World according to military mapping
Why constant state of war seems the new normalThe World According to Military Targeting unsettles. Erik Reichborn-Kjennerud argues that military targeting (identifying, tracking, and striking targets) has been turned into a worldview, which sorts reality into targets and threats.
It’s a way of seeing the world – as a grid of threats, even before it takes form and shape.In the process, war stops being an event. Military targeting becomes a permanent organising logic for expanding the battlefield to the entire world. In doing so, it normalises endless war. “Violent operations” are now fundamental to “knowledge production of war and warfare.”The book begins with former director of the NSA and CIA, Michael Hayden, describing how “the American war-fighting machine was reconfigured and revamped”, as a global manhunt, in service of US’s ‘war on terror’.
It reorganised the way the US military, and its ‘martial organisations’ (an ecosystem of intelligence gathering) imagined, assembled and ultimately, waged war.
The global manhunt inverted the Cold War paradigm of ‘easy-to-find, hard-to-kill’ – where Soviet Union was a monolithic threat – to ‘hard-to-find but easy-to-kill’, where networked individuals, targeted by the manhunt, were “elusive, hidden, and mobile”.
The book details the impact of tech advances on military apparatus – with each leap, targeting grew in space, time and depth. Insurgents exist in complex terrains, but in digital communications, they leave digital footprints – chatter, location, movement. So, intelligence apparatus could map actors and their movement, over time, and in real time. When threats were identified, they could be tracked.But not all threats could be ‘identified’. To be a threat, there has to be, what the military-security world calls, a signature.
But not every emerging threat left a signature. They went about their day doing normal things, like normal people.Then what? Bosses said, widen the net, collect everyone’s data everywhere, at all times, let anomalies show. But an anomaly, without context or meaning (human inputs), is not actionable intelligence. One has to know how machine learning (ML) arrived at its output. But ML doesn’t give you context, or meaning – only ‘accuracy’.
So, military targeting, the book argues, has become data deciding the emergence of the enemy.The enemy doesn’t have to exist. It could become the enemy in the future. In short, the book argues, the enemy can be imagined. Military targeting, then, no longer defines an enemy. It can be produced by data tech.When LLMs, and so-called AI, flagged ‘behaviour’, the operation logic behind war moved from “predict to preempt”.
From targeting ‘known unknowns’, military intelligence machinery has moved into ‘unknown unknowns’ – the term for which Rumsfeld got fair flak. Tough to find needles in a haystack? Build haystacks. Whatever sticks out, call that a needle. Contemporary targeting seeks “future beginnings” of threats, even facilitating their occurrence. The goal, the book argues, is to experiment – observe response, encourage action, gather more data, and continue experimenting.
Errors (like bombing a school) are part of that experimental “tinkering” – internalised as learning. “Probe, perturb, incite” – disrupt the system, to capture more feedback.This transformation – in how targeting maps the world – “forecloses alternatives, limits horizons of possibilities, and constrains our understanding of potential futures”. It should give us pause, says the book. And make us understand that it’s essential we understand how militaries map the world, and create the enemy.
