American victory in World War II was perceived to be due in large part to its scientific and technological superiority, best exemplified by the development of the atom bomb. Throughout the Cold War, scientific theories and methodologies were recruited even more extensively to weigh on military and strategic affairs. Cybernetics, along with operations research and systems analysis, sought to impose order and predictability on warfare through the collection, processing, and distribution of information. The emergence of the notion of command-and-control epitomized a centralizing approach which saw military organization purely as a vast techno-social machine to be integrated and directed on the basis of the predictions of mathematical models and the deployment of cybernetic technologies. Preparation for a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union was the primary focus of this conception of warfare but it failed spectacularly the test of Vietnam, thereby dramatically revealing its theoretical and practical bankruptcy. Indeed, cybernetic warfare was deeply flawed in its restrictive assumptions about conflict, its exclusive focus on quantitative elements, its dismissal of any views that did not conform to its norms of scientificity, and its neglect of the risks of information inaccuracy and overload.
As a singular witness and actor of the tumultuous 20th century, Ernst Jünger remains a controversial and enigmatic figure known above all for his vivid autobiographical accounts of experience in the trenches of the First World War. This article will argue that throughout his entire oeuvre, from personal diaries to novels and essays, he never ceased to grapple with what he viewed as the central question of the age, namely that of the problem of nihilism and the means to overcome it. Inherited from Nietzsche’s diagnosis of Western civilization in the late 19th century, to which he added an acute observation of the particular role of technology within it, Jünger would employ this lens to make sense of the seemingly absurd industrial slaughter of modern war and herald the advent of a new voluntarist and bellicist order that was to imminently sweep away timorous and decadent bourgeois societies obsessed with security and self-preservation. Jünger would ultimately see his expectations dashed, including by the forms of rule that National Socialism would take, and eventually retreated into a reclusive quietism. Yet he never abandoned his central problematique of nihilism, developing it further in exchanges with Martin Heidegger after the Second World War. And for all the ways in which he may have erred, his life-long struggle with meaning in the age of technique and its implications for war and security continues to make Jünger a valuable interlocutor of the present.
In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a ‘logistics of perception’, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking) and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders is concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has however extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light itself through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation is to be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb.
This article traces some of the intellectual lines of force concomitant to the constitution of a research field of Digital War.It submits that, while it may serve as a convenient shorthand for information and communication technologies concordantwith common parlance, the concept of the “digital” cannot in itself provide a dependable referent for demarcating such aninvestigative terrain. This consideration raises in turn a series of further conceptual, methodological, and empirical challengesfor scholars working in this emerging field, among which are the deep history of information technologies and their martialentanglements, the requirements of scientific and technical literacy, and engagement with the philosophy of technology
This article considers the place of the Hiroshima bombing and the September 11 attacks as singular acts of violence constituting major points of rupture in the historical consciousness and chronological narratives of the Western world: Ground Zero is Time Zero. Geographically and temporally delineated instances of intense death and destruction, both acts have been construed as moments when the world `changed for ever'. Our schemata of interpretation — the mental frameworks through which we impose meaning and continuity on the world around us and determine the range of our expectations — were violently overthrown by those events, shattered by images that exceed our minds' capabilities of re presentation and symbols that challenge our liberal metanarratives of ineluctable progress. By bringing to the fo re their aesthetic dimension and reading them through the lens of the Kantian notion of the sublime, we can grasp those events in their original intensity as overwhelming revelatory experiences. Apocalyptic both in their imagery and the meaning attributed to them, those unprecedented acts of terror re p resent turning-points in our reconstituted historical narratives, marking a culmination of history leading to it as well as the start of a new era in which it is proclaimed that many previous assumptions no longer hold.
The concepts, language and methods of complexity theory have been slowly making their way into international relations (IR), as scholars explore their potential for extending our understanding of the dynamics of international politics. In this article we examine the progress made so far and map the existing debates within IR that are liable to being significantly reconfigured by the conceptual resources of complexity. We consider the various ontological, epistemological and methodological questions raised by complexity theory and its attendant worldview. The article concludes that, beyond metaphor and computational models, the greatest promise of complexity is a reinvigoration of systems thinking that eschews the flaws and limitations of previous instantiations of systems theory and offers an array of conceptual tools apposite to analysing international politics in the twenty-first century.
Under the banner of martial empiricism, we advance a distinctive set of theoretical and methodological commitments for the study of war. Previous efforts to wrestle with this most recalcitrant of phenomena have sought to ground research upon primary definitions or foundational ontologies of war. By contrast, we propose to embrace war’s incessant becoming, making its creativity, mutability and polyvalence central to our enquiry. Leaving behind the interminable quest for its essence, we embrace war as mystery. We draw on a tradition of radical empiricism to devise a conceptual and contextual mode of enquiry that can follow the processes and operations of war wherever they lead us. Moving beyond the instrumental appropriations of strategic thought and the normative strictures typical of critical approaches, martial empiricism calls for an unbounded investigation into the emergent and generative character of war. Framing the accompanying special issue, we outline three domains around which to orient future research: mobilization, design and encounter. Martial empiricism is no idle exercise in philosophical speculation. It holds the promise of a research agenda apposite to the task of fully contending with the momentous possibilities and dangers of war in our time.