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You talk about the military’s use of information as a force multiplier. How is that?
It’s a term that originally signified a sort of propaganda - psychological or psy-op - that you would have as an adjunct to the soldier in the field, officers who would provide leafleting, or even bullhorn. Consider the example we saw in Apocalypse Now, preceding battle by playing Wagner on your loudspeakers when the air cav is coming in. These are all forms of intimidation. Contemporary tactics have moved beyond that. It’s no longer about simply increasing the effect of command and control of the battlefield. It’s also about bringing to bear computers, new communication technologies, new intelligence, and multiple media, in a battle for reality in which you’re shaping - in addition to the outcome on the battlefield - the opinion, beliefs, and decisions that are part of any temporary struggle that lasts longer than the usual one or two-week international conflict. The military use of force multiplying effects is about the ever-increasing coupling of science systems and weapons systems.

Is Sun Tzu’s notion of military force based upon deception now more true than ever before?
I’m sure he could only be envious of the tools we have at hand now, compared to the gongs and drums that he would use to multiply the force of conventional arms back in 500 B.C. But if you go to military doctrine now, they call for something called “full spectrum dominance,” which means using every single available technological information tool to deceive. That’s deception on a tactical level. We need to also consider the levels beyond tactics and strategics, and the extent to which we have new levels of dissimulation taking place, on the levels of decision-making, how we read the images, and how the public is informed about foreign policy.

How does Paul Virilio encourage us to think about military technologies?
He gets into the empirical detail of how these new technologies emerge in a coterminous, coeval way - the way that, for instance, the machine gun and cinema are interdependent on the same technology. Or even how viewing reality for the first time out of a steam locomotive train alters our way of seeing the world. Virilio’s very good about looking at how the war machine has led, unfortunately, to much of the innovation in how we see the world. In some cases, this interdependence is symbiotic. In other cases, the military is the avant-garde, the leading force. The military has taken these relatively crude technologies and refined them for the purposes of killing people. Then, in the same way in which you’d use them to prepare and execute for war, you use them to represent the war back to your populace - through the first-time use of aerial reconnaissance and high resolution images, all the way back to the Civil War, when bodies were posed on the battlefield to make it look more real, to how people are reading the images that are now coming out of Baghdad. (more…)

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Is it true that the introduction of precision weapons has reduced the number of soldier deaths in war?
It’s true that the number of American soldier deaths has radically gone down. The number of soldiers on the other side has not. The whole thrust of American technological development in weaponry - conventional ground and air force weaponry - for at least fifty years, undisputedly, has been to spend virtually any amount of money to reduce American casualties. Americans actually now believe you can have wars with no casualties on their side, but, remember, this only works against technologically inferior opponents. America hasn’t fought any technologically equal opponents since 1945. They’ve had a long, easy run of it. The implications of all this technology would be very different if both sides were on a level playing field.

Tell me about these so-called intelligent machines.
The machines we’re talking about - these precision-guided weapons - are not intelligent in any kind of meaningful sense. They’re guided or self-guided. The jargon is “one shot kill” capability. That is to say, in the First World War, you fired at least ten thousand bullets for every casualty. In the Second World War, you fired fifty to a hundred artillery rounds for every casualty you inflicted. Now, you fire one weapon and inflict a casualty - the casualty may well be a tank or an airplane, not just a person. The goal of all this stuff is to reduce the amount of weaponry you have to expend and kill the opponents. Of course, the weapons are so expensive that you’d better kill somebody with every one you fire; each round can cost anywhere from ten thousand dollars to half a million dollars.

What comes to mind when you hear the term “future warrior?”
First of all, I’m not really keen on future warriors. I don’t think we need them. There is this fantasy that now we’ve solved the military problem and, with these wonderful weapons, we can win a war without casualties. Yeah, sure you can, if you’re fighting three-generations old technology or people who haven’t got weapons at all. But even then, you’d win the first battle and, afterwards, if you actually want to stay around and occupy the territory, you’re back in the old grim world where a roadside bomb is just as good as an Apache helicopter. High technology is great for defeating two or three generations out-of-date conventional military technology, but it doesn’t solve the political problem you came to solve. When and if the opposition drops down to guerrilla warfare or resists with terrorism, for example, high-tech weapons become useless. (more…)

Spin-ons and spin-offs: This is not about the transfer of products. It’s a dynamic intermingling of transferred processes: command-and-control and hierarchy mixed with collaboration and innovation. Who’s influencing whom? And who’s benefiting?

1.INTERNET The story of the Internet begins in the 1950s with the space race and mounting US fears of a technological rift after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik, the first object of human design sent into space. In August 1962 the US Department of Defense (DoD) formed the first computer research program within the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and named MIT professor J.C.R. Licklider to lead the program. Licklider brought a fresh perspective to computers, seeing them as interactive devices, in sharp contrast to the inflexible punch-card-reading devices of the day. To help conceptualize and foster a new way of thinking about computing he formed a community of specialists which he called the –Intergalactic Network.�? Licklider’s vision of a community or network of people working to solve problems was much like the one we have today on a global scale.

2.KRAZY GLUE Krazy Glue, or methyl cyanoacrylate, was discovered by Harry W. Coover while he was attempting to develop transparent plastic gun sights for Eastman Kodak. Nine years later he and Dr. Fred Joyner rediscovered cyanoacrylate monomers while researching heat-resistant polymers for jet-plane canopies. In 1958, after refining its adhesive properties, the product was labeled Eastman Compound #910 and eventually introduced to the North American market in 1973 as Instant Krazy Glue. Coover also saw another use for his new discovery and later patented cyanoacrylates as an adhesive for human tissue. This compound is used for suture-less surgeries, rejoining damaged veins, and repairing soft organs. It was used during the Vietnam War to close soldiers’ wounds, and is still used today for medical applications. (more…)

Consider the human above the technology: If war is inevitable and one death is too many, is it possible to wage war without killing anyone?

There’s a lot of talk these days about the “future warrior�? and, depending on whose home turf you’re on, he is either high-tech or rogue, military or paramilitary. On the one hand, said warrior benefits from digital tools, imaging equipment, and high-functioning materials. On the other hand, he makes do with found materials, hand-me-down weapons, and inventiveness. In both scenarios, he plays to win.

If, as military historian Gwynne Dyer suggests, conventional reasons for going to war (land, primarily) are fading away, then why not entertain the possibility of designing a new model of warfare, without the bells, whistles, and body bags? (more…)