2. “Securocratic Wars”
• “The promise of the traditional liberal state was to preserve the liberal
order inside, while the realm of the outside was thought to be
condemned to be dominated by resolutely illiberal state practices. What
was normal within the national state borders was exceptional outside
and vice versa. The police was to preserve civil peace inside, while the
military waged war outside” Didier Bigo
• Now “a de-differentiation of the realm of the internal and the realm of
the external. The difference between the liberal and the illiberal, the
norm and the exception, is no longer fixed by state borders. The limits
between the internal and the external are moving” Didier Bigo
• “The terror war, with its enemies within and without, polices populations
at home and abroad with equal zeal and technique” (Randy Martin)
3. • Securocratic wars (Allen Feldman) are open-ended
and deterritorialised wars (on drugs, crime, terror,
illegal immigration, biological threats…).
• Not merely concerned wirth territorial conquest.
Rather, they also aim to counter “imputed territorial
contamination and transgression -- ‘terrorist’
demographic and biological infiltration.”
• “De-territorialized securocratic war promotes an
ideology of paranoid space in which borders leak, be
these of the body politic or the individual body []the
securocratic ideology fixes upon an iconography of
demonized border-crossing figures and forces,
including drug dealers, terrorists, asylum seekers,
undocumented immigrants and
microbes.” (Feldman ).
• Continually try and separate purportedly risky/malign
amd risk free/benign bodies and circulations
4. Linked Shift in Military Doctrine: From Battlefields to “Battlespace”
• ‘Battlespace’ is “deep, high, wide,
and simultaneous: there is no longer
a front or a rear” (Blackmore, 2005)
• Multi-scalar: nano to planetary
• Nonlinear, ‘swarming’ forces
operating within and through cities
across transnational scales
• All terrain a ‘battlespace’ within
permanent state of exception and
mobilisation: ‘new normal’
• Collapse of military-civil distinctions
• Slips into a discourse where “life
itself is war.” (Phil Agre)
5. Several, Related Strands: Asymmetric/
Unrestricted/ Fourth Generation Warfare
• “America’s way of thinking
about conflicts is changing,
accommodating reluctantly a
complicated world of
distributed, highly variable
threats both in civilian and
battlefield environments where
the front lines are no longer
brightly lit.”
• Mark P. Mills, ICX
Technologies, Inc.
6.
7. ‘Unrestricted Warfare’
Necessitating States of
Exception:
Complete Collapse CivilMilitary Distinctions?
Everyday Urban Sites and
Infrastructures Rendered
as Weapons Within
Boundless and Permanent
‘Low Intensity Conflict’
8.
9. Urbanizing Battlespace
• Securocratic wars work to “reinscribe the imaginative geography of the
deviant, atypical, abnormal ‘other’ inside the spaces of daily life.”
Louise Amoore
• ”Cities historically are the places where radical ideas ferment, dissenters
find allies and discontented groups find media attention" US Marines
‘98
• ”Everything worth fighting for is in the urban environment.” James
Lasswell, Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory
• “The city [is] not just the site, but the very medium of warfare – a flexible,
almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux” Weizman
10. But Cities Seen as Interrupters of Networked Omniscience
“In simple terms walls
tend to get in the way
of today’s battlefield
communications and
sensor
technologies” (Hewis
h and Pengelley,
2001)
“The technologies
traditionally ascribed
to the current
Revolution in Military
Affairs phenomenon
will have negligible
impact on Military
Operations in Urban
Terrain” (Harris,
2003)
11. • The solution? ‘Armed Vision’ and
ubiquitous, permanent, targeting, tracking,
locating…
• Preemptively and continually identify, locate
and track ‘targets’ from the almost infinite
mass of possibilities within cities, circulations
and systems of flow
• In the absence of a uniformed, identifiable
enemy, basically mobilise permanently
against the whole population and its
circulations
• Require systems blending sensors,
databases and communications systems to
continually “distinguish between friend and
enemy” (Bottomley and Moore)
16. •
“Airport surveillance, internet
filters, passport tracking devices, legal
detention without criminal charges,
security internment camps, secret trials,
“free speech zones”, DNA profiles,
border walls and fences, erosion of the
line between internal security and
external military action – these security
activities resonate together,
engendering a national security
machine that pushes numerous issues
outside the range of legitimate dissent
and mobilizes the populace to support
new security and surveillance practices
against underspecified enemies.”
Willaim Connolly,
•
.
21. “Predictive Battlespace
Awareness”
• “To fight terrorism through data
mining and link analysis, and by
exploiting such technologies as
“biometric signatures of
humans” and “human network
analysis. In practical terms, this
meant that it would attempt to
identify terrorists by linking
databases, then scanning for
suspicious activity the financial,
medical, travel, and government
records of millions of
Americans.” Pruett and Michael
Longarzo, U.S. Army War
College
22. Ride on the back of systems built up as part of the drive
for the geo-demographic and social-sorting of consumers
27. Tracking-Targeting-Locating:
A ‘New Manhattan Project’
• Defense Science Board (2004) US forces need another
“Manhattan Project” for tracking and locating targets in
‘assymetric’ urban warfare to “locate, identify and track people,
things and activities in an environment of one in a million”
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33. E.g. Biometric Cross-Overs
• “In the domestic space” within national borders,“the new 'normal'
biopolitical relationship between the citizen and the state affords sovereign
power the ability to appropriate and register the biological life of bodies.”
In “the 'international' space,” meanwhile, “biometrics is becoming an
ever powerful tool on war on terror's battlefield du jour.” Measor and
Muller,
34. •
“Truth comes to reside not in the behavior or speech of bodies
or in the assumption of one’s body and the attendant social and
political possibilities and responsibilities that embodiment entails.
Rather, truth is to be found in the information encoded in iris
scans and digital fingerprints, thereby doing away with the
problem of the global citizen’s agency altogether. Truth resides
in the relationship between the scanned individual and the
information held in U.S. databases.” Rachel Hall
36. Within proliferation of ‘zero
tolerance’ and ‘anti terror’ policing,
preemptive detention, ASBOs,
banning orders, curfews and free
speech zones work to undermine
rights to assemble, move and protest.
Anti-terror legislation often used to
criminalise and ban wider public
dissent
45. 2. Global Homelands:
Targeting Transnational
Circulations
• “If the territorial model of security
that allowed for the building of
modern nations states produced and
relied on an absolute legal,spatial
and ontological divide between
‘inside’ and ‘outside’ national
space (i.e. police/military, war/
peace, crime/terror), then the current
concern for the security of flows of
supranational systems
problematized these simultaneously
social and spatial forms” Deb
Cowan and the social. Mimeo. 2
•
46. • “The virtual border, whether it faces outward or inward to foreignness,
is no longer a barrier structure but a shifting net, a flexible spatial
pathogenesis that shifts round the globe and can move from the
exteriority of the transnational frontier into the core of the securocratic
state. With global wars of public safety, classifying and surveilling
pathogenic space has expanded as a geopolitical strategy” Alan
Feldman
• “The targeting of mobile bodies, things, objects or monies is becoming
a matter of locating – positioning in the sights, if you like. so that the
opportunities of a mobile global economy might be seized, while the
capability to take out the target remains. []The technologies that have
made possible a global supply chain of export processing zones and
offshore sites, are simultaneously being embedded into border
crossing cards, visas, passports and immigrant ID cards that include
mobile people within governable space by means of their targeted
exclusion.” Louise Amoore
47. “ Security agencies test dangerousness by means of the information
contained in their databases. [D]anger is assessed through calculated
distinctions based on physical descriptions,attributed religion,
citizenship statuses and immigration history. Refugees and
undocumented migrants, as well as Muslims or those perceived to be
Middle Eastern, Arab or Muslim are cast as potential threats to national
security.” Karine Côté-Boucher
48.
49.
50. NSA Internet Surveillance
• "There are about three or four buildings you need to tap. In L.A. there is
1 Wilshire; in New York, 60 Hudson, and in Miami, the NAP of the
Americas.” Stephen Becker, Telegeography.
53. ‘Urbanization of Insurgency’
“Opposition forces will camouflage
themselves in the background
noise of the urban environment.
Weapons hidden beneath a cloak,
in a child’s carriage, or rolled in a
carpet, can get past security
personnel undetected” (DIRC
1997)
68. Short Step to Automated, Algorithmic, Robotic State Killing
• ‘ LOCAAS’
equipped with algorithms
designed to separate ‘targets’ from ‘nontargets” automatically.
• Ultimate goal, “kill chain solution” based on
“1st look, 1st feed, 1st kill” where munitions
“seeks out targets on its own”
• humans required to make the decisions to
launch only “until UCAVs establish a track
record of reliability in finding the right targets
and employing weapons properly”. Then the
“machines will be trusted to do even that”.
• Lawlor, “autonomous, networked and
integrated robots may be the norm rather than
the exception by 2025”.
69. Gordon Johnson, Leader,
‘Unmanned Effects’, US Army’s ‘Project Alpha’:
“if it can get within one meter, it’s killed the person who’s
firing. So, essentially, what we’re saying is that anyone who
would shoot at our forces would die. Before he can drop that
weapon and run, he’s probably already dead. Well now,
these cowards in Baghdad would have to play with blood
and guts every time they shoot at one of our folks. The
costs of poker went up significantly. The enemy, are they
going to give up blood and guts to kill machines? I’m
guessing not”
70. ‘Smart Dust’: Fantasies of Robotised Urban War
“Several large fans are stationed outside
the city limits of an urban target that our
[sic] guys need to take. Upon appropriate
signal, what appears like a dust cloud
emanates from each fan. The cloud is
blown into town where it quickly dissipates.
After a few minutes of processing by
laptop-size processors, a squadron of
small, disposable aircraft ascends over the
city. The little drones dive into selected
areas determined by the initial analysis of
data transmitted by the fan-propelled
swarm. Where they disperse their nanopayloads.”
Defense Watch 2004
71. “After this, the processors get even more busy. Within minutes the mobile
tactical center have a detailed visual and audio picture of every street
and building in the entire city. Every hostile [person] has been identified
and located.
Unmanned air and ground vehicles can now be vectored directly to selected
targets to take them out, one by one. Those enemy combatants clever
enough to evade actually being taken out by the unmanned units can
then be captured of killed by human elements”
72. • Or, RFID Technophilia: “RFID readers at various sites around the
market had earlier recorded the car’s arrival in the marketplace
by reading {Electronic Product Codes] EPCs from passing RFID
tags embedded in the vehicle’s tires and windshield. Other EPCs
were recorded at nearly the same instant. A comparison of the
readers shows that each had recorded the same sets of EPCs as
the car passed by. Investigators are disappointed to learn that
none correspond to a biometric ID card or valid license plate, but
some of the EPCs correspond to apparel and others to currency,
which also can be tracked. By querying RFID readers at
chokepoints throughout the area, the vehicle’s EPCs are traced
back to a suburban garage that surveillance soon reveals is a
bomb-making factory.” Pruett and Longarzo, U.S. Army War
College
73. Conclusions
• “The truth of the continual targeting of the world as the
fundamental form of knowledge production is xenophobia,
the inability to handle the otherness of the other beyond the
orbit that is the bomber’s own visual path. For the
xenophobe, every effort needs to be made to sustain and
secure this orbit – that is, by keeping the place of the otheras-target always filled.” Rey Chow,
• The obsession with pre-emptive or anticipatory surveillance
within the ‘new military urbanism’ is a distillation of stark
bio/geopolitics of exception, technophiliac ideologies of
permanent war, sci-fi omnipotence fantasies + supply-push.
Fuelled by, as well as fuels, cultures of fear/anxiety
74. • Complex intersections of political economic imperatives,
imaginative geographies, popular geopolitics,
surveillance, simulation, entertainment and affect
• Cities ‘battlespace’; residents ‘targets’; war=forced
and persistent reorganisation of urban space
• ‘Insides’ and ‘outsides’ blur together within
integrated world of ubiquitous battlespace
• Radical ‘rescaling’ of security politics based on
attempts to secure valued and purportedly risk-free
bodies, places, enclaves and circulations from risky
ones across transnational architectures and
archipelagos erupting within and without national
territorial borders
• Not post-Disciplinary Control Society. Rather,
‘Passage-Point Urbanism’
75. But… Important Caveats
• Such technophilai is highly contested within US military
(especially after Iraq)
• Dramatically Incoherent: Ridden With Contradictions
• Don’t begin to reach levels of military effectiveness and
control in what are essentially unwinable wars/unconquerable
cities. Also, systems fail, don’t integrate + unintended effects
• As with all imaginative, colonial geographies, new military
urbanism says much about domestic urban fantasies, political
economies, anxieties and preoccupations
• “Tells us more about Modern Western society than it does
about any objective assessment of military options” Jeremy
Black
76. Above all a Politics of Visibility,
Tracking and (Attempted) Unveiling
