Remote Split

Abstract

This article analyzes US drone operations through a historical and ethnographic analysis of the remote split paradigm used by the US Air Force. Remote split refers to the globally distributed command and control of drone operations and entails a network of human operators and analysts in the Middle East, Europe, and Southeast Asia as well as in the continental United States. Though often viewed as a teleological progression of “unmanned” warfare, this paper argues that historically specific technopolitical logics establish the conditions of possibility for the work of war to be divisible into discreet and computationally mediated tasks that are viewed as effective in US military engagements. To do so, the article traces how new forms of authorized evidence and expertise have shaped developments in military operations and command and control priorities from the Cold War and the “electronic battlefield” of Vietnam through the Gulf War and the conflict in the Balkans to contemporary deployments of drone operations. The article concludes by suggesting that it is by paying attention to divisions of labor and human–machine configurations that we can begin to understand the everyday and often invisible structures that sustain perpetual war as a military strategy of the United States.

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

“…Edwards observes that while the Cold War nuclear stand-off strengthened the role of simulations, war games, and computer modeling as proxies for weapons that could not be used, the translation of the superpower conflict to the ground in Southeast Asia beginning in the 1960s afforded a different experimental site for closed-world thinking. Operation Igloo White, the project of instrumenting the Ho Chi Minh Trail with sensors to disable it as a North Vietnamese transport road, embodied a fantasy of total surveillance and complete control over the battlefield from the safety of a distant, high-tech command center (the Infiltration Surveillance Center or ISC in Thailand), along with wired-in, computer-controlled aircraft cockpits (see also Chaar López, in press ; Elish, 2017 ). Together these and other developments resulted in an extreme intensification of efforts toward (and claims for) centralized, remotely controlled operations based on advanced computing and communications.…”

Sensors, interpreters, analysts: operating the ‘electronic barrier’ during the Vietnam War

“…For those reporting on Vietnam in the American news media in the early 1970s, IGLOO WHITE was a horrifying but spectacular realisation of an operational paradigm where soldiers mostly sat back and observed complex, 'rational' machines searching for and destroying the enemy (Jaubert 1972;Stanford 1975;Dickson 1977). In the scholarship on Cold War defence computing, IGLOO WHITE has been presented as an important case study emblematic of a distinctive 'cyborgian' strategic rationality (Edwards 1997) and a precursor to contemporary remote, unmanned warfare (Bousquet 2008;Shaw 2016;Elish 2017). These are fair claims: the electronic barrier employed remote autonomous devices, automatic data-processing computer systems, and unmanned aircraft with the aim of dominating a vast territory and combatting an 'enemy insurgency'.…”