectory of the mathematical translation of specific material practices to more widely applicable conceptual formulations (and materializations). As Onians so compellingly demonstrates, these formulations were discovered and developed substantially for their potential to order and regulate the course of war as a (or possibly the) fundamental contingency of existence for the ancient Greeks. This tendency of Greek thought is readable in the passage from the game space and its playing pebbles via the Pythagorean (and subsequent Greek) mathematical transformation of geometry into an abstract, conceptual space of numbers and their formulaic relations to each other. Geometry, the measuring of the earth developed by the ancient Egyptians, became the protoscience launching Western science. Archimedes, whose inventions served the defense of his native Syracuse against the invading Romans in the third century BCE, symbolizes this dynamic between military technical development and conceptual elaboration as much as he does the advance of mathematics as foundational technique and analytic method informing geometry, astronomy, architecture, and the other knowledges of the world. And, as Hilgers has shown, in the early nineteenth century mathematically innovative wargaming practices in Germany dovetail with (among other things) the major cartographical enterprise that will eventuate in the systematic, mathematically accurate surveying and mapping of the territory of the prospective German nation first surveyed and rendered as a battle space (Hilgers 2012, 55). The dynamic between abstract concept and practical application continues and intensifies in the heart of European modernization. “Mathematics,” argues Hilgers, may be distinguished by its abstractness, but it nonetheless requires forms of evidence and visibility” (91).

Postwar Technoscience: Computerized Battlespace

This tendency toward the demonstration in practice of an expanding activity of conceptualization reaches a new level and is realized on an unprecedented scale in the twentieth century with the rise of scientific and increasingly mathematical innovations in military technologies and techniques. Tracing this tendency through the intervening eras is a task beyond the scope of this chapter, but its modern technoscientific course received key bearings both from the emergence in eighteenth-century Europe of the modern sciences (from out of the domains of philosophy and theology) and their mobilization to accelerate and multiply the ramifications of the technical discoveries that led to the industrialization of production toward the end of that century. Hilgers’s account, cited earlier, of the role of wargames in aspects of these developments is no small contribution to an analysis of the course of this material-conceptual dynamic.

The industrialization of production has also entailed the industrialization of destruction and has thus been central to the course of Western modernity’s global expansion in the twentieth century.¹⁵ The century of industrial modernization was also that of the two global conflicts, of the emergence of “total war” as industrial project requiring “total mobilization,” of the rise of the global superpowers, and of the prospect of global thermonuclear war. In the post–Cold War period, global geopolitical conflict has been characterized by what James Der Derian calls the “postwar warring” of the industrial powers—a blurring of military and security operations with actions supporting other agendas and agencies in a context where “war” as state versus state and armed forces versus armed forces no longer occurs (Der Derian 2001, 59). The “asymmetrical” conflicts that have ensued in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Palestinian occupied territories, Somalia, and elsewhere continue the legacy of this century of globalizing modernization.

Onians is right when he says that “mathematics was not exclusively military in character” and that it soon “acquired a life of its own” in later cultural contexts (Onians 1989, 62). This is still true, but if it is a mistake to forget or repress its connections to military practices and motivations in imagining a more pacific and idealist (and idealized) history of the ancient Greek “miracle,” Onians concludes with the speculation that it is perhaps “an unconscious recognition of the military relevance, not just of Greek mathematics, but of Greek art too, which has guaranteed them their continued authority” (Ibid.). Indeed, but in the light of my concern with the composition of conscious (and unconscious) interiority with exterior technical material dynamics, the relevance of military concerns to mathematics (and art and architectural works), however sublimated in histories of science and civilization, remains decisive in their mutual becoming in the ongoing history of the Greek legacy.

Moreover, this relevance is heightened in the explicitly strategic-political postwar reorganization of the relations between science and technological innovation that Andy Pickering (1995) has characterized as the emergence of a military-led technoscience. This reorganization has produced material and conceptual “inventions” that lead directly to the developments in the contemporary technical tendency that drones instantiate and intensify. Above all, these are the simulation of the conflict and the virtualization of its conduct, along with the possibility of automating the latter.

In his work Derek Gregory has traced developments in aerial bombing and surveillance that lead from World War II to the counterinsurgency and antiterrorist operations in which drones play a significant part today in the air over what he calls the “global borderlands” (Gregory 2011a, 2011b). Drones act either in support of other attacking units through their ability to provide the persistent monitoring of targets or as a “hunter-killer” platform combining reconnaissance and strike capabilities. Vietnam was crucial to these developments for the emergence of three constitutive elements of contemporary “armed overwatch”: the systematic deployment of “remotely piloted aircraft, real-time visual surveillance and a networked sensor-shooter system”—as yet not integrated in a larger operational complex (Gregory 2011a, 2). In this regard the principal achievement of the post–September 11 military actions of the United States and its allies is to have attained such an integration, one which is conceived and implemented as a unified sphere of spatiotemporal coordination achieved by real-time networked digital communications.

The unified sphere of war operations was envisaged in post-Vietnam military doctrine. It emerged tendentially as a conceptual consolidation of the most technologically sophisticated, computerized military “advances” of the US-led campaign. The spectacularly unsuccessful prosecution of the geopolitical strategy of the containment of communist expansion in Vietnam spawned the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs” that sought to rethink military operations in an explicitly systemic and informational manner. Military commander in Vietnam (1964–68) General William Westmoreland’s vision of war in the age of computers, articulated in a report to the American Congress in 1970, is often cited as the catalyst for this revolutionary movement toward an era of “smart weapons” and real-time command and control networks. Westmoreland predicted that “enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation and automated fire control” (Chapman 2003, 2). The paradigm shift is exemplified in the subsequent redefinition of the theater of war as a “battlespace.” Tim Blackmore states that this three-dimensional, volumetric space incorporates land and sea (on the surface and below), the air above and the space above that, and the spheres of signals and communications, information and mediation (Blackmore 2005, 3). Achieving victory in operations in battlespace becomes a question of attaining “full-spectrum superiority” across all of the spatiotemporal dimensions of “air, land, maritime and space domains” and the “information environment (which includes cyberspace)” (Department of Defense 2014b, 113).

Battlespace is a conceptual elaboration of the “abstract and technical” distancing of the enemy other and the enemy territory Gregory identifies in his analysis of the electronic surveillance technologies and sighting techniques that emerged in the conduct of the air war over Vietnam (Gregory 2011a, 2). In this regard, he discusses the “pattern bombing” of Viet Cong–dominated regions of South Vietnam, the area bombing of forests (with defoliants) by B-52s and the subsequent damage assessment analysis. At 25,000–30,000 feet in the air, the bomber crews executed a highly impersonal, familiar technical exercise, as instruments of the command and policy decisions of others (5). Photo interpreters read images of the results in terms of holes in the ground and target boxes: “Throughout the targeting process the language of patterns, areas, circles, holes and boxes erased people from the field of view; bombing became a deadly form of applied geometry” (4).

This applied geometry became increasingly “virtual” with the “electronic battlefield” established in 1967 to interdict the supply of Viet Cong forces along trails running from North Vietnam to the south along the border with Laos. Operation “Igloo White” established a large sensor field over the “Ho Chi Minh trail.” The seismic and acoustic sensors dropped by parachute listened and felt for the movement of vehicles and people along the trail and their signals were monitored in an electronic map screen at a command center in Thailand from where air strikes were ordered in and then monitored live. The Assessment Officers at the Infiltration Surveillance Center in Thailand looked for trails of lights from the sensors indicating the passage of a potential target along the trail. These “target signatures”—“abstract geometries” of “lines on screens” and “boxes on maps”—traced the movements of people via these ephemeral electronic signals until they disappeared. Their last moments were played over the PA system in Thailand and later for the “Electronic Battlefield Subcommittee” of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee (8).

Gregory points out that today’s “drone wars” evidence the unification of Vietnam War-era developments (in real-time surveillance, networked sensor fields and remote piloting of aircraft) in a single operational system. The key difference is that “the ‘viewing screen’ now occupies a central place and has become indispensable for those who wage remote war” (9). As an instance, or acceleration, of the Revolution in Military Affairs, however, it is equally fundamental to the nature and implications of its implementation that this systemic integration is “powered” by the computer microprocessor revolution (Chapman 2003, 3). The digitization of what were analog electronic networks of reconnaissance, surveillance and the coordination of strike aircraft represents a profoundly significant alteration in the mathematical-technical abstraction of war in this real-time, global assemblage of elements. The integration of diverse elements is facilitated by the translation of phenomena and procedures for analyzing and acting on them into databases and algorithms inscribed in binary code. As Paul Edwards has argued, in the Cold War technoscientific matrix out of which computer hardware and software emerged, the promise of digital computerization was to contain the world of dangerous contingency within the parameters of programmable routines (Edwards 1996). If analog networks of reconnaissance, analysis, and communications made real-time “dynamic targeting” possible in Vietnam, the expansion of global digital networks led toward a computational pursuit of this promised incorporation of what is external and contingent in an integrative digital spatiotemporality. It is in this light that Edwards discusses Operation Igloo White as model for the computerized enclosure of the world desired by military strategy and Cold War political doctrine (15–20).

I have elsewhere analyzed the development of flight simulation (and virtual reality) technologies in this period as a launchpad for the materialization of this ambition by emphasizing how the modeling of the battlespace served an anticipatory logic of developing a preemptive mastery of the territory and its potential threats (Crogan 2011). Today’s “drone wars” represent the contemporary stage of the materialization of this tendency in a process that radicalizes this simulational modeling of the enemy’s potentiality. It alters the nature of war and peace in the manner I identified at the outset of this chapter as a symptomatic but highly problematic trajectory of the West’s global technocultural expansion.

Drones and Mathematical Materializations: Simulation, Virtualization, and Automation

It is important to emphasize—as Gregory does in his analysis of the lines of descent leading to the contemporary remote-controlled military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere—that tracing the lines of these tendential developments is neither to affirm faith in the promise of total incorporation and control of the enemy, nor of the earlier rhetoric of “progressive” or “beneficial bombing” realizing an increasingly rational and efficient conduct of war (Gregory 2011a, 1). On the contrary; I will suggest at the conclusion of this chapter that a better candidate for a “futurology” of global military-led security operations is Paul Virilio’s speculations, dating from the 1970s, concerning the “territorial insecurity” which develops as the “reality projected by the system” dedicated to attaining this total control (Virilio 1976, 37). For his part, Gregory’s detailed analysis of a botched joint USAF and Special Forces operation in Uruzgan province in 2010 that led to the deaths of many Afghani civilians (and to the prosecution of members of the team remotely operating the drone involved in the attack) forcefully demonstrates the large distance between the promise and the reality of a fully integrated and systematically coordinated militarized modeling of battlespace (Gregory 2011a, 2011b).

The efforts to realize this incorporation of contested territory in a “system of systems” capable of full-spectrum superiority nonetheless transforms the conduct and conceptualization of war (Chapman 2003, 3). I am emphasizing the simulational character of this, by which I mean it evidences the application and extension of a process that corresponds to Sargent’s influential account of the simulation design cycle I cited at the outset of this chapter. I argue that essential features of the simplification and abstraction of phenomenal complexity that characterize the simulational modeling of a “problem space” able to be defined and resolved—or rather whose problems can be anticipated and controlled—through software-based “solutions” are manifest in many aspects of drone deployments.

The use of drones such as the MQ-1 Predator (first deployed with Hellfire missiles in 2001) and MQ-9 Reaper (since 2007) as hunter-killer systems combining surveillance and strike depends on such a process of abstraction and simplification to execute strikes on designated targets (Gregory 2011b, 207). Drone operations proceed on the basis of the systemic coordination of numerous computer-based systems, including those for the coordination of remote vehicle piloting between the Nevada-based pilot and sensor operators and the “Launch and Recovery” crews (responsible for takeoff and landing) at bases in the contested geographical territory where the drones are stationed, for the pilot’s interface setup (screens and sensor outputs, joystick, throttle and other input devices) in the ground control station and the drone’s translation of this remote user input into aerial maneuvers, for the communications linkages and video/sensor feeds between ground control with other elements engaged in joint operations, tactical command positions in the battlespace and strategic command centers situated in the United States and elsewhere, the smart weapons systems and their communications with these other networks of command and tactical elements, and so on.

The computerization of systems supporting targeting is a key feature of this complex system of systems for conducting remote war, and one that displays most vividly the simulational logics emerging in these operations. Gregory is right in identifying the centrality of the visual video feed from the remotely operated vehicle for targeting and execution as a key transformation from the Vietnam-era developments in remote control warfare. The “immersive” involvement of the ground crews in the digitally enabled battlespace occurs as a juxtaposition of intimate proximity and extreme distance. As Gregory states, the remote “pilot and payload” team are located both eighteen inches from the video monitor and at around six to seven thousand miles from the contested territory (Ibid., 207). Many of the crucial ethical, political, and psychological themes explored in response to the expansion of the UAV program turn on the issues and implications of this paradoxical combination of proximity and distance. Gregory characterizes this combination as an uneasy ensemble of “near-sighted” and “far-sighted” vision that creates as many uncertainties as it resolves concerning the accuracy of its tactical implementation and the effectiveness of its strategic and political goals. The video game–like “immersive capacity” of the remote drone operator interface places them virtually in the battlespace occupied by allied soldiers and pilots. It connects them to a community mediated by real-time audiovisual monitoring of the enemy. This network of screens amounts to a “political technology of vision,” one that “renders our space familiar even in ‘their’ space—which remains obdurately other” (Gregory 2011a, 12).

This confusion of near and far perspectives is repeated in the US domestic sphere (and its global diffusion) in the proliferation since the first Gulf War in 1991 of what Roger Stahl has analyzed as “militainment” (Stahl 2010b). Stahl examines the trend toward a more intensive and “interactive” experience of combat in video games, embedded reporting and reality TV, and more recently via online video sharing of footage of firefights captured by helmet-cams, of drone strikes, and so on. This experience of war as increasingly immersive entertainment corresponds with and indeed occasions a movement away from a deliberative social or political engagement in the far-flung operations against terrorism and the enemies of US interests. For Stahl, miltainment’s contradictory movements ever closer to the action but away from a political means for collectively negotiating its significance generate cultural-political tensions. I would characterize these disturbances of the body politic (and the collective visual imaginary of the “virtual citizen-soldier”) emanating from the commercial media sphere as symptomatic of the destabilizing impetus of the technical tendency at whose leading edge drone operations develop today (Stahl 2010b, 110).

If “eyes on” the target via high resolution video imaging is crucial both for the surveillance capabilities of drone vehicles and to the positive identification required for authorization of a strike, it is important to recognize that the video image is part of a larger flow of sensory data feeding the reconnaissance and targeting operation. The drones themselves supply multispectral image data—infrared, daylight, and image-intensified video. Developments are well underway in the operational implementation of wide-area composites of multiple high resolution surveillance scans to form a kind of tiled mosaic of detailed video scanning of the contested territory—“Gorgon Stare” and ARGUS-IS are two such projects (Gregory 2011b, 193). The persistent flow of datafeeds from these various sensors is treated by video analysis software designed to selectively identify key information required for intelligence analysis and targeting processes. These “highly formalized” procedures—that is, statistical, algorithmic programs for making usable an overwhelmingly enormous database of pixels—set out to “distinguish ‘normal’ from ‘abnormal’ activity in a sort of militarized rhythmanalysis that is increasingly automated” (Gregory 2011a, 10).

This cutting-edge “big data” software development includes the NVS system (National System for Geo-Intelligence Video Services) being produced under the direction of arms manufacturer giant Lockheed-Martin. According to Paul Richfield, NVS will filter, sort and produce video-on-demand reports through software agent functions comparable to Netflix’s user profiling of preferences and related searches (Richfield 2011). Reports combine various statistics concerning the full-motion video playback and resemble financial reporting on MSNBC or watching a football game on ESPN. Like all database processing software, the generation of useful reports depends on the quality of the metadata produced through the indexing of video data according to relevant categories. The allusion to ESPN is more than illustrative: Chamayou notes that the US Army licensed a version of the video analysis software ESPN uses in its football coverage to aid research and development of its drone-supported counterinsurgent targeting (Chamayou 2013, 61). The software is especially good for collecting and cataloguing videos associated with a particular player from a massive archive of game coverage, and this dovetails with the desire to map and characterize the past actions of individuals identified as insurgent or terrorist.

Chamayou comments that this turn to professional sports coverage seems to fulfill Walter Benjamin’s prediction that future war (in a dystopian, fascist future) will replace categories of warrior and war in favor of sporting terminology (Chamayou 2013, 62). From our perspective on these developments as a continuation and exacerbation of the military-mathematical tendency of Western technoculture, this adoption is one of many indications of the digital extension of the game space of pebble counters on a little field of circumscribed action to a more generalized simulational space.¹⁶ The analysis of enemy “play-moves” is now subject to a formalized procedurality that seeks to render less incalculable the complexity of events in real geophysical space on the basis of a ludic, abstracted, simplified, and delimited game space. Moreover, this software processing of the pattern of the enemy-as-player is becoming increasingly automated. Projects such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) “Mind’s Eye” are working on Artificial Intelligence to analyze and annotate video automatically. The envisaged “visual intelligence” would be able to learn to recognize and classify actions between elements (people, vehicles and so forth) in a video sequence (Defense Aerospace.com, 2011). Beyond machine vision developments in pattern recognition and object identification, the ambition of this project is to automate a cataloguing of actions and relations between objects. The ever-growing flows of multispectrum video scans from battlespace will necessitate the implementation of such programs able to “automatically translate the aggregations of pixels into nouns, verbs and propositions” (Chamayou 2013, 62).

Systems and software such as NVS and Mind’s Eye will be added into the suite of statistical and analytical software delivering the “militarized rhythmanalysis” Gregory describes. These include “Geotime,” which gathers and visualizes various forms of surveillance data such as satellite monitoring and mobile phone signal tracking. Mobile phone tracking, made possible by the “spectrum dominance” over the communications sphere of battlespace, has become a significant contributor in the intelligence analysis supporting the targeting of individual “insurgents” in the deployment of drones to support or execute targeted assassinations. It has also been at the center of some of the more infamous mistaken strikes, such as the alleged killing of an election campaign team in northern Afghanistan by a joint operation relying on cell phone tracking to identify the target (Gregory 2011a, 13). According to Kate Clark, the special forces team came to believe the Taliban deputy leader of Takhar had switched phones and adopted an alias when in fact the phone they tracked in order to locate the target and execute the strike was still in the hands of its original user, a former Taliban figure well-known in democratic Afghani politics (Clark 2011, 2).

The US military have rejected the claim that this strike was a catastrophic case of mistaken identity. Wherever the truth resides, Clark’s detailed investigation shows both that it is widely held to be so in Takhar province and in Afghanistan more generally, and that “technical intelligence” from phone tracking was central to the special forces operation. The phone tracks are an important part of what is known as “pattern of life” analysis used across the drone operations of both the US Air Force and the Joint Special Force operations they are involved in and by the CIA’s targeted assassinations in northern Pakistan and elsewhere. A person’s activities, associations, and electronic communications with others can be compared against a “normal” civilian set of routines and social exchanges for people in the surveilled territory in order to identify unusual “patterns” or associations. Such abnormal patterns indicate potential targets for further monitoring or possible assassination. The individual identified with such a pattern may find themselves graduating from the database of potential targets—the “Disposition Matrix”—to becoming a “nomination” on the “kill-list” under consideration in the Pentagon and ultimately by the US President (Becker and Shane 2012).

It has been claimed that strikes based on pattern of life analysis represent a significant component of drone-based hunter-killer attacks on individuals who are only known as potential threats through a process reliant on software-based analysis (16). These targeted individuals no longer need to be identified except as a certain kind of deviation from a norm established through the statistical modeling of sets of data drawn from full-spectrum monitoring of the battlespace. Their names and lived reality are less relevant than this conceptualization of them as potential threat known as a “signature target” as opposed to a “personality”—the signature refers to the particularity of their abnormal data pattern of movements, habits and web of associations that marks them as a threat (18).

In their “anonymity” and “abstraction” the signature targets “are ghostly traces of the target signatures that animated the electronic battlefield” of the Ho Chi Minh trail (Gregory 2011a, 13). Moreover, they register the systemic transformation of this Vietnam-era experiment in remote warfare: from a dynamic targeting procedure responding to “signature” analog traces of the movement of (presumed) enemies, to the programmatic generation of a pattern from data processing that is used to produce the targets in advance of their threatening movement or action. As Chamayou notes, this technical procedure instantiates a promise to “predict the future and be able to modify its course through preemptive action” (Chamayou 2013, 66).

The simulational character of this procedure is striking. It repeats the rationale offered for SIMNET’s development in the 1980s as a comprehensive, computer simulation-based training system enabling a precocious mastery of the contingent complexity of future conflict: to use history to anticipate and prepare for the future. As Lenoir and Lowood demonstrate, the networking of military simulation enabled the collective training of joint force elements in a distributed but unified battlespace based on detailed archives of terrain, military units, and prior operations. SIMNET developer Jack Thorpe expressed the desire to make an interactive training vehicle that would use history to prepare for the future (Lenoir and Lowood 2005, 19). In analyzing these SIMNET developments in Gameplay Mode I posed a question about the effect of this modeling of the terrain and the enemy and its future impacts on battlespace. Lenoir and Lowood had already indicated that simulational systems were finding their way closer—in both spatial and temporal terms—to ongoing operations through battlefield deployment of systems aiding tactical planning (20). In this regard I would say that the emerging practices of increasingly automated and schematic generation of targets represents a radicalization of this preparatory logic that drove simulation ever closer to the conduct of war. The modeling of the enemy as a set of behaviors is no longer limited to the realms of a hypothetical operational scenario—however close its correspondence to envisaged operations. This modeling of enemy-as-pattern is now performatively rather than hypothetically enacted in targeting decisions. The anticipatory impetus of simulational technologies have overtaken the very processes spawning military actions in a creeping barrage of increasingly automated data-scraping and scenario modeling.

In a similar manner the digital simulation of space supporting the planning of attacks has found its way out of the hypothetical mode of simulation with the digital implementation of “joint fire areas” or what were known as “killboxes.” These are names for a procedural designation of physical space enabling the coordination of elements engaging targets within a specified area that is both temporary and scalable according to the nature of the target and the conditions and constraints of the operation. As Chamayou explains, the killbox describes a process as much as a space: “one opens, activates, freezes and then closes a killbox” (Chamayou 2013, 83). The killbox is a zone of temporarily and flexibly realized virtual space: virtual inasmuch as it comes into existence digitally thanks to the real-time technologies of modeling, monitoring, measurement, and transmission. It puts into practice the redefinition of traditional geographical and strategic-political territory projected in the theory of battlespace. Killboxes can in principle (and in their virtuality as digital diagrams) be opened anywhere in the world, and be as small or as large as required, rendering irrelevant traditional geopolitical limitations such as national borders, city walls, and geophysical boundaries such as mountain ranges, rivers and so forth. Chamayou speaks about the killbox’s combination of precision measurement and flexible delineation enacting a dual principle of the “globalization and homogenization” of space (86).

It is in the technological implementation of procedures such as the killbox (and its more recent iteration as the “joint fire area”) that the redefinition of the theater of war as “battlespace” is concretized in the manner of the technical object: that is, as the ongoing materialization of a tendency that demands critical-theoretical as well as legal-humanitarian attention.¹⁷ This is made clear in the history of the “killbox” concept that Chamayou dates to a 1996 USAF report scoping the future use of unmanned aerial vehicles in zones of “autonomous operation” (326). Today’s remote operations involving UAVs are semiautonomous, requiring the coordination of teams across the globe. They employ a virtualizing principle and procedure, by which I mean a mediation of space and time via an interface that translates and transacts actions back and forth between actual and virtual, physical and digital. “Classic” questions of digital technoculture concerning the impact of real-time communications and telepresence on subjective experience, cultural identity, and social-political structures are posed by the virtualization of missile strikes in a way that brings into focus the long history of the military motivations of technological and technoscientific advances.

The drone is, in this regard, a materialization of the tendency to fashion an artifactual warrior identified by Onians in ancient Greek philosophy, literature, and material culture. As weapons system it repeats the contradictory, dualistic treatment of the citizen-soldier in the origins of Western democracy—the composition of political subject and pure object of the State’s strategic-political will is mirrored in the virtual, globally distributed composition of the military personnel with the drone weapon platform. If the seeds of democracy are to be found in the warrior’s negotiation of the rights and responsibilities that are entailed in a conditional, intermittent acquiescence to a state of artifactual instrumentality of state violence, however, this was on the basis of his commitment to the life or death stakes of the collective struggle. In drone operations, this composition is undergoing a disorienting disintegration. The tendency is most apparent in the use of drones as both targeting support and target elimination.

The military personnel—at least those “at home” in the USAF base in Nevada, or in the strategic command centers far from the drone in flight over its target—are still part of the military machinery, but less as warriors than as operators of a technological system for the preemptive resolution of environmental problems that threaten to impede its effective functioning in coordinating its many elements in the global battlespace. Tensions within the US military evidence this ambiguous status of the drone operators in Nevada.¹⁸ At the same time, as Gregory has shown, their virtualized spatiotemporal involvement in joint operations via video feed with forces on the ground, voice communications, and chat windows can involve them intensely and intimately in a vicarious experience of the warrior’s exposure to risk (Gregory 2011b, 198ff). Those who suffer psychologically from this unprecedented involvement and experience of the carnage of industrial, high-tech killing have stretched the boundaries of the definition of posttraumatic stress disorder in that exposure via proximity to the risk of death is a central diagnostic criterion (Chamayou 2013, 155). The contradictions multiply.

Notes

10 In his afterword to his and Gilles Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Felix Guattari cites the phalanx as a privileged example of the concept of the “machine” mobilized in their reinterpretation of culture and history in this and subsequent works (Guattari 2013). The phalanx is a combination of elements (the hoplite warriors), each a machine comprised of soldier and arms (the hoplite panoply) and the phalanx is itself a machine element in larger machines, right up to the Greek city-state machine. A fundamental point of this characterization is to circumvent a conventional historical analysis of the political and cultural causes and influences leading to and from the phalanx and to instead posit the significance of the combination of human and non-human, material, technical and strategic and conceptual elements as an ensemble that drives history and events. As an arrangement of equal elements (in machinic “phyla”), the machine’s dynamic is not reducible to a human-centered narrative of ideas and their projected materialization, nor to an account of tools as means to human-authored ends. In this Deleuze and Guattari’s “machine” corresponds to Stiegler’s efforts to think the constitutive role of technical developments in human becoming (further evidence of the debt they each owe to Simondon’s philosophy). Stiegler’s more “anthropocentric” (to be understood here minus the assumption concerning the essential stability or inevitability of the anthropos) concerns with the possible ethico-political dimensions of the future of the technical tendency offers me a better basis on which to approach critically the developments in automated and unmanned systems I am concerned with in this chapter.

13 Hilgers’s approach, influenced by Friedrich Kittler’s materialist media and cultural theory, is not unlike Stiegler’s thought of the composition of cultural, political, and technical tendencies. He analyzes the role played by the material and technical practices of wargames in the transforming cultural-political context of an emerging German nation-state in the center (geopolitically and in terms of cultural, philosophical, and scientific developments) of Europe. Hilgers’s insightful account places wargames not only as significant contributors to the European history of conflict and cultural transformation, but as major conduits for the advances in mathematics in the West that led to its preeminent role in the modern military-technological complex driving key innovations of World War II, a state of affairs that will extend into the postwar technoscientific transformation of culture into global technoculture.

54 War, Mathematics, and Simulation: Drones and (Losing) Control of Battlespace