MediaTropes eJournal Vol X, No X (YEAR): xxxxxx ISSN 1913-6005

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS:
DEADLY BIOCONVERGENCE AT THE BOUNDARIES OF BODIES AND MACHINES
LUCY SUCHMAN

Situational awareness is defined as the ability to maintain a constant, clear mental picture of relevant information and the tactical situation including friendly and threat situations The RSTA [Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition] elements must provide situational understanding of the operational environment in all of its dimensions political, cultural, economic, demographic, as well as military factors. Dostal, 2001

For many of us fortunate enough to remain at a geographical distance from the zones of armed conflict (both overt and covert) in which the United States is currently engaged in our names, our understanding of what those conflicts involve is dependent entirely on renderings available to us through the media (see also Federman and Holmes, 2011: 74). While media forms proliferate now to include not only professional but also participant reporting,1 the relation between our own bodies and those that are directly involved is for us a remote one. In this essay I offer some initial reflections on connections between the increasing emphasis in military and security discourses on keeping our bodies
1

See for example Jennifer Terrys powerful pedagogical assembly of YouTube videos created by active duty soldiers at http://www.vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=7&projectId=86. It is important to note that even these renderings are exclusively (and quite literally) from the point of view of our side. I return to this problem below.

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safe through so called network-centric warfare,2 and the project of cutting the networks (Strathern, 1996) that might bring our wars too close to home These connections are multiply configured, as some bodies become increasingly entangled with machines, in the interest of keeping them apart from the bodies of others. This essay represents the beginnings of an argument regarding the essential and inescapable tension between a commitment to distance on one hand, and to what in military discourses is named the problem of situational awareness, particularly with respect to the (mis)identification of relevant others. This tension holds not only for those involved in command and control of the front lines (the focus of the militarys concerns), but also for those of us responsible as citizens for grasping events in which we are, however indirectly, morally, politically, and economically implicated. As one exhibit of the issues involved, we can take journalist David Clouds (2011) Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy, published in the Los Angeles Times.3 The story reports on an incident that occurred in February 2010, when a group of around two dozen Afghans4 from several small mountain villages set out in the early hours of the morning in two sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and a pickup truck. Information assembled after the incident indicates that they had a variety of missions: some were shopkeepers going to replenish supplies, others were students returning to school, people going for medical treatment, families off to visit their relatives. There were several women and as many as four children under the age of six. They gathered to travel together over rough mountain roads to the main paved highway that would take them on to Kabul and other destinations. Those interviewed afterwards reported that the convoy was motivated by the possibility that one of the vehicles might break down along the way, though the travelers were also somewhat apprehensive of Taliban in the area. Unknown to them, a US special operations unit had been dropped into the area the night before, tasked with rooting out reported Taliban insurgents. An
2 3

For a compelling introduction to this trope and associated institutions see Der Derian, 2009. Cloud explains that his story was assembled from previously unreleased military documents including transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as the results of two Pentagon investigations, and interviews with officers involved and with Afghan citizens on the ground. For a further and more detailed reading of this event see Gregory, 2011, and for a summary of the US Forces own assessment see http://cryptome.org/2012/03/creech-savagery.pdf. 4 Drawing on Foucaults observations on the ways in which discourses constitute individuals, collectives and mass populations, Diedrich (2011) reminds us to track these figurations closely: note that here we get only a rough count of bodies, identified collectively as Afghan nationals. It is precisely these identifications that are at issue in the story that follows, and in the wider problem that it indexes.

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AC-130 attack plane, an armed Predator drone, and two Kiowa attack helicopters were providing the unit with defensive cover. At 5:08 that morning the AC-130 pilot spotted a pickup truck and an SUV converging from different directions, and saw one of the drivers flash his headlights in the darkness. He radioed this observation to the crew of the Predator drone three miles overhead, and the movements of the small convoy began to be closely tracked as targets of suspicion by the Predator pilot, his cameraman, mission intelligence coordinator, and safety observer at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Suspicions were heightened when the convoy stopped and, to quote the communications transcripts, 20 military age males were seen to gather on the side of the road to pray. This is definitely it, this is their [the Talibans] force, the drone cameraman was recorded as saying. Praying? I mean, seriously, thats what they do. Theyre gonna do something nefarious, the crew's intelligence coordinator agreed. By now the AC-130 pilot and drone crew were joined by the special operations unit on the ground in Afghanistan via radio, and with a team of screenersenlisted personnel trained in video analysis on duty at Air Force special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Florida. The screeners were sending instant messages to the drone crew, observations which the latter then relayed by radio to the unit on the ground. It was the prerogative of the ground force commander of the special operations unit to order an air strike, but doing so under rules of engagement requires a positive identification that the adversary is carrying weapons and poses an imminent threat. For the next four and a half hours, the Predator crew and screeners scrutinized the movements of the convoy, looking for evidence to support that identification. Their problem, as Cloud reports it, was that even with the advanced cameras on the Predator, the images were fuzzy and small objects were difficult to identify.5 But as an army officer involved in the incident later explained, We all had it in our head, Hey, why do you have 20 military age males at 5 a.m. collecting each other? There can be only one reason, and thats because weve put [US troops] in the area. During this time, one of the screeners in Florida reported that they thought they had seen some children in the group, but the Predator pilot and cameraman dismissed the report. At the same time, teams of US military linguists and intelligence personnel with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment who were intercepting cell phone calls in the area had been listening to chatter that suggested a Taliban unit was assembling for an attack. Despite the lack of precise location for this
5

The exact status of imagery from Predator cameras is ambiguous in media reports. Gregory (2011) quotes another article on the incident from the Wall Street Journal in May of 2010, whose authors report that officers who later viewed the feed said that it was clear from the tape that civilians were about to be rocketed (Cullison and Rosenberg, 2010).

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assembly, their report was conveyed to the special operations unit commander and then by the commander to the Predator crew, who took it as further confirmation of positive identification. At 8:43 a.m., army commanders ordered two Kiowa helicopters to get into position to attack, with the Predator pilot tasked to take out anyone who survived that hit. The attack was carried out, and at 9:15 a.m. the Predator crew noticed three survivors in brightly colored clothing waving at the helicopters. They appeared to be trying to surrender. What are those? asked the camera operator. Women and children, the Predators mission intelligence coordinator answered. By the US count, fifteen or sixteen men were killed in the strikes and twelve people were wounded, including a woman and three children. Elders from the Afghans home villages said in interviews that twenty-three people had been killed, including two boys aged three and four.6 It is the camera operators question, What are those? that I want to focus on in the remainder of this essay. The LA Times article reports that the Air Force conceded in an internal document that drone crews had not been trained to notice the subtle differences between combatants and suspicious persons who may appear to be combatants. A 2,100 page report released by the US Central Command on 22 March 2012 (US Forces-Afghanistan, 2010) admits that up to 23 local nationals were killed and 12 others injured, and issues an unequivocal condemnation of the inaccurate and unprofessional reporting of the Predator crew operating out of Creech AFB, Nevada which deprived the ground force commander of vital information that would have established that the vehicles were not a hostile threat. Cloud reports that some officers in the Pentagon concluded from the incident that an abundance of surveillance information can lead to misplaced confidence in the ability to tell friend from foe. Technology can occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything, that you can hear everything, that you know everything, said Air Force Major Gen. James O. Poss, who oversaw the Air Force investigation. I really do think we have learned from this. So who exactly shares in this false sense of security, under circumstances in which living bodies are subject to categorization as friend or enemy, and the latter are rendered as military targets? And what lessons might we learn from this tragedy? Shortly after the event, Cloud reports, General McChrystal banned the use of the category military age male, acknowledging that it implied that every adult man was a combatant.7 In their discussion of
6

The difference in these numbers is another symptom of uncertainty, even after the fact, regarding incidents on the ground. 7 In contrast to this circumspection with regard to acceptable discourse, McChrystal himself was removed from his command by President Obama in June of 2010 for conduct that

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those held at Guantanamo Bay over the past decade under the category of enemy combatants, Cary Federman and David Holmes (2011) draw on legal theorist Carl Schmitt to elaborate the ways in which the so-called War on Terror, and states of emergency more generally, are used to suspend recourse to legal adjudication of the friend/enemy distinction (2011: 74). While Federman and Holmes are concerned with the philosophical and legal implications of the strategically vague category of enemy combatant, my focus here is the more specifically situated and pragmatic problem faced by those charged with positive identification as a prelude to killing. In his inquiry into what he terms the scopic regimes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, the Air Forces preferred name for drone-centered systems), Derek Gregory (2011) considers discourses of precision and their limits.8 Gregorys central argument is that the lines of sight effected through these regimes are inescapably tethered to the view from our side, while they systematically erase the standpoints of those not identified with the US military or its allies: high-resolution imagery is not a uniquely technical capacity but part of a techno-cultural system that renders our space familiar even in their space which remains obdurately Other (2011: 201). It is the work of the UAV apparatus, Gregory argues, to effect these lines of separation. Resisting too quick a mapping of the UAV teams view to that of the video gamer, Gregory points out that video games staged in simulacra of Afghanistan show stylized landscapes prowled solely by insurgents or terrorists whose cartoonish appearance makes them instantly recognizable but the video feeds from UAVs reveal a much more complicated, inhabited landscape in which distinctions between civilians and combatants are intensely problematic (2011: 198). He continues: contemporary counterinsurgency is often described as war amongst the people, where it is formidably, constitutively difficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians. As the Pentagons own Defense Science Board admitted: Enemy leaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles; enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemy equipment and materials look like civilian equipment and materials (Defense Science Board Summer Study, 2004:
"undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system, or what NBC News (2010) characterized as his loose lips when it came to his own disparaging remarks regarding the administration. 8 For a comprehensive, critical overview of the use of armed UAVs by the US military and its consequences see Benjamin, 2012.

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154). This central, existential problem would remain even if the battlespace could be made fully transparent (Gregory, 2011: 200, original emphasis). The identification of friends among those who fall within the sightlines of UAV systems and their discrimination from enemies is rendered increasingly problematic by the same developmentsthe irregular operations of the War on Terrorthat motivate the expansion of war fighting as a system of remote control. And through these very operations, the hostile terrain becomes a constantly expanding one. As Gregory (2011: 189) observes, throughout the long history of aerial counter-insurgency beginning with the British in Afghanistan and Mesopotamia/Iraq in the 1920s, informed commentators have argued for its counter-effectiveness, as the widening networks of those injuredemotionally as well as corporeallycreates more enemies among the population from which it aims to eliminate them. A corollary to the configuration of their bodies as targets to be killed is the specific way in which our bodies are incorporated into war fighting assemblages as operating agents, at the same time that the locus of agency becomes increasingly ambiguous and diffuse. These are twin forms of contemporary bioconvergence, as all bodies are locked together within a wider apparatus characterized by troubling lacunae and unruly contingencies. The framing of these special issues of MediaTropes is directly relevant here. Our understanding of bioconvergence is in part inspired by Foucaults work on bio-power. On the one hand, Foucault argues that bio-power is capillary and dispersed. On the other, through genealogical critique he demonstrates that bio-power also convergesas moments, as artefacts, and as infrastructurescross-cutting the terrains of politics, ethics, and culture. (Steinberg and Murray, 2011: ii) The moments, artefacts, and infrastructures of convergent bio-power considered here are in one sense the crudest continuation of that which Foucault identified with the sovereign; that is, the right to take life or let live.9 In their coverage of these struggles, media representations of the war in Afghanistan adopt military discourses that alternately individualize bodies (in the centering of particular leaders targeted for assassination by the United States), collectivize groups (in their characterization as supporters of the Taliban), and massify
9

Lisa Diedrich (2011), in her contribution to the first of these Special Issues discusses the historical and conceptual intersections of sovereign and biopower as they have been articulated by Agamben and Mbembe.

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populations (in the translation of specific events of killing to body counts on each side). Doing justice to what is made present and what is rendered absent in the mediatization of war goes beyond the limits of this essay, but the effects are central to the apparatus under discussion. The figure of the cyborg after Donna Haraway (1985/1991) clearly does work here as well, indexing the implosion (in this context as well the explosion) of any sense of body-machine boundaries as given or fixed, calling on us rather to treat the creation of lines of separation and difference as always contingent, often strategic. Action at a Distance According to media reports,10 more than 7,000 drones of all types are in use over Iraq and Afghanistan, and remote control is seen as the vanguard of a revolution in military affairs (Der Derian, 2009: 28) in which US military and intelligence agencies are heavily invested, in both senses of the word (see Benjamin, 2012). In 2001 the US Congress affirmed the Pentagons goal of making one-third of ground combat vehicles remotely operated by 2015 (US Congress, 2000: 38) and began using armed drones in Afghanistan that same year (Weber, 2009: 97).11 As the authors of the Department of Defense Unmanned Systems Roadmap, 20072032 observe, For defense-related unmanned systems, the series of regional conflicts in which the United States has been engaged since the end of the Cold War has served to introduce and expand the capabilities of unmanned systems technology to war fighters. This conflict-driven demand has ensured the technologys evolution and continued funding, with each new conflict reinforcing the interest in such systems. (2007: 48)12

10

See for example Mulrine, 2011. I focus here on the (undeclared) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Central Intelligence Agency is engaged in the use of armed drones as well. The Bureau of Investigative Reporting attempts to maintain a comprehensive account of covert, remote control warfare. According to the Bureau, between 2004 and 2011 the CIA conducted over 300 drone strikes in Pakistan and additional strikes in Yemen and Somalia, killing 3,000 people including between 500 and 1,000 civilians. See http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/, accessed Feb. 2, 2012. 11 For further detail on the history of the deployment of armed UAVs see Gregory, 2011. 12 This excerpt is quoted in Weber, 2009. Her chapter offers a wider consideration than I provide in this essay on developments in uninhabited aerial vehicles and military robotics, particularly by the United States and Israel, as the issues have been taken upinadequately as yet in Webers assessmentin human rights and ethics discourses. She provides further evidence as well for civilian casualties from drone strikes. For an extensive consideration of autonomous weapons from the point of view of ethics see also Sparrow, 2007, 2009.

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In other words, war is still good for business. In 2009 the US Department of Defense updated its twenty-five-year research plan under the title, Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap 20092034, with $21 billion allocated for the first five years of research, development, and deployment. As of 2010, the Air Force was spending nearly $3 billion a year buying and operating UAVs and training more pilots to fly unmanned than manned aircraft13 (Markoff, 2010), and by 2011 the amount of money being spent on research for military robotics surpassed the entire budget of the National Science Foundation (Mulrine, 2011). Recent announcements regarding reductions in the 2012 Defense Department budget promise a future with fewer boots on the ground, but those are to be replaced by greater investments in new technologies, including drones. And the president reassures us that the Obama administrations proposed budget still exceeds that of the last years of the Bush administration.14 So how might we theorize the entangled relations of this ever expanding apparatus of networked warfare, and the intensified commitment to greater detachment of our bodies from its effects? The inter-relation of bodymachine intimacies and the problematics of separation are at the core of war fought by remote control. In Nuclear Borderlands (2006), Joseph Masco cites Walter Benjamins thesis on the correlation between more powerful destructive technologies and a reorganization of the human sensorium. Each new means of destruction [Benjamin argued] required a greater level of social anesthesia to normalize its impact on everyday life The industrial revolution restructured everyday life around repetition (the factory assembly line), speed (city life), and technologically-mediated violence (industrial accidents and mechanized war). The repetitive shocks to the body as sensory organ produced by these new social forms required a new means of processing stimuli, a system based not on engaging ones environment but on insulating and protecting the sensorium from it Rapid technological change has produced a reversal of the polarity of the human senses, which increasingly work not to engage the world but to insulate individuals from it. (2006: 9) Benjamins premisethat new modes of technological mediation are leading to
13

As Gregory (2011:195) points out, while UAVs do not carry a pilot, around 185 personnel are required to support one Predator or Reaper Combat Air Patrol. 14 See http://www.democracynow.org/2012/1/9/drones_asia_and_cyber_war_pentagon, accessed Feb. 2, 2012.

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a kind of sensory insulationseems well supported by developments in contemporary forms of remotely-controlled war fighting. The US media, at least, are fascinated with the geographical distance between the pilots of remotely operated drones, sitting in small enclosed rooms at Air Force bases in the Nevada desert, and the targets of their actions over 7,000 miles away in the mountains of Afghanistan. And there is no question that the logic of remotely controlled warfare is based on the promise that our bodies (the presumed audience for these stories) will be kept in safe spaces as they project lethal force at a distance. At the same time, it seems clear that the present moment is characterized by configurations that conjoin persons and bodies separated in space into increasingly intimate relationships. Commentators on contemporary war fighting emphasize the sense of proximity that arises from tightly coupled systems of satellite surveillance, networked communications, and remote control. This description, from an article by staff writer David Zucchino in the LA Times in February of 2010, provides a sense for the assemblage. After arriving for his shift [as a Predator drone pilot based at Creech Air Force Base], on a mild day bathed in brilliant sunshine, [Sam] Nelson received a battlefield briefing and then opened the door to his officethe ground control station. He settled into the cockpit seat, known to pilots as the Naugahyde Barcalounger, facing computer screens displaying live images from the mountains of Afghanistancolor during the day, black-and-white at night. As in any other cockpit, he had readouts for engine speed and temperature, altitude, fuel, pitch and roll angles, as well as other flight data. At his fingertips were two keyboards. He could type messages in chat rooms connecting him to scores of military personnel and analysts worldwide, and he could call up maps, satellite images and intelligence reports. He talked by radio with ground commanders and troops who saw the same live images on their laptops and hand-held radios. In this article, titled Drone pilots have a front-row seat on war, from half a world away, Zucchino continues: For the first time in warfare, troops on the ground can see the enemy miles away on live video feeds. The psychological challenges are unique: Pilots say that despite the distance, the video feed gives them a more intimate feel for the ground than they would have from a speeding warplane Locked in on a mission, they often forget theyre in Nevada. Capt. Mark Ferstl,

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a former B-52 pilot, said drone pilots typically feel more intimately involved in combat than they did when they sat in actual cockpits. When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you dont even see the bombs falling, Ferstl said. Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or thats the way it seems.15 We might compare these accounts to descriptions by Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger of the phenomenal fields of financial traders intimately tethered to global markets (2002),16 or to Rachel Prentices research on the intimacies of robotically assisted minimally invasive surgery (2005). Thinking through Prentices work in particular raises questions regarding the relevancies, and relations, of persons and bodies in these configurations. In the case of surgery, a familiarity with the body of the other may be the most crucial mode of knowing: the surgeon may have detailed knowledge of my shoulder, for example, in ways that require little knowledge of other aspects of me as a person. In the case of remotely controlled killing, in contrast, the difference between murder and action that is even arguably justified on the basis of rules of engagement rests on recognition not of bodies, but (at least categorically) of persons. And it is there that the problems arise. One military advisor, in a symposium presentation at the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center in 2010, concedes that visual imagery is clearly insufficient and urges that optimal engagement of UAVs demands a nuanced understanding of the environment gained only through interaction with the population on the groundUAV use is not a panacea [sic] for face-to-face interaction (cited in Gregory 2011: 209). My concern with these topics is in part an extension of my longstanding interest in questions around the human-machine interface, including how agenciescapacities for actionare distributed across different configurations of persons and machines (Suchman, 2007). How, I am now wondering, might I usefully mobilize and extend these arguments to aid efforts to documentand
15

Gregory (2011: 197) observes that a constant refrain of those working from Nevada is that they are not further away at all but only eighteen inches from the battlefield: the distance between the eye and the screen. This sensation is partly the product of the deliberate inculcation of a warrior culture among UAV pilots, but it is also partly a product of interpellation, of being drawn into and captured by the visual field itself. Gregory urges us to attend to the different forms of intimacy implied: when officers at Creech Air Force Base argued that the amount of time spent surveilling an area from a UAV creates a greater sense of intimacy than is possible from conventional aircraft, they were describing not their familiarity with the human terrain of Afghanistan but their identification ofand crucially withAmerican troops in the battlespace (200, original emphasis). 16 See also Nadesan, 2011.

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interruptwhat international studies scholar James Der Derian (2009) has named the growing military-industrial-media-entertainment network? Der Derian argues that this MIME-net is the basis for the infrastructure that supports what he calls virtuous war. At the heart of virtuous war is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distancewith no or minimal casualties17 Fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real-time surveillance and TV live-feeds, virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars Virtuality collapses distance, between here and there, near and far, fact and fiction. It widens the distance between those who have and those who have not. (2009: xxxi-iv) We might understand the suicide bomber in part as a desperate response to these developments: in the absence of high tech weaponry, what is available is your own body, the ability to put your body in proximity with others and become, yourself, a weapon (Vurdubakis, 2008). Robots on the Ground A New York Times series titled A New Generation of Robotic Weapons opens with the statement that for research and development in armed robotics, distinguishing friend from foe is especially challenging (Roberts and OConnell, 2010). In 2009 Penguin Press released Peter Singers Wired for War: The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. The books release was accompanied, at least within the United States, by extensive media coverage. In one interview on research and development in military robotics, Singer explains: Theres incredible work on social robots that can recognize facial expressions and then, in turn, give their own facial expressions. And this is going to continue, because you have Moores Law going on here, where our systemsour microchips are doubling in their computing power just about under every two years or so. And that means that the kind of systems that we have today really are the Model T Ford. Theyre the Wright Brothers flyers as compared to whats coming. If Moores law holds true, the way it has held true for the last several decades, within 25 years our systems may be as
17

No casualties to our side, that is.

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much as a billion times more powerful than today. And so this all sounds like science fiction, and yet it is real right now. Its a technologic reality and a political reality.18 Rhetoric like Singers requires slowing down, and closer reading, if we are to resist the particular form of anaesthetization that the breathless pronouncement regarding technological futures effects on its audience. Along with its heady mixture of alarm and enthusiasm, Singers statement evidences some significant ellipses. We can begin with the claim that social robots can recognize facial expressions and in turn, give their own facial expressions. I have written at length about the sense of recognition involved in social robotics, where normative classification schemes are encoded and matched to analyzable features of a corpus of facial imagesand its limits in capturing the dynamic contingencies and subtleties that we assume in face-to-face interaction among human (or even nonhuman) animals (Suchman, 2007; 2011). We might even question the premise that the robot has a face, other than as a surface onto which are written modes of animation, designed to invite their recognition by us as expressive actions. Even if this claim were fully founded, moreover, just what would be its relevance to the use of robots in war fighting? If the intimation is that this ability could underwrite the robots discrimination of friend from enemy, we have seen that even among humans this remains one of the most challenging problems of contemporary warfare, where the boundaries of the battlefield are no longer clearly designated, and the sympathies of others are complex and difficult to discern. The social robots progress in Singers account elides these problematics through a non-specific this that is going to continue, gratuitously linked to Moores Law.19 A technical observation/projection regarding increases in the processing speed of microchips, so-called Moores Law, is cited endlessly to suggest the inevitability of any and all forms of technological progress, as processing speed is generalised to computing power. Power is, by implication, a categorical good, as our systems endow new agencies not only to social robots but also to an audience assumed to identify, as Americans, with the speaker. The invocation of Moores Law is followed by the robots analogy to two iconic inventions/inventorsthe Model T and the Wright brothers
18

RU Sirius, (2009, May 20), Wired For War or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Let Dystopian SF Movies Inspire our Military Bots, [Editors Blog]. h+. http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/wired-war-or-how-we-learned-stop-worryingand-let-dystopian-sf-movies-inspire-our-, accessed Feb. 7, 2012. 19 It is worth noting that Gordon Moore himself, in his address on receipt of the 2002 Benjamin Franklin Institutes Bower Award for Business Leadership, disclaimed the characterization of his observations as a law (personal communication).

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cited in contemporary technological discourses as at once a sign of possibility and a mark of primitive originals to be surpassed beyond their inventors dreams through subsequent, and increasingly rapid, development. While offered as comparisons, these two figures appear in this passage less because they have any logical or technological relation to the military robot, than that they, like Moores Law, are taken as incontrovertible proof of the speed of technological change. The twenty-five-year time frame is a standard unit for the long term in research and development discourse (long, that is, but still within our lifetimes), while the reference to science fiction anticipates and pre-empts our scepticism, collapsing present and future, fiction and nonfiction into an inescapable right now, in which it is already too late to change course. Finally, and most importantly, we need to note how Singers assertion helps to perform the technological and political realities that it purports innocently to announce. It is that which makes it so important for us to question the relations of cultural imaginaries to actual material practices, to articulate both their differences and their entanglements. Most commentators on military robotics, including its critics, are captured by the prospect of fully autonomous lethal robots. Responding to the US Armys Future Combat Systems document,20 Robert Sparrow (2007) argues that if we take this prospect seriously, unresolvable ambiguities surrounding questions of responsibility for actions taken in the case of artificially intelligent robotic weapons (particularly in relation to the automation of target identification) render their deployment irremediably unethical. In taking up the possibility that future wars will be fought by robots, Peter Asaro (2008) draws on Michael Waltzers much cited text Just and Unjust Wars (1977/2000) to explore the question How Just Could a Robot War Be? Asaro lays out a number of scenarios, then examines their logics with reference to Just War Theory, the principles underlying most of the international laws regulating warfare, including the Geneva and Hague Conventions. Asaro points to the argument by proponents of artificially intelligent robots that, insofar as human soldiers are trained to act robotically (i.e., to follow orders without question), a super moral robot might be trained more reliably to question bad orders, thereby reducing civilian casualties and war crimes. Roboticists reiterate in this imaginary the irreconcilable subject positions of the warrior hero discussed by Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (2011: 89), called upon to be perfectly compliant but also, at least in his/her popular cultural figurations, to resist when the situation demands it. The notion that the soldier can be at once an evacuated subject and an autonomous outlier, Epstein and Steinberg observe,
20

Available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/fcs.htm, accessed Feb. 7, 2012.

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is precisely the tragic conceit explored in films like the Bourne Trilogy, at the same time that it is belied by actual military proceedings.21 The logic of super morality is, nonetheless, inspiration for Ron Arkin, a roboticist at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots (2009). Arkin embraces the inevitability of armed robots: in his words, the trend is clearwarfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct (2009: 29). He proposes to design what he describes as an ethical governor for lethal robots, citing the feedback controls built into the steam engine that first inspired cyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Arkins project assumes that actions can be classified as ethical or unethical according to a calculus: starting with a potential lethal action and subtracting the various ethical responses to the situation equals an unethical response. Arkins approach is to translate the corpus of codified, written military law developed over the last 150 years into terms that robots would be able to understand and interpret themselves. He argues that creating an ethical military robot is easier than many other types of artificial intelligence because the laws of war are clearly stated in numerous treaties. We tell soldiers what is right and wrong, Arkin observes in an interview with MSNBC, We dont allow soldiers to develop ethics on their own.22 Robots, he argues, might be better equipped than human soldiers to adhere to these ethical codes insofar as they are ruled by reason rather than passion, by a dispassionate rather than fearful response. Robots dont have an inherent right to self-defense and dont get scared, he observes. Therefore, the robots can take greater risk and respond more appropriately. Arkin assumes, inter alia, that Laws of Armed Conflict and Rules of Engagement resolve questions of ethical conduct in war fighting and could be effectively encoded within the control architecture of a robotic systemthat their implementation is a technical matter of correctness and reliability. But Asaro reminds us that the Laws of Armed Conflict comprise what he characterizes as a menagerie of international laws and agreements (such as the Geneva Conventions), treaties (such as the anti-personnel landmine ban), and domestic laws, and the Rules of Engagement (ROE) rest on the principles of discrimination and proportionality. As Asaro explains, the ROE are devised to instruct soldiers in specific situations, and take into account not only legal restrictions but also political, public relations, and strategic military concerns They often appear ambiguous or vague to the soldiers on the ground who
21 22

See, as just one example, the case of Bradley Manning, http://www.bradleymanning.org/. Eric Bland, (2009, May 18), Robot Warriors Will Get a Guide to Ethics, msnbc.com, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30810070/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/robot-warriorswill-get-guide-ethics/#.TzHOnOM9U_8, accessed Feb. 7, 2012.

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observe situations that do not always fall neatly into the distinctions made by lawyers, while the principle of proportionality is abstract, not easily quantified, and highly relative to specific contexts and subjective estimates of value (2009: 21). These are far from algorithmic specifications for decisionmaking and action, in other words, not least (as in the case of recent contests over who is protected under the Geneva Conventions) over the identification of a combatant. In contrast, Asaro points out that Arkins ethical governor assumes a situation in which civilians have evacuated the war zone, and anyone pointing a weapon at US troops can be considered a target. But the earlier account of civilian deaths in Afghanistan exemplifies the failure of this assumption in the US War on Terror, along with guarantees of certainty regarding the presence of a weapon in the hands of a militant, or its intended target. More generally, the terrain of ethics is not that of singularity or certainty but rather of equivocality,23 in the form of a politics of care that assumes capacities of response-ability that are presupposed by ethical codes, but can never be fully specified by them. The solution to the limits of robot autonomy is generally seen as keeping the human in the loop, which brings us to the question of remote control, and closer to the actualand in that sense more troublingstate of the art in military robotics. One of the primary vendors of military robots24 is the company iRobot, founded by Rodney Brooks, director of MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. iRobot is the producer of two now famous robots, the PackBot, hailed by CNN in August of 2002 as the US Armys first battlefield robot and the newest recruit to the ground war in Afghanistan, and Roomba, the intelligent floorvac, described by its creators as the first automatic vacuum cleaner in the United States. These two devices, both built on the navigational techniques for which Brooks is famous, stand as milestones in the delegation of dirty human labor to machines. As an article in the Boston Business Journal in 2006 enthuses, as CEO of iRobot, [Colin] Angle has created successful robots for military and commercial applications, taking on bombs with its PackBot robot and dust bunnies with its hot-selling Roomba (Holland, 2006).

23 24

Thanks for Deborah Steinberg for this point (personal communication). Other major manufacturers are Foster-Miller, Inc. and QinetiQ.

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Source: http://www.irobot.com/, accessed Sept. 23, 2006.

Joanne Muzak User! 17/5/12 12:09

Far from any discomfort with the ways in which narratives of military war fighting might sit alongside civilian domestic life, this image from iRobots website and most of the stories that iRobot tells of itself not only celebrate the range of the companys products, but actually draw attention to the parallels between them. Here we see figures of PackBot and Roomba side by side and as if at the same scale, the former lending power to the latter, while being rendered more benign in the process. In the background, muted to avoid any overshadowing of the focal figures (or potentially messy details of their real world circumstances), human associates of each are pictured in the natural environments of the devices use. The iconic male figure of the soldier in the field walks toward, and through its orientation suggestively protects, the preambulatory toddler sitting at home at the feet of what we assume to be her caregiver/mother. Moreover, the text that accompanies these images suggests that the soldiers body is an object of protection as well, as here and elsewhere

Comment [1]: Do you have permission from the company to reproduce this image? The question of permission here is a bit tricky. On the one hand, it could be argued that this is fair use. On the other hand, this is clearly promotional material, which always needs permission, and they seem especially concerned with demonstrating trademarks, which makes me think we should seek permission.

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iRobot reiterates the purpose of its products as saving soldiers lives. Once again this life-saving role is effected through an erasure of the wider scenes of warfare, including inevitable killing, that comprise the context and necessitating conditions of Packbots work. The battlefield on one hand, the kitchen on the other, comprise twinned sites of (in)security and the domestic spaces that are its opposite and object. iRobot delivers into these spaces innovation in the form of robot workers dedicated to the safety and comfort of their human proprietors: from cleaning floors to disarming explosives, we constantly strive to find better ways to tackle dull, dirty and dangerous missions.25 And while Packbot has been used for surveillance and detection of improvised explosive devices, remotely controlled robots are now being armed, including by iRobot itself.26 Limits of Knowledge/Power In October 2011 the LA Times issued another story, based on a not yet released Pentagon report, offering details of an incident in April of that year in which a marine staff sergeant and a navy medic were killed in Helmand Province by friendly firespecifically a Hellfire missile fired from a US Predator drone (Zucchino and Cloud, 2011). The two, along with another marine, had separated from the others in their unit involved in a firefight with the Taliban, and were firing on a cluster of nearby buildings. Infrared cameras on the Predator overhead picked up heat signatures of the three men and detected muzzle flashes as they fired their weapons. This time, the Pentagon reported, analysts in Indiana watching the firefight via live video feed from the drone expressed doubts about the targets identity as Taliban fighters. At one point the analysts described the pair as friendlies, but then withdrew that characterization, saying that they were unable to discern who the personnel were. At another point, the analysts reported that gunshots were oriented to the west, away from friendly forces. But the Predator pilot in Nevada and the marine commanders on the ground were never made aware of the analysts assessment. The analysts told investigators later that they didnt believe that they should intervene to block an airstrike if US troops were possibly in danger, even if they had doubts about the targets. The father of the marine killed in the incident, who was shown the video images from the drone feeds, said it was impossible to see uniforms or weapons. You couldn't even tell they were human beingsjust blobs, he said. This was, according to the Pentagon, the first known case of friendly fire deaths involving an unmanned aircraft. The
25

Note that the triplet dull, dirty, and dangerous appears as well in the Department of Defenses roadmap (2007: 34, quoted in Weber 2009: 89). 26 For more on iRobots 710 Warrior see http://robotfutures.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/armingrobots/.

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report blames the attack on a fatal mix of poor communications, faulty assumptions and a lack of overall common situational awareness. It concludes that no one involved in the attack was culpably negligent or derelict in their duties. This was, in other words, a normal accident (see Perrow, 1999). In Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction of Targets (2007), visual historian and cultural studies scholar Caren Kaplan explores the history of the translation of the aerial view from geography into surveillance and war fightingan assemblage aimed not only at mapping but acting in real time within the territory mapped, specifically, in order to kill. As Kaplan observes in the editors introduction, the piece expands explicit discussion of the politics of vision through an experiential dimension that deliberately foregrounds the highly artificial nature of seeing from above. This includes the presence of scrolling, mobile text, and multiple windows that continually interrupt and partially or wholly block the view, as well as images that are rarely pristine or clear, not by error but by design and with intention, leading us to question the relationship between what we (imagine we) see and what we (think we) know. We are reminded, in short, that sight is never natural, that perspective is always political, and that the ability to zoom through landscapes or to designate borders is unevenly distributed, enabled by infrastructures of power that we would do well to remember and question. Kaplans experiment raises the question of how the science and technology/media studies sensorium might help us to articulate the implications of these particular bioconvergences of bodies, technologies, and media. Bruno Latour has famously used the example of the handgun as a device to think about questions of responsibility, when sociotechnical assemblages redraw our units of analysis. He writes: You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into a relationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-thearmory or the gun-in-the-drawer or the gun-in-the-pocket, but the gun-in-your-hand If we study the gun and the citizen [together] we realize that neither subject nor object is fixed. When the [two] are articulated they become someone/something else. (1999: 17980) Latours relatively homely example is a tool with which to rethink questions of responsibility, away from the National Rifle Association-engendered preoccupation with the question of whether guns kill people or people kill people, to a consideration of what new forms of agency are constituted through

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specific (now vastly more extensive and complex) sociotechnical apparatuses. Considered as a Foucauldian dispositif, the entanglement of knowledge/power and technology involved in the convergence of bodies and lethal technologies becomes clearer. To say that the dispositif essentially has a strategic character assumes that it is a matter of a specific manipulation of relations of force, a rational and focused intervention in these relations of force, either to develop them along a particular direction, or to block them, or to stabilize them, to use them. The dispositif, thus, is always inscribed in a play of power, yet it is always tied up to one or more limits of know-how (savoir), which emerge out of it, but, equally, condition it. (Foucault, Dits et crits, vol. 3: 299, cited in Venn, 2010: 157, emphasis added) It is this last comment, and the limits of know-how to which Foucault directs our attention, that indicates a way forward for critical scholarship. One focus in articulating the dispositif of remotely controlled war fighting, it suggests, might be the limits of know-how implied by the militarys own trope of situation awareness and, more specifically, the contingent and vital problematic of discriminations among and between bodies and persons. How do bodies become persons within these apparatuses, and persons become targets? As Deborah Steinberg observes (personal communication), an irony here is that while discussion of objectification has tended to focus on processes of persons becoming bodies, this case study demonstrates the countermovement, where (distinguishable) personhood is the object of the lethal exercise. This remains a particular form of recognition, however, which sustains its objectifying effects through categorization. While science fiction and popular culture anxiously anticipate a future of autonomous robot soldiers, more intimate configurations of human and machine are presently in play in the form of these new arrangements for the projection of action at a distance. While critics rightly direct our attention to questions regarding the ethical and legal status of mechanized decision-making, I am suggesting here that we focus on a prior question regarding the promise of decision itself. Arguably always a fictive prelude to action, the moment of decision becomes further distributed across messy assemblages of sociotechnical mediation that presuppose the recognizability of their objects, at the same time that those objects become increasingly difficult to define. The limits of knowledge are a problem that loops back as well to the question with which I began, regarding the implications of a population (in which I include myself) systematically insulated from the lived realitiesthe horrorsof war

Joanne Muzak User! 17/5/12 12:09

Comment [2]: Clarify Emphasis original or added?

Lucy Suchman! 27/5/12 15:44

Comment [3]: I hope this is now clearer with the change to the previous sentence.

Joanne Muzak User! 17/5/12 12:09

Comment [4]: Clarify I think this it will be clearer if the two its in the previous sentence are clarified.

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by geographical distance and technological, discursive, and ideological mediatizations. The task for those many of us who remain at 30,000 feet is at least to make visible that which nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously describes as the fog of wara fog that intensifies as the machinery of surveillance and precision expandsand the corresponding inadequacies of our own situational awareness, as further confirmation of the urgent and compelling obligation that we bring these operations to an end.

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Epstein, Debbie, & Steinberg, Deborah Lynn. (2011). The Bourne tragedy: Lost subjects of the bioconvergence age. MediaTropes, 3(1), 89112. Retrieved from http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/Mediatropes/article/view/15750 /12843 Federman, Cary, & Holmes, David. (2011). Guantnamo bodies: Law, media, and biopower. MediaTropes, 3(1), 5888. Gregory, Derek. (2011). From a view to a kill: Drones and late modern war. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(78), 188215. Haraway, Donna. (1985/1991). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 14982). New York: Routledge. Holland, Roberta. (2006, September 1). Colin Angle: MIT helped him clean up. Boston Business Journal. Kaplan, Caren. (2007). Dead Reckoning: Aerial perception and the social construction of targets. Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, 2(2). Retrieved from http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=11 Knorr Cetina, Karin, & Bruegger, Urs. (2002). Inhabiting technology: The global lifeform of financial markets. Current Sociology 50, 389405. Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandoras hope: Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Markoff, John. (2010, November 27). War machines: Recruiting robots for combat. New York Times. Masco, Joseph. (2006). The nuclear borderlands: The Manhattan project in post-cold war New Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mulrine, Anna. (2011, October 22). Unmanned drone attaches and shapeshifting robots: Wars remote control futures. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved from http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2011/1022/Unmanned-droneattacks-and-shape-shifting-robots-War-s-remote-control-future Nadesan, Maija Holmer. (2011). The biopolitics of transactional capitalism. MediaTropes, 3(1), 2357. NBC News and News Service. (2010, June 23). Obama relieves McChrystal of command. Retrieved from

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Venn, Couze. (2010) Individuation, relationality, affect: Rethinking the human in relation to the living. Body & Society, 16, 12961. Vurdubakis, Theo. (2008, November 6). Death ex machina: The body, technology and the organization of destruction. Paper presented in the symposium Warfare and Healthcare: Action at a Distance and Bodies in Contact. Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, UK. Walzer, Michael. (1977/2000). Just and unjust wars. New York: Basic Books. Weber, Jutta. (2009). Robotic warfare, human rights, and the rhetorics of ethical machines. In R. Capurro and M. Nagenborg (Eds.), Ethics and Robotics (pp. 83103). Heidelberg: AKA Verlag. Zucchino, David. (2010, February 21). Drone pilots have a front-row seat on war, from half a world away. Los Angeles Times. Zucchino, David, & Cloud, David. (2011, October 14). U.S. deaths in drone strike due to miscommunication, report says. Los Angeles Times.

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