Sensing, territory, population: Computation, embodied sensors, and hamlet control in the Vietnam War

Abstract

This article analyses a mid-20th century computerized pacification reporting system, the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES), used by the US military to measure hamlet-level security and development trends in the Vietnam War. The significance of the HES was its capacity to translate US Military Advisor observations of Vietnamese hamlet life into a machine-readable format used by US military systems analysts to disclose 'patterns of life.' I show how US Military Advisors operated as 'embodied sensors' within the HES, producing a distinctive location-based event ontology -a 'view of below' -accompanied by rudimentary digital maps in-formation from incoming hamlet-level observation streams. I argue that acts of translating the rich texture of hamlet and village life into an objectified information format constituted a unique form of 'epistemic violence,' rooted not so much in the narrative subjection of the 'Other,' but in the pure abstraction of life into a digitally stored data trace.

On Agricultural Techniques:Broadcast,precision, and the media of culture

“…Moreover, many of the most important innovations in various forms of computerized precision were famously martial in origin, funded by and developed for the US military across the Cold War. Digital "command and control" systems and precision technologies developed for or used in the Vietnam War, for instance, included media, weapons, and surveillance systems like the Global Positioning System, laser-guided "smart" bombs (Watts, 2013), Operation Igloo White (an environmental network of sensors, computers and communications for directing aircraft attacks, see Edwards, 1997), and early GIS like the Hamlet Evaluation System (Belcher, 2019). Here, vast environments and populations were increasingly rendered in epistemologically cybernetic terms; masses of interrelated data and signals, recursive worlds of informatic noise that, ostensibly, demanded informatic precision to assess and exploit.…”

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

“…Indeed, questions of vision and visibility are therefore quite literally central in this case study, as the analytic gaze of the photograph interpreter was one of the enduring tasks that could not be elided by machines in IGLOO WHITE. I draw on accounts of embodiment in Belcher (2019) and Wilcox (2017) to examine these questions. Wilcox, examining this point in relation to the contemporary armed drone, argues taking this approach 'disputes narratives of the sublime capabilities of technologies and, furthermore, shows such narratives as partaking in a totalizing logic that ignores the specific forms of embodiment found in drone warfare' (Wilcox 2017, 24-25).…”

GIScience I: Social histories and disciplinary crucibles

“…However, there are other sites where GIScience takes hold. Oliver Belcher (2019) connects the geographic innovations in the Harvard Lab, such as the use of SYMAP, to the development of the Hamlet Evaluation System during the Vietnam War, to provide a ‘view of below’, of a calculable population in advance of war (extending work by Cloud, 2002; Crampton, 2011). In another through-line, Elvin Wyly (2019: 69) tells the story of Ed Ackerman as a figure that advocated for a ‘militarizing [of] the technical mind’, whose ideas would shape the later emergence of GIS and the discipline’s embrace of big data.…”