The turn to military robotics is a striking feature of contemporary Western warfare. How then to make sense of the increasing reliance on unmanned weapons systems, in particular, the use of combat-enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/drones? Questioning the intuitive and oft-repeated claim that robotics ‘take the human experience out of war’ (reducing it to a video game), I argue that in order to make sense of current developments, we need precisely to reconsider our understanding of the human, her role in, and experience of, war. In this, we are aided by a critical materialist inquiry that investigates the human–material assemblage as a complex whole, taking both fleshy and steely bodies into account. Drawing on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, I show that only by considering what being human means – in ontological terms – and by asking how human experience is altered through new technologies will we be able to think politically and ethically about contemporary war.
Contemporary Western war-fighting is animated by the fictitious imagination of a war free from antagonism. In this logic, winning wars is about winning the 'hearts and minds' of local populations, about persuasion rather than confrontation. In recent years, the concept of 'strategic communication' (SC) has been elevated to the top echelons of strategic thinking in United States military circles, focusing attention on how to communicate 'effectively' with local populations. Via an analysis of the concept of SC, this article examines the ethico-political dimensions of contemporary Western-led 'population centric' war. Through a reading inspired by Judith Butler's recent work in Precarious life (London: Verso 2006) and Frames of war (London: Verso 2009), and an analysis that turns on the link between ethics and ontology, I reflect on the significance of the 'communications turn' in warfare for our study of war in ontological terms.
This is a vital and timely collection. These essays work superbly well together to unpack one of the deadliest terms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -'security forces' -and they do so with that rarest of combinations, intellectual creativity and substantive depth.
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