As for man, [his days] are numbered,
whatever he may do, it is but wind…
TABLET II, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
Gilgamesh’s Uruk, Warka in modern-day Iraq, is about 185 miles south of Baghdad. It is mostly a wreck of a place, half buried and picked over by centuries of looters, largely unknown outside the world of archeology. Yet it has the distinction of being the first, largest, and longest-lived city from the most ancient period of Mesopotamia, perhaps even the oldest city in our entire world.1
Sometime during the first half of the third millennium BCE, in the early dynastic period of Sumerian civilization, a real Gilgamesh is said to have ruled there.2 The city goes back even further, at least 2,000 years further. Within its 10-kilometer-long walls—claimed in the Epic to have been built by King Gilgamesh himself—were 500 acres where wheat was first successfully cultivated on a large scale, where the pottery wheel was developed, where time was first divided into units of sixty, where the first examples of writing were found, and where authorship was granted. This place was the ancient world until it disappeared—some say because of conquest, others because of the effects of overpopulation, others because of a change in the course of the great river and environmental challenges that followed.3
When Sumerian civilization disintegrated and Uruk perished, the Epic of Gilgamesh also disappeared. A lively oral history circulated throughout the Near East, and the story shaped countless others, but it wasn’t until 1850 that the West discovered it. Tablets and fragments recording the Epic were found in the ruins of a royal Assyrian library at Nineveh, many hundreds of miles north of ancient Uruk, near today’s Mosul.4 Since then, almost 100 different caches of all or parts of the Gilgamesh story have been found from modern-day Iran to Turkey and into Palestine. And fragments are still being recovered.
Early translations, some hastily concluded and based on sparse understanding of the Akkadian language,5 framed the story in the aesthetics and interests of the day. That mostly meant molding European Christian ideals and orthodoxy: the flood was a real event, and thus the Bible challenged the emerging theory of evolution.6 Then, if you will, the intelligence improved. The “standard version” uncovered in Nineveh, missing some 575 of its total of 3,500 lines, was supplemented by parts of other tablets, some in other languages, some even from different epochs.7 As one scholar points out, each subsequent translation and version that emerged was thus based on “steadily accumulated knowledge.”8
Like a modern military PowerPoint briefing that is constantly fiddled with and always shifting, and now also like our entire world of interactive, ever-changing, and never static data, which masquerades as our “intelligence” explaining the world, each version of the Epic reflects the input, competence, interests, and biases of its author. That’s why in academia there is a gay Gilgamesh and much dogma about everything from the origins of the gods to the rule of oppressive kings. Saddam Hussein even spoke of himself as a Gilgamesh in one of his last councils with his generals, the maniacal dictator born for and to a people who could rest assured that they had a unique history of giving birth to legends and heroes.9 To me, Gilgamesh not only symbolizes our lack of understanding of the very lands in which we fight, but is also a seminal document that suggests the moral guidelines for making war, not just some heroic motif of comradeship in performing amazing feats and the brotherhood of Gilgamesh and Enkidu and their synergy in battle. Gilgamesh symbolizes the importance of thinking through why to undertake a fight, how to fight once we are in that battle, and then what the consequences of each conquest are, even in how we celebrate our victories.
When I discovered that there was a Gilgamesh black box, I tried to find out whether the person who named it had something in mind. Was it a wry acknowledgment of the futility of the modern endeavor? I didn’t really expect to find the answer, but many of the military officers I asked, many of whom considered themselves historians and specialists on the Middle East, had never heard of the historic Gilgamesh or could only vaguely recount what the Epic was about. These Iliad-reading officers considered warfare’s roots to lie in Greek heroes and battles that took place thousands of years after Sumeria. And though they were taught as young cadets that “the challenges and complexities associated with the moral and ethical dimensions of warfare can be traced back to ancient times,” those times were never ancient enough to be associated with Uruk as an actual place.10 Not only, then, do Western militaries fight in Gilgamesh’s land largely oblivious to the stories of universal mankind, but the ways of the Data Machine ensure that as battles shift to any Everybad, the background becomes ever more irrelevant.
Intelligence collection and analysis, at least at the keyboard and monitor level, look awfully Googleized, an algorithm-and machine-determined imposition of what’s important that seems to leave us as dumb as ever. I question how the practitioners of War 2.0 know the real world in all of its complexity or can possibly be learning anything. There is too-rapid turnover in assignments to any of a half dozen war zones for any geographic experience to develop among American military officers, and there is too much diversity of language and culture for any of them to truly emerge as an expert. Mastering the workings of the Data Machine and its never-ending shifts and changes is a full-time job.11 An analyst or officer can shift from country to country, even from continent to continent, applying the same cultureless techniques. This is not even to mention that the job is targeting, not understanding. That is the essence of our unmanned world.
And as for that specific black box named Gilgamesh that sits on Predator and Reaper drones? The fact that this geolocating gizmo can reach right into cell phones and other communications devices to determine their precise location seems wholly unremarkable and transitory to the modern unlaborer. My friends in the military and intelligence worlds unanimously dismiss Gilgamesh and its ilk as the military equivalent of some digital crush and problem solver that is absolutely essential one day but accumulates in the back of the dresser drawer the next. These black boxes—so invisible—are not tangible fragments like ancient pieces of tablets and humanity, nor do they have any distinction in grasping why American war tends to unfold the way it does. Add to their unrewarded toil and mechanical dismissal the fact that technical proficiency doesn’t have the same romance as any kind of human bravery, honor, or sacrifice. In other words, the unmanned are not worthy of an Epic.
When the US military found itself digging into these very lands in August 1990, confronting Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it was probably the last place it ever expected to be. In describing the new battlefield, there were some news stories about the cradle of civilization and even mention of Iraq’s Ur of the Chaldees as the birthplace of the biblical Abraham. The father of Judaism and the patriarch of Islam, if he existed at all, probably lived during the time of King Shulgi, maybe some 3,000 years after Gilgamesh. In modern-day southern Iraq there was still the millennia-old ziggurat of Ur, a wondrous archeological object that is unfortunately relegated to being little more than an entry in a database of objects that should be avoided; they are called no-strike targets.
Thirty-nine days of bombing in 1991 led to a complete rout of Saddam’s army. Though most still can’t believe it, modern airpower changed the human calculus: men and tanks clashing on the ground and mass slaughter were supplemented, some would even say replaced, by the technology of unstoppable remote attack. Organized war as it had been fought throughout history was finished. No one quite knew how to capture air war, it being so ahistoric and heroless. So the focus changed from battles to bombing, and the depiction became an endless stream of lifeless numbers of sorties and targets. Then the propagandists stepped in. Baghdad cried about hidden civilian casualties and collateral damage, actually scoring a hit when they unveiled an infant formula production plant that had been bombed, near a then little-known town called Abu Ghraib. Saddam Hussein even sat for his only wartime interview with Peter Arnett of CNN, and through a wordy and roundabout ninety-minute monologue, he promised “blood… lots of blood… let not fickle politicians deceive you once again by dividing the battle into air and land parts—war is war.”12
American counterpropagandists retaliated. Imagery analysts spotted two Iraqi MiG-21 fighter jets parked next to the ruins of the ziggurat of Ur.13 The archeological site was swallowed within the fence line of Tallil Air Base, one of Iraq’s largest. Though the enemy planes had been towed more than a mile from the nearest runway and thus were a threat to no one, the picture illustrated Iraq’s perfidy in trying to put the ziggurat within American cross hairs. Saddam was carrying out ploys to provoke civilian attacks, the United States bellowed. The White House even issued a terse statement: “This morning, we have documentation that two MiG-21s have been parked near the front door of a treasured archaeological site which dates back to the twenty-seventh century BC.”14 The White House was only off by twenty centuries.
And then, when American ground commanders concluded that those forces were defeated—Iraqi equipment was depleted by more than 50 percent—the glorious battle commenced. A still-industrial war machine advanced along a wide front, while the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division—a powerful force just being endowed with digital steroids—left-hooked right into ancient Akkad and even took Tallil Air Base, about the US Army’s northernmost advance before swinging east toward Basra. In 100 hours, it was over, the it being the ground war, the only war that registered as real and legitimate, as honorable or historic.
By the time the second Iraq war came in 2003, the Data Machine had pumped up combat power enormously. Iraq’s every electronic squawk and quiver was now exposed. Precision had started to transform the ground forces as well, as had computerization and miniaturization and digital everything. A force less than one-fifth the size of the force mobilized in 1990 gathered in Kuwait to get rid of Saddam. The little ground army jabbed, bobbed, weaved, and connected its way to Baghdad, a spry and lightning-fast welterweight David with superior vision rapidly overwhelming an archaic Goliath. Predator and Global Hawk were now fixtures of battle, and unrelenting 24/7 surveillance actually produced too much information, but again the narrative ignored drones and black boxes and all the instruments of the Data Machine. Barely three US and British ground divisions, now half-digital and half-industrial, took down Saddam, shock and awe some faux crushing sideshow, victory secured by sweat and blood—absolute conventional victory. The history was the twenty-one-day dash of the ground forces—of men—to Baghdad. War was war and never changing, the generals and commentators agreed.
And they were oh so wrong.
In May 2003, President Bush declared “Mission accomplished,” and though many would later guffaw over the error and the hubris, that was what it looked like to the Iliad-tutored officers. The 3rd Infantry Division to the west and the 2nd Marines to the east stood at the door of Akkad and then blasted through the land of Sumer, brushing aside Ur, driving through ancient Uruk on the way to Babylon and then on to Baghdad, a force armed with the greatest information and one that looked nothing like “divisions” of the past.
And yet every road and every landmark remained utterly foreign to the invaders. It wasn’t just that the military didn’t know the story of the Epic and the civilizations that lay beneath the actual places they’d been to, not once but twice. There were also true surprise and tragic unpreparedness in understanding the Iraqi people—Shia, Sunni, Kurd, tribal—just as there had been gross error in reading Afghanistan after Kabul and Kandahar fell. Then, the potential of the growing digital storm was shown in the rapid dislodgment of al Qaeda and the Taliban in barely a month of fighting. And the narrative then was just a few hundred American men with laptops on horseback vanquishing the enemy, despite the odds, despite the hand-wringing about those mountains being the graveyard of empires.
In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Machine performed, suggesting and even portending what was to come: that no history or geography would get in its way. The drones emerged, as did GPS and the network, IR, SAR, MASINT, multispectral, ISR and nontraditional ISR, an acronymic multitude of INTs giving substance to a dream of an all-seeing and perfect execution. And then the crusaders stayed. They became occupiers and new subjugators, no matter how hard they actually strived to minimize civilian harm and fight a perfect war. When twenty-first-century assertions and chat sessions faded, the ways of the ancient times took over. In Afghanistan, the guerrillas regrouped, using all the advantages of geography and tribal relations. In Iraq, looting came and a locustlike swarm descended upon the tyrant’s temples, even taking the artistic discoveries from Uruk: the massive Warka Vase, covered with relief carvings of a procession of offerings to the goddess Ishtar; and the life-sized limestone Face of a Woman, the oldest known sculptural depiction of the female face. Ignorance was simply framed as some Rumsfeldian or neoconservative failure, the civilized world tsk-tsking and finger-pointing as to too few troops or a diversion of attention, as if more men and more weight would have liberated, when in fact the peoples of these ancient lands were hardly yearning for the advances promised in the model of Western white and democratic civilization.
The public assumption remained that more troops were needed.15 Yet boots on the ground and occupation no matter what the “strategy” also meant turning the nimble databird into a colossal dinosaur. The Machine initially stumbled on suicide bombers and the bloodlust of history and civil war and IEDs until it carved out enough of an information bubble for the ground army to actually withdraw. With Uruk and Iraq swept aside, expunging the world’s evil became a matter of killing individuals. Slowly, the Machine armed itself with all of the black boxes to perfect its new appointed craft.
The terse recapping here isn’t meant to impugn the US armed forces and others who have sacrificed much and given life and limb in this awful fight. But no matter how many red lines the generals draw in the sand, no matter how many routes north and south are labeled with military precision to suggest battles of the past, no matter how many gaps in the defenses are studied for breaching, no matter how many counterinsurgency doctrines are written or how many cultural intelligence programs are created, the Data Machine has become the supreme authority and influential silent partner in all that has unfolded. After 9/11, the United States moved the Machine to Kuwait and the Gulf states, positioning it in obliging foreign lands to extend the unblinking eye and its accompanying broadband to dead spots on the globe, which then meant Afghanistan. It only made practical sense after the fall of Kabul not to close up the hot spot and send the network home.
That same Machine, growing in global capacity, then expanded into a targeted killing campaign in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and elsewhere, this time with no boots on the ground, at least not the boots of old. Drones were only a minor part of what emerged: the black boxes themselves accumulated and got better; then came every new platform from Constant Hawk to Harvest Hawk to space-based systems and even the cybervirtual that is body-worn. A permanent high-capacity global hot spot followed through the pumping up of satellite communications and the tetherless network, the be-anywhere air communications node. Combat troops left, but the Machine spiraled and perfected. And then, even as forces were withdrawn from Afghanistan, the pace of development didn’t stop. Cemented into permanent and invisible space, the Machine could support global operations anywhere. But it was a particular kind of operation—targeting—and that in itself seemed to define both American involvement and its limits.
When the Syrian civil war came along in 2013, and when Iraq War Number Three reared its head the next year, the Machine determined the response. Announcing American assistance as the Sunni group ISIS rampaged, the overall American task in Iraq, as laid out by President Obama, was some vague support to restore peace. It became clear that the actual activity acceded to the capacities of the Data Machine and the unmanned. American involvement would be given over completely to “intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” specialized military jargon that even President Obama could throw about in prime time. Six times in a short press conference, Obama spoke of getting “a better picture” of what was going on in Iraq, wisdom pretended through the very suggestion of the word “intelligence.” And then he spoke of his new Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund, which allocated $5 billion to work with Middle East governments to develop and improve their capacities to “fight the terrorists.” That meant the professional protocols and capabilities of counter-this and counter-that, pure and simple, for there really wasn’t anything that the American military and its intelligence cousins could teach or provide other than data and targeting. In short, the United States was assisting those governments, whether legitimate or not and regardless of the long-term outcome, in their capacity to improve their own targeting, with only a prayer and a hope that they would focus on the same targets.
More than anything else, though, Obama reassured the American people that American troops would not be “returning to combat,” thus also evading the fact that indeed combat would be taking place and that the unmanned Machine would be doing the fighting previously done by men. “I have no greater priority than the safety of our men and women,” Obama reassured in his Iraq speech.16 The Data Machine would ensure the task in the immediate sense, with the safety of the men and women of the United States deferred.
Some might say that Obama’s reluctance to send in troops is political or even some expression of weakness or liberalism, when the reality is that it wholly matches American military style. This aesthetic has reigned throughout the precision age. “Yours is a society that cannot accept ten thousand casualties,” Saddam said swaggeringly before the first Gulf war in 1990, baiting the United States to fight his version of some ancient grotesque bloody battle. Bush I did not. Through Bosnia and Kosovo, Clinton and company experimented with humanitarian intervention, some clamoring for boots on the ground and even arguing that the mere threat of a ground war achieved political outcomes (or even more bizarre, that ground forces were less destructive than precision airpower). Even before 9/11, terrorism became a national threat, and yet the response was almost completely given over to the hands-off technology, whether that meant Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missiles or the new Predators. When bombing began for the big public retribution campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11, Bush II never really loosened restrictions that were in place to safeguard American lives. In fact, Rumsfeld instituted policies that were as restrictive as those of his predecessors, the tandem goals being to take full advantage of technology while also not creating or provoking a hornets’ nest of political controversy or backdraft. All through warring that would extend to Iraq and farther afield, the avoidance of risk to US forces (and the avoidance of the risk of civilian harm) was held up as a top priority. Critics might lament civilian casualties, but there is no denying that the numbers are historically low compared to wars of the past, that billions have been spent to develop intelligence and weapons capabilities specifically to minimize those casualties. Though again, the objective is tandem: fewer civilian casualties and fewer industrial accidents also mean that public interest wanes. The Data Machine counts and affirms constant progress, yet the numbers don’t really matter in the same way.
Even at the height of frustration and American casualties in Iraq, even at the time of the hunting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and then later of Osama bin Laden, opportunities to kill even the worst terrorists were passed up because of the potential collateral harm to civilians—so deeply ingrained was a certain aesthetic promising perfection. When Zarqawi was killed in June 2006, the air force bragged that its pilots were assured “100 percent” that not only were all the socks in order, but no civilians were at risk in an attack.17 When bin Laden was killed in May 2011, the mission was a careful balancing act that rejected manned bombing because of its potential for excessive damage. One might wonder how it is that such compromises can be made in the face of articulations of the extraordinary threats that these individuals pose. Even the most dovish commentaries about the laws of armed conflict accept that in cases of extreme military necessity, a balance can be struck between achieving a specific timely and important military objective and the potential civilian harm. And moreover, the most dovish commentaries accept that if the combatant hides amongst civilians, a certain immunity is lost if the target is deemed to be critical and timely.
The years-long hunt for Zarqawi and bin Laden was taken up with meticulous care in order to balance the amount of civil harm or collateral damage that was created in the interim. That is, if avoiding civilian deaths is an overriding objective, which I’m suggesting it can never be, then the far larger calculation has to be made as to the cost to society and humanity for even operating in this seemingly near-perfect way. Zero civilian casualties do not equal military necessity. Just war, which forms the basis of the law of armed conflict and US military doctrine, governs not only the justification to go to war but also the conduct of military operations during a war, all with the final conclusion—the only acceptable justification for using force—that not only is there no alternative, not only have all other options been exhausted, but the use of force will not create the conditions that would undermine the restoration of peaceful relations once war ends.
What Saddam Hussein said almost three decades ago is true: we are such a society that today cannot accept ten thousand deaths in battle (nor should we be). But if we are merely measuring progress and justness from each tiny Raven and Pyros that performs its magic task, then we might not be so brutal and bloodthirsty, but we are surely foolish and shortsighted. We have become a society that is largely divorced from our military, and that is partly due to its unmanning. And we have certainly, and even the political and military leadership has largely, divorced ourselves from the Data Machine. In other words, we have failed to keep up with its development and sway, and with the shift of warfare out of the millennia-long Iliad epoch.
Today, the Data Machine doesn’t care where it is fighting. It doesn’t matter whether targets are hiding in Hindu Kush caves or in villages of the Fertile Crescent. Nor does Predator care, or Reaper, or Global Hawk, or any other of our other aptly and awkwardly named all-seeing eyes. In fact, they don’t care about anything: they are machines. But the men and women behind Gilgamesh the black box and behind the entire Machine also don’t care, for every place is reduced to geographic coordinates that flash across a screen in seconds. Nations, armies, and even people are reduced to links and networks. Along the way, a popular and almost universally supported war against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda diffused to one against high-value individuals, high-value targets, foreign regime elements, violent extremists, and anticoalition forces, names changed to match propaganda of the day but all atomized “targets” in the end. And this most modern technology and technique of digital war-making can be applied even in some of the most technologically backward places on earth—on the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen and the “empty quarter” of the Arabian peninsula, in the Horn of Africa, in the stans, in the Sahel, in the Muslim archipelagoes, and even in the last pirate bastions.
Victory now means effective black boxes that work in whatever weather and whatever desert, mountain, or urban setting. Loitering drones and geolocating weapons just need the data. Everyone needs the global information grid and the Internet—or, more precisely, an internet. Actual battlefield geography and culture have become immaterial. The node and the network sentry become the determinant and the provocateur of action—all the way to the edge of the world, anywhere. Gilgamesh is sensing at the edge; the Epic temple of information at the core.
But here’s where I don’t fall: despite being of the generation of non-native-gamers, I also know something of the military—old and newfangled—and consequently, I don’t yearn for the old days. I don’t mean typewriters and carbon paper; I mean the industrial grind. When the Washington pundits and the New York movers and shakers and the Hollywood wannabes disparage the technology—video-game war, death TV, killer robots—I wonder what it is they do want. Eleven million men and women in uniform as in World War II? Thousands being killed at one time in battles and bombings? Some even suggest a draft—as if they are ready to serve themselves or serve their kids up for war—because equal risk might somehow tame some wild Enkidu out there, when the truth of the matter is that our own 2.0 way of war just doesn’t demand that many bodies anymore, or at least not the traditional soldierly types. We are nowhere near being completely unmanned in our war-making, but a Data Machine doing the bulk of the work does and should change our picture of war and of shared sacrifice and risk. When all of the post-Afghanistan headlines announce that the US Army will be the smallest it’s been since before World War II, the entire premise is cockeyed: we just don’t need that many people anymore, particularly not in bringing lethal destruction to bear on some enemy. That’s how good the technology of war is. But we do need armies of IT people and so-called analysts to conquer the increasingly infinite stockpiles of data, and that in itself makes the nature of the military, the nature of our economies, even the nature of our societies very different than they were in the past.
The semblance of Gilgamesh and Enkidu still tends to dominate how we see our world: the mighty bristling with muscles, and beautiful specimens to boot. It isn’t that might makes right, as if it ever were. But it is the case that might is might. The 5,000-year-old story of Gilgamesh is still so powerful precisely because the heroic tale is so persistent and the universal lesson of the immortal quest so enduring. No matter how many conquests he accumulated, King Gilgamesh learned that he was going to die, that mortality and domination over the gods could never be achieved, and that the reality of mortal life demanded coexistence and wise leadership. Drones and their puppeteer, the Data Machine, may have developed from some sense of need and good, but no matter what, this Machine is going to kill, and it is going to make godlike decisions. In the end, having this Machine between us and the killing is making us less human. The illusion of perfect warfare is little more than a blaring video game endlessly played to higher and higher levels and higher scores, but one being played in a crumbling crack house.
The greatness of the Gilgamesh story, told and retold over millennia, is that it touches on the loss of human innocence, on the beauty of friendship, on the brevity of human life, on the rules for proper living while we are here on earth, and finally, on human striving, tragedy, and reconciliation. Focusing on any one of these narratives isn’t wrong per se. The story’s enduring power is that the tale is so grand and unifying that even as its interpretation has shifted over the years, the enduring core of the search that never ends is just that: it never ends. And not only that, but here is an ancient book that set down universal truths long before the Bible or the Qur’an, a tale from the very threshold between the days of legend and our era of historically grounded truth.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is about what it means to be human. In the original Sumerian version, laid down before Babylonian times, the king finds Utanapishti and receives not just the story of the flood but also long-lost information on practices and rituals that had fallen out of use after the deluge.18 Gilgamesh returns to Uruk to restore the old ways and be more civilized, which means, amongst other things, ruling wisely and caring for a human community. A hero who at the beginning of the Epic is clearly closer to the gods than to ordinary mortals, a bumbling superpower labeled a “wild bull on the rampage,” grows and learns that he is not all-powerful or all-knowing, that he will not live forever. He is a man, after all, even if he is divine. Beginning and ending with stanzas that emphasize the magnificence of the walls of Uruk, the whole narrative exudes the message that what man leaves behind is his only hope for immortality. And so there is also an epic scope in the Machine’s striving—like its namesake’s fruitless toils for immortality. The greatness of the Epic of Gilgamesh—the humanity of the endeavor—only comes in comprehending the arc from striving to failure to acceptance as that arc itself demonstrates our condition.