Imaginaries of omniscience: Automating intelligence in the US Department of Defense

Abstract

The current reanimation of artificial intelligence includes a resurgence of investment in automating military intelligence on the part of the US Department of Defense. A series of programs set forth a technopolitical imaginary of fully integrated, comprehensive and real-time ‘situational awareness’ across US theaters of operation. Locating this imaginary within the history of ‘closed world’ discourse, I offer a critical reading of dominant scholarship within military circles that sets out the military’s cybernetic model of situational awareness in the form of the widely referenced Observe, Orient, Decide, Act or OODA Loop. I argue that the loop’s promise of dynamic homeostasis is held in place by the enduring premise of objectivist knowledge, enabled through a war apparatus that treats the contingencies and ambiguities of relations on the ground as noise from which a stable and unambiguous signal can be extracted. In contrast, recent challenges to the closed-world imaginary, based on critical scholarship and investigative journalism, suggest that the aspiration to closure is an engine for the continued destructiveness of US interventions and the associated regeneration of enmity. To challenge these technopolitics of violence we need a radically different kind of situational awareness, one that recognizes the place of ignorance in perpetuating the project of militarism. Only that kind of awareness can inform the public debate required to re-envision a future place for the US in the world, founded in alternative investments in demilitarization and commitments to our collective security.

Enabling ‘AI’? The situated production of commensurabilities

“…These elements directly echo Suchman's (2023) investigation of contemporary US military scholarship in its relation to so-called ‘AI-enabled situational awareness’. In order to attach the label ‘AI’ to warfare devices, Suchman shows that it is essential to make human sensory and behavioral faculties comparable with those of computerized devices, before asserting, in turn, that the latter are today superior to the former.…”

“…To keep in mind the ambivalence of the term ‘AI’ and its capacity ‘to evade definition in order to maximize its suggestive power’ ( Suchman, 2023 , p. 781), we generally write it in quotation marks in this introduction.…”

North-south scientific collaborations on research datasets: a longitudinal analysis of the division of labor on genomic datasets (1992–2021)

“…Following Lucy Suchman's critique of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a "floating signifier" (Suchman, 2020(Suchman, , 2022, that is, an abstract term to describe a broad phenomenon in ways that are "slippery, " and ultimately "escapes concrete definition as a referent" (Suchman, 2022), we argue the N-S classification is a floating signifier. Here, it is unclear what is the actual referent of a country in the "global North" (i.e., a country, say, Ethiopia or the United Kingdom)?…”

Death by remote control: Drone warfare in Afghanistan, Ukraine and beyond

“…3 Perhaps more unsettling is the prospect of weapon systems enabled by AI. Both critics and advocates of lethal autonomous weapons are warning about an emerging global AI arms race in which the US, China, Russia and others rush to develop armed autonomous drones -what some US military officials call 'sensor-to-shooter' machine learning infrastructures (Suchman 2022). The experimental XQ-58A Valkyrie autonomous aircraft, described by the New York Times as an AI-enabled 'robot wingman' for fighter pilots, may be a harbinger of things to come (Lipton 2023).…”