Monthly Archives: February 2014

The radio-controlled television plane

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I’ve written before about the long history of drones (UAVs or RPAs, if you prefer – and the Air Force does prefer), and the unrealised intersections between remotely-controlled aircraft and early television: I’m thinking of Archibald Low‘s experiments with what he called Televista in 1914 and his trial pilotless aircraft (codenamed ‘Aerial Target”) in the dog days of the First World War.  I had assumed that the connections did not materialise – and even then in very precarious ways – until the closing stages of the Second World War with the US Project Aphrodite, which I discussed briefly in ‘Lines of Descent’ (DOWNLOADS tab).

But now, via Gizmodo, I discover another way-station that was put in place in 1924.  First published in The Experimenter magazine, and then republished in Television News in 1931 in its March-April issue, an article by Hugo Gernsback described the military operation of a ‘radio-controlled television plane’, directed by radio and navigated using ‘electric eyes’ that would enable ‘the control operator, although 50, 100 or possibly 500 miles away, [to] see exactly what goes on around the plane, just the same as if he himself were seated in the cockpit; with the further advantage that, sitting before a screen, he can scan six directions all at once, which no human aviator can do.’

Television-News-1931-Mar-Apr

And, just like Project Aphrodite and its modern descendants, this would be a hunter-killer mission:

‘The radio-controlled television airplane can then be directed to the spot where it is supposed to drop its bombs. Moreover, the distant-control operator can see exactly when his machine arrives over a given spot. A sighting arrangement can be attached to the plane in such a manner that, when the object to be bombed comes over the cross-wires in the range-finder, the bomb or bombs are dropped at the exact moment.’

But as the illustration indicates – and in contrast to today’s Predators and Reapers – it was assumed that the aircraft would be able to operate in contested air space – and even more effectively than a conventional aircraft:

If, for instance, an enemy airplane suddenly comes out of a cloud and starts dropping bombs on our machine below, the control operator sees this enemy machine quicker 500 miles away, than if an aviator sat in the cockpit one-quarter of a mile away from or below the enemy bomber. The control operator will send a radio signal that will immediately discharge a smoke screen from his radio television plane, hiding his craft in smoke.

Explaining the decision to republish the article, Gernsback accepted that when it first appeared ‘the ideas set forth therein might have appeared more or less fantastic’ – but ‘they are no longer considered so today’:

‘As a matter of fact, the radio-controlled airplane is with us today.  Several of the leading governments have already in their possession airplanes that can now fly and stay aloft for any length of time, within reason, without a pilot or any human being on board.

‘The television adjunct will follow as a matter of course.’

tvglasses

Gernsback was an extraordinary man.  Sometimes hailed as the father of science fiction – hence the Hugo Awards – he was keenly interested in turning his imaginative ideas into material fact.  Even before the First World War he had invented a home radio set.  Matthew Lasar explains:

Gernsback’s “Telimco Wireless” didn’t receive the signals of any broadcast radio stations,  since there were almost none before 1920. But it did ring a bell in an adjacent room without any connecting wires. Such was the sensation the device made that local police demanded a demonstration, following up on a fraud complaint. Satisfied that it worked, the Telimco was subsequently sold in many department stores … until the first World War, when the government banned amateur wireless transmission.

But he was soon fascinated by television; he launched Radio News and then move on to Television News as platforms for his ideas and enthusiasms.  The image above shows him in 1963 wearing his ‘television glasses’.  He died the following year, or he might have invented Google Glass too.

The other side of NSA

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I’ve emphasised the networks in which drone operations take place several times on this blog, and I’ll have more to say about it (and, crucially, the satellite links involved) very shortly.  But this applies to all domains in which advanced militaries now operate.  In 2012 Army magazine (62: 6) put it like this:

The world in which U.S. forces operate is increasingly wireless and computer network-based. Rapidly evolving information technologies are expanding the speed, capacity, agility, efficiency and usefulness of modern networks. The prolif- eration of these systems is changing the way humans interact with each other and their environment, including military operations. This creates conditions that will make U.S. forces increasingly dependent on these technologies and require soldiers to counter technology-empowered and so- phisticated adversaries who can utilize commercial indus- try and the network as their primary combat developers. This broad and rapidly changing [Operational Environment] will present a plethora of potential threats and opportunities that are primarily limited by our own—and our opponents’—imagination, causing the Army to operate within a cyberspace domain and EMS [Electromagnetic Spectrum] that are increasingly congested and contested.

The authors went on to emphasise the convergence of ‘cyber and EMS capabilities’ (and, not coincidentally to my interest in satellite communications, the intersections between commercial and military systems):

Commercial and military systems are increasingly reliant on both as networks and telecommunication infrastructures expand their use of wireless means. This is particularly important for collaborative systems that require connectivity to operate effectively. The synergistic effect of these networks is a significant reason why EW [electronic warfare], EMSO [EMS operations] and cyber operations must be viewed as interrelated and interdependent.

The Pentagon has now published its first Field Manual on Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (FM 3-38).  If you are still wondering what these are, and why I’ve described them as the ‘other side’ of NSA (and by extension, GCHQ and the other ‘Five Eyes’) global surveillance operations, this is what the manual says:

Cyber electromagnetic activities are activities leveraged to seize, retain, and exploit an advantage over adversaries and enemies in both cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, while simultaneously denying and degrading adversary and enemy use of the same and protecting the mission command system (ADRP 3-0). CEMA consist of cyberspace operations (CO), electronic warfare (EW), and spectrum management operations (SMO).

Cyber Electromagnetic Activities

The FM – and remember this is doctrine: we have a long way to go before we are able to probe into practice – diagrams the relation between the ‘five domains’ of US military operations (air, land, sea, space and cyberspace) and the electromagnetic spectrum like this:

Five domains and the Electromagnetic Spectrum

Operationally, for ‘unified land operations’ (this is a US Army manual, remember) this translates into undertaking Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA) thus:

Cyber electromagnetic activities Operational View

You can find a short discussion of the pre-history behind the Field Manual here.

I’m going to work my way through the manual in detail, and think through its implications for what I already know about cyberwar (even if Thomas Rid thinks it will never take place).  I sketched out some of my early ideas in ‘The everywhere war’ (DOWNLOADS tab), largely in relation to Stuxnet and cyber-attacks on Iran’s nuclear programme, but there have been many more developments and revelations since then, so watch this space.

Primer on Palestine

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MERIP 2014The indispensable Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP) has just published a new edition of its brilliant Primer on Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar.  It was first published in 1991 and updated in 2001.

The new edition is available as an open access publication online (and you can also download it as a pdf) here (16pp).  It’s succinct, sharp and savvy – and excellent for teaching.

The Primer includes one of Dutch cartographer Jan de Jong‘s meticulous maps tracing the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, originally produced for the equally indispensable Foundation for Middle East Peace: you can follow their regular Settlement Reports here.

War and therapeutic geographies

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Tall Rifat hospital near Aleppo attacked by helicopter gunships June 2012

I previously noted the problems of providing medical care to those fleeing the war in Syria – and to those who’ve been left behind – and an article by Thanassis Cambanis in the Boston Globe (‘Medical care is now a tool of war’) reinforces the importance of the issue:

 The medical students disappeared on a run to the Aleppo suburbs. It was 2011, the first year of the Syrian uprising, and they were taking bandages and medicine to communities that had rebelled against the brutal Assad regime. A few days later, the students’ bodies, bruised and broken, were dumped on their parents’ doorsteps.

Dr. Fouad M. Fouad, a surgeon and prominent figure in Syrian public health, knew some of the students who had been killed. And he knew what their deaths meant. The laws of war—in which medical personnel are allowed to treat everybody equally, combatants and civilians from any side—no longer applied in Syria.

“The message was clear: Even taking medicine to civilians in opposition areas was a crime,” he recalled.

As the war accelerated, Syria’s medical system was dragged further into the conflict. Government officials ordered Fouad and his colleagues to withhold treatment from people who supported the opposition, even if they weren’t combatants. The regime canceled polio vaccinations in opposition areas, allowing a preventable disease to take hold. And it wasn’t just the regime: Opposition fighters found doctors and their families a soft target for kidnapping; doctors always had some cash and tended not to have special protection like other wealthy Syrians.

Doctors began to flee Syria, Fouad among them. He left for Beirut in 2012. By last year, according to a United Nations working group, the number of doctors in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, had plummeted from more than 5,000 to just 36.

Since then, Fouad has joined a small but growing group of doctors trying to persuade global policy makers—starting with the world’s public health community—to pay more urgent attention to how profoundly new types of war are transforming medicine and public health.

It is grotesquely ironic that ‘global policy-makers’ should have to be persuaded of the new linkages between war, medicine and public health, given how often later modern war is described (and, by implication, legitimated) through medical metaphors: see in particular Colleen Bell, ‘War and the allegory of medical intervention: why metaphors matter’, International Political Sociology 6: 3 (2012) 325-28 and ‘Hybrid warfare and its metaphors’, Humanity 3 (2) (2012) 225-47.

AI Health Crisis in SyriaBut there are, as Fouad emphasises, quite other, densely material biopolitics attached to contemporary military and paramilitary violence, including not only the targeting of medical staff, as he says, but also their patients.

“In Syria today, wounded patients and doctors are pursued and risk torture and arrest at the hands of the security services,” said Marie-Pierre Allié, president of [Médecins san Frontières’]. “Medicine is being used as a weapon of persecution.”

In October 2011 Amnesty International described the partisan abuse of the wounded in hospitals in Damascus and Homs, and the denial of medical care in detention facilities, in chilling detail.

At least then (and there) there were hospitals.  Linking only too directly to my previous post on Aleppo, Cambanis concludes:

Today, Fouad’s former home of Aleppo is largely a ghost town, its population displaced to safer parts of Syria or across the border to Turkey and Lebanon. The city’s former residents carry the medical consequences of war to their new homes, Fouad said—not just injuries, but effects as varied as smoking rates, untreated cancer, and scabies. Wars like those in Syria and Iraq don’t follow the old rules, and their effects don’t stop at the border.

I first became aware of these issues at a conference on War and medicine in Paris in December 2012, which prompted my current interest in the casualties of war, combatant and civilian, and the formation of modern medical-military machines.  Several friends from the Paris meeting (Omar Dewachi, Vinh-Kim Nguyen and  Ghassan Abu Sitta) have since joined with other colleagues to produce a preliminary review published this month in The Lancet: ‘Changing therapeutic geographies of the Iraqi and Syrian wars’.  They write:

War is a global health problem. The repercussions of war go beyond death, injury, and morbidity. The effects of war are long term, reshaping the everyday lives and survival of entire populations.

In this report,we assess the long-term and transnational dimensions of two conflicts: the US-led occupation of Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing armed conflict in Syria, which erupted in 2011. Our aim is to show that, although these conflicts differ in their geopolitical contexts and timelines, they share similarities in terms of the effects on health and health care. We analyse the implications of two intertwined processes—the militarisation and regionalisation of health care.  In both Syria and Iraq,boundaries between civilian and combatant spaces have been blurred. Consequently,hospitals and clinics are no longer safe havens. The targeting and misappropriation of health-care facilities have become part of the tactics of warfare. Simultaneously, the conflicts in Iraq and Syria have caused large-scale internal and external displacement of populations. This displacement has created huge challenges for neighbouring countries that are struggling to absorb the health-care needs of millions of people.

They emphasise ‘the targeting and implication of medicine in warfare’ and note that ‘the militarisation of health care follows the larger trends of the war on terror, where the boundaries between civilian and combatant spaces are broadly disrespected.’  They have in mind ‘not only the problem of violence against health care, but also [the ways in which] health care itself has become an instrument of violence, with health professionals participating (or being forced to participate) in torture, the withholding of care, or preferential treatment of soldiers.’

And they describe a largely unplanned dispersal of medical care across the region that blurs other – national – boundaries, requiring careful analysis of the ‘therapeutic geographies‘ which trace the precarious and shifting journeys through which people obtain medical treatment in and beyond the war zone.  They insist that ‘migrants seeking refuge from violence cannot be framed and presented as mere victims but as people using various strategies to acquire health care and remake their lives.’ The manuscript version of the report included the map below, which illustrates the scale of the problem:

Therapeutic geographies

My own work addresses similar issues through four case studies over a longer time-span, to try to capture the dynamics of these medical-military constellations: the Western Front in 1914-18, the Western Desert in the Second World War, Vietnam, and Afghanistan 2001-2014 (see ‘Medical-military machines’, DOWNLOADS tab).

msf-afghanistan-report-finaToday Médecins sans Frontières published an important report, Between rhetoric and reality:  the ongoing struggle to access healthcare in Afghanistan, that speaks directly to these concerns.  Like the Lancet team, the report explores the ways in which war affects not only the provision of healthcare for those wounded by its violences but also access to healthcare for those in the war zone who suffer from other, often chronic and life-threatening illnesses: ‘The conflict creates dramatic barriers that people must overcome to reach basic or life- saving medical assistance. It also directly causes death, injury or suffering that increase medical needs.’  Releasing their findings, MSF explained:

After more than a decade of international aid and investment, access to basic and emergency medical care in Afghanistan remains severely limited and sorely ill-adapted to meet growing needs created by the ongoing conflict…  While healthcare is often held up as an achievement of international state-building efforts in Afghanistan, the situation is far from being a simple success story. Although progress has been made in healthcare provision since 2002, the report … reveals the serious and often deadly risks that people are forced to take to seek both basic and emergency care.

The research – conducted over six months in 2013 with more than 800 patients in the hospitals where MSF works in Helmand, Kabul, Khost and Kunduz provinces – makes it clear that the upbeat rhetoric about the gains in healthcare risks overlooking the suffering of Afghans who struggle without access to adequate medical assistance.

“One in every five of the patients we interviewed had a family member or close friend who had died within the last year due to a lack of access to medical care,” said Christopher Stokes, MSF general director. “For those who reached our hospitals, 40 per cent of them told us they faced fighting, landmines, checkpoints or harassment on their journey.”

The patients’ testimonies expose a wide gap between what exists on paper in terms of healthcare and what actually functions. The majority said that they had to bypass their closest public health facility during a recent illness, pushing them to travel greater distances – at significant cost and risk – to seek care.

MSF provides a photoessay describing some of these precarious journeys (‘Long and dangerous roads’) here, from which I’ve taken the photograph below, showing an inured man being led by a relative into the Kunduz Trauma Centre.

MSB5652

Mapping Aleppo – and more

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Mapping Aleppo

I’ve posted about mapping the war in Syria and its spillover effects before (see here and here), but most of these projects cover a wide area with varying degrees of reliability.  Now News from Laleh Khalili of a report from David Kilcullen‘s Caerus Associates (with the American Security Project) on the civil war in Aleppo, “Mapping the conflict in Aleppo, Syria”, which provides a much more fine-grained view of what is happening on the ground.  You can download the report here or view the interactive version via First Mile Geo here, and you can read an account of the project from Wired‘s Greg Miller here.

Caerus has also joined with the Pentagon’s Center for Complex Operations to produce a special supplement of PRISM (vol.  4, 2014) on the Syrian conflict, which includes an essay by Kilcullen and Nathaniel Rosenblatt on ‘The Rise of Syria’s Urban Poor: Why the War for Syria’s Future Will Be Fought Over the Country’s New Urban Villages’; the whole issue is available on open access here.

These interventions are important and interesting for several reasons.

First, the report is based on exacting local fieldwork.  Acknowledging that local people in conflict zones develop vitally important stocks of local knowledge as a means of survival, the report also accepts that this ‘information-rich environment remains analytically poor.’  For that reason, the field teams ‘provided training and cloud-based tools to help local actors collect locally understood knowledge about their conflict for rigorous analysis.’

From September 16, 2013 to January 6, 2014, we collected four types of information: a monthly survey of perceptions among 560 residents in Aleppo’s 56 neighborhoods, biweekly location and status data for bakeries (a key indicator of humanitarian conditions due to the centrality of bread in the Syrian diet), biweekly location and status data on security checkpoints (a key indicator of security, territorial control and public safety conditions), and a monthly neighborhood-level assessment filled out by our enumerators. These four data streams not only allowed the research team to detect and visualize shifts in the environment in near-real time, but also provided an extremely rich source of insights on the geo-social dynamics at play. All field research was conducted in Arabic.

First Mile Geo notes that it will make the data available to organisations ‘for responsible use’: see Open Data here.

KILCULLEN Out of the mountainsSecond, Kilcullen’s analytical argument (he is described as ‘Principal Investigator’ for the Mapping project) is, naturally enough, fully conformable with the thesis he develops at length in his latest book, Out of the mountains: the coming age of the urban guerrilla (2013); the report reveals the grisly details of contemporary siege warfare and urbicide – central themes in the book, where Kilcullen notes the work of  Steve Graham and Eyal Weizman – and gestures towards a future ‘feral city’ (how I hate that phrase) broken into multiple fiefdoms where gangs and militias exact violence and provide rudimentary services to the residents:

‘The inability of opposition groups to aid residents of neighborhoods they control suggests Aleppo – and Syria as a whole – will become a mosaic of small, intersecting fiefdoms, each providing assistance to its respective neighborhood without regard to macro-level concerns for national governance and reconciliation. Growing warlordism may be particularly acute in Aleppo, where economic rent-seeking opportunities will attract armed gangs who will attempt to seize control of its neighborhoods. These “conflict entrepreneurs” will have little incentive to end a conflict from which they derive power, prestige, and profit. Even in the event of peace, Aleppo’s strategic location will help these actors establish roots for illicit networks that may endure well beyond the present conflict. Moreover, as a non-capital city, Aleppo will not benefit from national government attention. Instead, Aleppo’s future may resemble that of similarly conflict-plagued second cities in the Middle East, such as Mosul in Iraq or Benghazi in Libya. These cities are plagued by warlordism and dominated by illicit economies. They have quickly become safe havens enabling terrorist networks to plan, recruit, and launch attacks.’ 

I’ve posted about Out of the Mountains here, when I promised an extended commentary: Laleh and I will be working on a joint examination of Kilcullen’s larger thesis in the near future, so watch this space. We already have Mike Davis‘s thumbnail view:

‘Although an enemy of the state, I must concede that this is a brilliant book by the most unfettered and analytically acute mind in the military intelligentsia. Kilcullen unflinchingly confronts the nightmare of endless warfare in the slums of the world.’

Here, incidentally, it’s revealing to read Kilcullen’s theses alongside Neil Brenner‘s ‘Theses on urbanisation’, Public culture 25:1 (2013) 85-114, which makes a series of suggestive proposals – but from which war is strikingly absent.  So Kilcullen’s thesis certainly demands serious scrutiny, particularly by those who think that the future of war is somehow encapsulated in the drone.  In my previous note, I joined Geoff Manaugh in being sceptical about the ‘aerial-algorithmic’ interventions that attracted Kilcullen in a series of talks based around the book, but ‘Mapping the conflict in Aleppo’ reveals a much more substantial interest in ‘the facts on the ground’, local actors and local knowledge.  (And here a good counter-text would be the brilliant work of AbdouMaliq Simone; see also his blog, Villes-Noires, here).  So, as I say, watch this space.

First Mile Geo ALEPPO

But there’s a third reason this matters.  I’ve been reading and thinking about Jeremy Crampton, Sue Roberts and Ate Poorhuis‘s ‘The new political economy of geographical intelligence’ – a fine essay in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104: 1 (2014) 196-214 – and I’ll be returning to this in the next day or two.  They emphasise the importance of satellite imagery in the production of US geospatial intelligence, whereas I’ve been developing a different (though related) argument about  the importance of satellite communications for the ‘everywhere war’.  In both cases, there is an intimate relation between ‘milsat’ and ‘comsat’, the military and commercial sectors, which will come as no surprise to those who’ve been plotting the extending contours of the military-industrial complex.

Those contours have snared all sorts of other institutions, of course, which is why James Der Derian talks about MIME-NET (the military-industrial-media-entertainment network) and I’ve talked about MAIM-NET (the military-academic-industrial-media network).  The role of universities in the development of military capabilities and military knowledge (and ultimately the production of military violence) is no less surprising, of course, and in fact there’s a session on ‘Geography and the military’ organised by Eric Sheppard at the AAG conference in Tampa (an appropriate location for several reasons) to debate these issues.  But it should now be clear that the production of these geographical knowledges is not confined to the military and civilian intelligence agencies, the academy and large corporations but also includes a host of much smaller private contractors devoted to ‘geographical intelligence’.  They come in different shapes and sizes, and with different agendas.  Caerus, for example, describes itself as a ‘strategy and design firm’ that helps clients ‘understand and thrive in complex, conflict-afflicted, and disaster-affected environments’.  But there are many others, and it’s important not to lose sight of their role in what the US military would call ‘shaping the battlespace’…

Death, drones and Camp Delta

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When I wrote ‘The Black Flag’ (DOWNLOADS tab), exploring the idea of Guantanamo Bay as a space of exception, three young men had just committed suicide in the war prison.  This is how I started:

In the early morning of 10 June 2006 three prisoners held at the military detention facility at the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, two from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen, were found dead in their cells. Although the three men had been detained without trial for several years and none of them had court cases or military commissions pending (none of them had even been charged), the commander of the prison dismissed their suicides as ‘not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us’. Although the three men had been on repeated hunger strikes which ended when they were strapped into restraint chairs and force- fed by nasal tubes, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy described their deaths as ‘a Public Relations move to draw attention’ – to what, she did not say – and complained that since detainees had access to lawyers, received mail and had the ability to write to families, ‘it was hard to see why the men had not protested about their situation’. Although by presidential decree prisoners at Guantánamo are subject to indefinite detention and coercive interrogation while they are alive, when President George W. Bush learned of the three deaths he reportedly stressed the importance of treating their dead bodies ‘in a humane and culturally sensitive manner’. 

KAISER Tod in Camp Delta

After ‘The Black Flag’ was published, I read a remarkable account of the despair and desperation of these three men by Mario Kaiser.  His original essay has now been updated and translated into English as ‘Death in Camp Delta‘ at Guernica.  Here is an extract:

At some point during their captivity, these three men began to retreat. They no longer touched the food the guards pushed through the holes in the doors of their cells. Their bodies dwindled. Their lives hung on thin yellow tubes shoved down their nostrils each morning to let a nutrient fluid drip into their stomachs. In their minds, nothing changed. They didn’t want to stay, and one night, on June 9, 2006, they decided to leave Guantánamo. They climbed on top of the sinks in their cells and hanged themselves.

In the Pentagon’s view, the men hanging from the walls of their cells were assassins whose suicides were attacks on America. The Pentagon struck back.

The story of the lives and deaths of these prisoners is an odyssey of three young men who left for Afghanistan and ended up in Cuba. It is the story of a war against a terror that is difficult to define, a war that the United States government wages even in the cells of its prisoners. It is about a place, Camp Delta, that exposes the asymmetry of this war, and it leads to the front lines—and the American lawyers standing between them, struggling to defend presumed enemies of their country. It is the story of the internal and external battle over Guantánamo.

Nobody but the dead knows the whole truth. But there are places where the story can be pieced together. There are files and letters, people who distinctly remember these prisoners. There are places where the strands of this story intersect. A law firm in Washington. A mosque in London. A living room in North Carolina. A cell in Guantánamo.

This is on my mind today for three reasons.  The first is that Kaiser describes himself as

‘a writer who combines in-depth reporting with literary storytelling. Taking on issues of social transformation and human rights, Kaiser’s stories are based on long-term immersion in environments that are difficult to access. His hope is that this approach provides a fuller understanding of the ways in which policies and social change affect people’s lives and long-term prospects.’

It’s worth reflecting on those aspirations if you read his essay (which I urge you to do) because they raise important questions about the lazy distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, and about the ability of researchers to produce and animate publics through their (our) work.  There’s something there, too, about the power (and, yes, the seductions) of story-telling: so much academic writing still seems to substitute and so privilege our own narrative (‘I did this… then I did that .. I thought this…. then I felt that’) for the stories of others.  And, as Kaiser shows in that brief extract, those stories are often multi-sited.

AGAMBEN State of exceptionThe second reason Kaiser’s work matters to me is that I’m revisiting ‘The Black Flag’ for The everywhere war (more on this later) and, partly in consequence, thinking again about spaces of exception.  I’m in Mexico this week, and I’ve been re-reading Giorgio Agamben‘s Homo sacer and The state of exception.  I was originally doing this to sharpen my arguments about the Federally Administered Tribal Areas as a space of exception for air strikes by the CIA/JSOC and the Pakistan Air Force – I’ll be talking about this in Glasgow early next month, and I’ll post the presentation slides as soon as I’ve finished – but as I’ve worked my way through these texts still wider issues have emerged.

One of the central elements of Homo sacer (and Remnants of Auschwitz – though here too the differences between the two texts are suggestive) is the deliberate exposure of bodies to death: outcasts from whom the protections of the law have been stripped so that their death is no crime.  But in The state of exception Agamben’s focus is on the genealogy of the ‘force of law’ through which this takes place: the victims are nowhere in sight.  Throughout the short text Agamben makes much of the proximity of war and, for the ’emergency’ that activates the modern state of exception, of the First World War, but war and its developing armature of (international) law is never subjected to critical scrutiny.

Yet war (and its casualties) can reveal something else about spaces of exception.  On the battlefield – and let us immediately agree with Frédéric Mégret that ‘the battlefield’ is a highly unstable conceptual constellation – soldiers are at once vectors and victims of violence.  Here the usual restrictions on killing are removed; they can kill, provided they do so ‘lawfully’, without risk of punishment (‘combatant immunity’).  The other side of the contract, of course, is that those who might kill them are not subject to  legal sanction either.

This is not what Agamben means by the state of exception, and apart from repeated references to a contemporary ‘global civil war’ (and to Guantanamo) the transnational rarely appears in his writing and international law disappears into the margins.  His thumb-nail history of the state of exception is framed by the state and its sovereign.

But for reasons that I’ll set out in a later post, the proximity of the exceptional space of  the ‘battlefield’, of war zones and killing fields, to the ultimate reductions of bare life, is far from accidental.  In fact, that’s one of the links between the three deaths in Guantanamo Bay and air strikes and targeted killings in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan which, as I’ll want to show, requires a radically enlarged view of spaces of exception and their historical geographies.  (In the case of the FATA, the Obama administration insists it requires a radically enlarged juridical conception of the ‘battlefield’ in time and space too).

To be continued.

A wedding turned into a funeral

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yemen0214_reportcoverHard on the heels of its report into six US targeted killings in Yemen in 2009 and 2012-13, Human Rights Watch has published a detailed analysis by Letta Tayler of another drone strike carried out by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) against a wedding convoy on 12 December 2013.  According to Greg Miller in the Washington Post,

The report represents the most detailed independent examination to date of a strike that has focused attention on the administration’s struggles to tighten the rules for targeted killing, provide more information about such operations to the public and gradually shift full control of the drone campaign from the CIA to the Pentagon.

There is considerable evidence of covert US-Pakistan co-operation in targeting in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (see here and here), but in the case of Yemen the collaboration is more overt and perhaps even more formalised: Yemen’s President described a ‘joint operations room’, including agents/officers from the US, the UK, NATO and Yemen that ‘identifies in advance’ prospective targets (who are usually described as members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula).

In this case, as in so many others, the United States has insisted that all those killed were terrorists, but HRW’s on-the-ground interviews (and videos) tell a different story.  After a wedding feast at the home of the bride, many of the men and some of the women jumped into their vehicles to escort the bridal couple to a second celebration at in the groom’s village of al Jashem 35 km away.

HRW Drone strike Yemen 12 December 2013

At 4.30 that afternoon four Hellfire missiles struck the vehicles, killing at least 12 men and wounding at least 15 others – who are named and identified in the HRW report, and according to relatives all civilians.

‘We were in a wedding,’ cried the groom, ‘but all of a sudden it became a funeral. …We have nothing, not even tractors or other machinery. We work with our hands. Why did the United States do this to us?’

The US isn’t saying, and HRW notes that accounts from the government of Yemen have been inconsistent – though the local governor an military commander apologies for the killings, describing them as ‘a mistake’.  Some reports agreed that some of those targeted were Al-Qaeda members – though if so, it seems they escaped: AQAP has not identified ‘martyrs’ lost in the attack, which is its invariable practice – and some claimed that the victims included ‘smugglers and arms dealers’.

2014181435057734_20

But they also all made it clear that this was a wedding convoy that was targeted, and the government of Yemen has made compensation payments to the families.

HRW discusses the implications of the killings under the different legal regimes of international humanitarian law (the ‘laws of war’) and international human rights law, but also notes that the attack seems to have violated the protocols set out by the Obama administration in May 2013.  These included the ‘near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured…’

NBC – which also has video of the aftermath of the strike – reported in January that the Obama administration was carrying out an ‘internal investigation’, but nothing has been forthcoming and questions from HRW were rebuffed.  All we have so far is this extraordinary statement, reported by  Rooj Alwazir for al Jazeera:

“Obviously, broadly speaking, we take every effort to minimise civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations – broadly speaking, without speaking to this one specifically,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said when asked about the strike.

‘Broadly speaking’, what is it about weddings that those carrying out air strikes don’t understand?

It’s not difficult to imagine what those who attended the wedding will remember of that day.  But in case it is, Reprieve (which carried out its own investigation into the strike) has published photographs of some of the victims and their families – and of a funeral of nine people.

UPDATE:  AP is now carrying sketchy information about the official investigation into the strike:

Three U.S. officials said the U.S. government did investigate the strike against al-Badani — twice — and concluded that only members of al-Qaida were killed in the three vehicles that were hit…

Lt. Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, ordered an independent investigation by an Air Force general and the White House requested another by the National Counterterrorism Center. Both concluded no civilians were killed. Votel’s staff also showed lawmakers video of the operation. Two U.S. officials who watched the video and were briefed on the investigations said it showed three trucks in the convoy were hit, all carrying armed men.

The report provides no basis for the identification of the victims as non-civilians.  Human Rights Watch had already questioned the presence of armed men as indicative:

‘Nearly everyone in the procession was an adult male, and one Yemeni government source said many of the men carried military assault rifles. But these details do not necessarily point to involvement in violent militancy. Yemeni weddings are segregated, including the traditional journey to bring the bride to her new home. And Yemeni men commonly travel with assault rifles in tribal areas, including in wedding processions, when celebratory gunshots are common.’

But here is the final Catch-22:

The officials said the Pentagon can’t release details [of the strike or the investigation] because both the U.S. military and the CIA fly drones over Yemen. By statute, the military strikes can be acknowledged, but the CIA operations cannot. The officials said that if they explain one strike but not another, they are revealing by default which ones are being carried out by the CIA.

Killing the SIMs

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NSA-binoculars5

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s post about Metadata+ – and my earlier, necessarily impressionistic discussion of the National Security Agency, drone strikes in Pakistan and what I called ‘the everyware war’ – comes a report from Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept that details the NSA’s role in the US’s targeted killing programme.

The programme is carried out by multiple means and multiple agencies (including the US military), but the main source for their report is a former drone operator from Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – and readers of Jeremy’s Dirty Wars will know that it is JSOC rather than the CIA that is his main critical target.  We’ve known about the NSA’s Geolocation Cell (‘GeoCell’) for some time now.  Last summer Dana Priest outlined the history of collaboration between the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the NSA, which she traced back to the months following 9/11, and the determination to use cell phones as ‘targeting beacons’:

The cell opened up chat rooms with military and CIA officers in Afghanistan — and, eventually, Iraq — who were directing operations there. Together they aimed the NSA’s many sensors toward individual targets while tactical units aimed their weaponry against them.

A motto quickly caught on at Geo Cell: “We Track ’Em, You Whack ’Em.”

But, as Scahill and Greenwald show, the process remains far from reliable.  Their informant confirms that strikes are often carried out on the basis of metadata analysis and cellphone tracking (‘SIGINT’) rather than human intelligence (agents on the ground), and he admits that it is a hit or miss affair, and literally so: ‘high value targets’ have been killed, but so too have innocent people.

[T]he geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell – sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”

There are several lists of so-called High Value Targets, but the operational problem is, as he concedes, ‘We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones.’

 [T]racking people by metadata and then killing them by SIM card is inherently flawed. The NSA “will develop a pattern,” he says, “where they understand that this is what this person’s voice sounds like, this is who his friends are, this is who his commander is, this is who his subordinates are. And they put them into a matrix. But it’s not always correct. There’s a lot of human error in that.”

The programme relies on more than what we have come to think of as standard (though still shocking) NSA intercepts of communications.  For more on the NSA’s global tracking of cellphones, see Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani here, from which I’ve taken the image below.

NSA cell phone tracking 1

As the graphic shows, the standard method of ‘co-location analytics’ tracks not only targets but also their associates (‘co-travellers’) using cell towers (which have in turn become key targets for insurgent attack in Afghanistan partly for this reason).

For clandestine operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere the NSA’s geolocation system codenamed ‘GILGAMESH’  (king of the city-state of Uruk in Mesopotamia: where do they get these names from?) equips Predators assigned to JSOC with ‘virtual base-tower transceivers’ that can track and locate a SIM card to within 30 feet; the information is then used in near-real time to activate an air strike or a night raid through a network that has ‘cued and compressed numerous kill chains’.

The CIA uses another system, codenamed SHENANIGANS (no mystery about that one), which collects data ‘from any wireless routers, computers, smart phones or other electronic devices that are within range.’  Last fall Greg Miller, Julie Tate and Barton Gellman described how the system was used in the targeted killing of Hassan Ghul in Mir Ali in Waziristan in October 2012:

In the search for targets, the NSA has draped a surveillance blanket over dozens of square miles of northwest Pakistan. In Ghul’s case, the agency deployed an arsenal of cyber-espionage tools, secretly seizing control of laptops, siphoning audio files and other messages, and tracking radio transmissions to determine where Ghul might “bed down.”

The e-mail from Ghul’s wife “about her current living conditions” contained enough detail to confirm the coordinates of that household, according to a document summarizing the mission. “This information enabled a capture/kill operation against an individual believed to be Hassan Ghul on October 1,” it said.

The file is part of a collection of records in the Snowden trove that make clear that the drone campaign — often depicted as the CIA’s exclusive domain — relies heavily on the NSA’s ability to vacuum up enormous quantities of e-mail, phone calls and other fragments of signals intelligence, or SIGINT.

To handle the expanding workload, the NSA created a secret unit known as the Counter-Terrorism Mission Aligned Cell, or CT MAC, to concentrate the agency’s vast resources on hard-to-find terrorism targets. The unit spent a year tracking Ghul and his courier network, tunneling into an array of systems and devices, before he was killed. Without those penetrations, the document concluded, “this opportunity would not have been possible.”

The two systems are agency-specific but they often work in concert: Scahill and Greenwald note one joint operation in 2012, ‘VICTORYDANCE’, that ‘mapped the WiFi fingerprint of nearly every town in Yemen.’

Takhar attack 1

The documents that they draw upon are from various dates, extending back to 2005, so that these are a series of snapshots of an uneven and developing set of systems.  Still, the concerns about accuracy are persistent, and although they don’t cite her report Kate Clark‘s forensic examination of the attempted killing of the Taliban shadow governor of Takhar province in Afghanistan in September 2010 provides an exceptionally detailed account of the dangers of relying on metadata and cellphone tracking.  Here is what I said about this in my discussion of Targeted Killing and Signature Strikes:

On 2 September 2010 ISAF announced that a ‘precision air strike’ earlier that morning had killed [Muhammad Amin] and ‘nine other militants’.  The target had been under persistent surveillance from remote platforms – what Petraeus later called ‘days and days of the unblinking eye’ – until two strike aircraft repeatedly bombed the convoy in which he was travelling.  Two attack helicopters were then ‘authorized to re-engage’ the survivors. The victim was not the designated target, however, but Zabet Amanullah, the election agent for a parliamentary candidate; nine other campaign workers died with him. Clark’s painstaking analysis clearly shows that one man had been mistaken for the other, which she attributed to an over-reliance on ‘technical data’ – on remote signatures.  Special Forces had concentrated on tracking cell phone usage and constructing social networks. ‘We were not tracking the names,’ she was told, ‘we were targeting the telephones.’

Targeting the telephones

The Takhar case has been on my mind again because, as Kate revealed in a new report last week, the agencies involved in targeted killing reach beyond the NSA – and beyond the USA.

The involvement of Britain’s GCHQ and other ‘Five Eyes’ sites in global surveillance has become well-known in recent months – and see Nikolas Kozloff for a short reflection on its ‘geopolitics of racism‘ (though he ignores the willingness to spy on other European states and allies)  – but Kate’s new report is significant for what it reveals about the complicity of civilian police agencies. In August 2013 Habib Rahman, who lost two brothers, two uncles and his father-in-law in the Takhar attack, petitioned for a judicial review of the involvement of Britain’s Ministry of Defence and the (civilian) Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) – whose brief includes the drug trade from Afghanistan – in the compilation of the Joint Prioritised Effects List (one of the lists of priority targets used by the Pentagon).

soca_logo

SOCA is part of the  Joint Inter-Agency Afghanistan Task Force (JIATF), a military-police task force based at Kandahar AFB that also includes the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the US military and the British military.  In a US Senate report on the nexus between drug trafficking and insurgency, ‘Afghanistan’s Narco War‘, a SOCA investigator described the proposed collaboration as ‘a critical opportunity to blend military and law enforcement expertise’ (p.15).  At the time (August 2009) the JIATF was awaiting formal approval from Washington and London, but informal collaboration was already under way, and the SOCA officer was enthusiastic about its consolidation:

‘In the past, the military would have hit and evidence would not have been collected,’ he explained. ‘Now, with law enforcement present, we are seizing the ledgers and other information to develop an intelligence profile of the networks and the drug kingpins.’ An American military officer with the project was blunter, telling the committee staff, ‘Our long-term approach is to identify the regional drug figures and corrupt government officials and persuade them to choose legitimacy or remove them from the battlefield.’

Rahman’s lawyers argued:

As a civilian policing organisation SOCA has no legitimate or lawful role to play in the compilation or administration of this Kill List – it has no authority to be involved in military operations and the killing of individuals. The courts must urgently review whether the SOCA’s and indeed the UK’s role in the compilation, review and execution of this list if unlawful. Incidents like that affecting our client must be properly investigated.

In response, SOCA acknowledged making its intelligence available to the military, but added these provisos:

SOCA places restrictions on the dissemination of intelligence to the ISAF. Intelligence which is disseminated by SOCA is required to include handling conditions which require the express approval of the originator if it is proposed to use the material for military targeting purposes. If the mission is to arrest, with a view to criminal investigation and potential prosecution, SOCA would ordinarily be prepared to provide and/or allow the use of its intelligence. On the other hand, if the primary option for a mission is to use lethal force, SOCA would not provide intelligence or allow the use of its intelligence in support of such a mission, save potentially where the individual who is the target of the operation poses a significant and immediate threat to he lives of others (and so such disclosure would be for the purpose of preventing a criminal offence).

9780547547893_hresThe judge dismissed Rahman’s claim.  But read that last sentence again.  These missions are almost always designated as ‘kill or capture’, and while in practice ‘kill’ is often preferred over ‘capture’, how likely is it that the ‘primary option for a mission’ would be advertised as a targeted killing before the intelligence were made available?  An undated US Justice Department memo setting out conditions for targeted killing included the stipulation that where  ‘capture is infeasible’ the US would continue ‘to monitor whether capture becomes feasible’, which turns the mission (and SOCA’s proviso) into a moving target in more ways than one.  Once intelligence has been incorporated into the matrix it can hardly be withdrawn or embargoed.

And that final clause about pre-emptive action opens up a discretionary space that the Obama administration has already sought to enlarge with its demands for an ‘elongated’ concept of imminence in which the ‘immediacy’ of the threat is subject to prolongation to the point of contortion.

Rahman is not the first victim to have been rebuffed by British courts.  Last month the Court of Appeal dismissed Noor Khan‘s case against the British Government over the role of GCHQ in providing ‘locational intelligence’ for a CIA-directed drone strike in March 2010 in Miranshah in North Waziristan that killed his father.  The ruling accepted that the case put forward by Noor Khan’s barrister – that the provision of such intelligence risked contravening the Serious Crimes Act (2007) – was ‘attractive’ and  ‘persuasive’, but concluded that the review could not proceed because the claims
‘involve serious criticisms of the acts of a foreign state.  It is only in certain established circumstances that our courts will exceptionally sit in judgment of such acts.   There are no such exceptional circumstances here.’ 
The state of exception, it turns out, is not so exceptional…  To be continued.

Meta-dating

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Excellent news from Josh Begley that Apple has finally accepted his app tracking US drone strikes:

BEGLEY Twitter Metadata

No longer Drones+, it’s now called Metadata+ and advertises ‘real time updates on national security’, and you can download it free of charge from the App Store.

MetadataYou can find more on Josh’s work, including the larger Dronestream project here, while the  saga of Apple’s rejections of Drones + is here.   The first application in July 2012 was rejected because the app was ‘not useful or entertaining enough’ (really); a subsequent application was rejected because it provided content that ‘many audiences would find objectionable’ (yes indeed).  Last September Apple made it clear that any app specifically about drone strikes would be rejected – unless, of course, it was a game like UAV Fighter – but ‘if you broaden your topic, then we can take another look.’  Hence Metadata+ (and look at its wonderful logo on the left).

According to Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at mashable, the inspiration for the name change was a tweet from Tom Junod, the author of an unrelenting critique of ‘The lethal presidency of Barack Obama’ that appeared in Esquire in August 2012:

Junod Metadata

Indeed it is.  I’ve posted about metadata, code/space and ‘the everyware war’ via Josh’s work here, and for a brief reflection on the ‘connection between the unfolding NSA metadata controversy and the controversy that has long plagued the administration’s position on drone strikes’, see Robert Chesney at Lawfare here.  Like too many commentators he thinks the key issue is ‘transparency’ (which he links to legitimacy) – on which Madiha Tahir‘s critical comments bear repeating –  but Josh’s experience with Apple shows that transparency is important.  As long as it’s entertaining and not objectionable, of course…

Total war, double vision and surgical strikes

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Paul K. Saint-AmourOver the years I’ve learned much from the writings of Paul K. Saint-Amour, whose work on the violent intersections between modernism and air power has helped me think through my own project on bombing (‘Killing Space’) and, in a minor key, my analysis of cartography, aerial reconnaissance and ‘corpography’ on the Western Front in the First World War.  A minimalist listing would include:

Like me, Paul also has an essay in Pete Adey‘s co-edited collection, From above: war, violence and verticality (Hurst, 2013): ‘Photomosaics: mapping the Front, mapping the city’.

He has just published an important essay, ‘On the partiality of total war‘, in Critical inquiry 40 (2) (2014) 420-449, which has prompted this post.  What I so admire about Paul’s writing is his combination of literary style – these essays are a joy to read, even when they address the bleakest of subjects – critical imagination and analytical acumen, and the latest essay is no exception.

His central point is that the idea of ‘total war’ – which, as he insists, was essentially an inter-war constellation – was deeply partial.  It both naturalized and undermined a series of European imperialist distinctions between centre and periphery, peace and war:

‘… forms of violence forbidden in the metropole during peacetime were practiced in the colony, mandate, and protectorate, [and] … the distinction between peace and war was a luxury of the center. At the same time, by predicting that civilians in the metropole would have no immunity in future wars, it contributed to the erosion of the very imperial geography (center versus periphery) that it seemed to shore up.’

Hence the partiality of what he calls ‘the fractured problem-space of the concept’: ‘A truly total conception of war would have insisted openly on the legal, ethical, political, and technological connections between European conflagration and colonial air control’ (my emphasis).

CharltonPaul advances these claims, and enters into this fraught ‘problem-space’, by tracking the figure of a Royal Air Force officer, L.E.O. Charlton (left).  A veteran of the First World War, Charlton was appalled by his experience of colonial ‘air control’ in Iraq in the 1920s (‘direct action by aeroplanes on indirect information by unreliable informants … was a species of oppression’: sounds familiar) but became a strenuous advocate of bombing civilians as the ‘new factor in warfare’ in the future. Convinced that Britain was exceptionally vulnerable to air attack, the only possible defence was extraordinary air superiority capable of landing devastating ‘hammer blows’.

Now others have traced the lines of descent from Britain’s ‘air policing’ in Palestine, Iraq and the North-West Frontier in the 1920s and 30s to its bomber offensive against Germany in the 1940s – ‘Bomber’ Harris notoriously cut his teeth in both Iraq and Palestine, though one historian treats this as precision dentistry – and still others have joined the dots from yesterday’s imperial borderlands to today’s: I’m thinking of  Mark Neocleous‘s (re)vision of police power (‘Air power as police power‘, Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 31 (4) (2013) 578-93 and Priya Satia‘s genealogy of ‘Drones: a history from the Middle East‘, Humanity 5 (1) (2014) 1-31.

But Paul complicates these genealogies in important ways by showing how, within British military circles, war from the air was at once prosecuted and displaced/deferred.  He argues that major air power theorists of the day reserved the category of ‘war’ for conflicts between sovereign states and relegated state violence ‘against colonial, mandate and protectorate populations’ to minor categories: ‘police actions, low-intensity conflicts, constabulary missions, pacification, colonial policing’.  Indeed, at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1923 the British delegation sought to abolish all air forces except those deployed ‘for police purposes in certain outlying regions’.  The manoeuvre failed, yet it wasn’t until 1977 that the first Additional Protocol to the Geneva Convention of 1949 recognised the right of subject populations to resist colonial domination, military occupation and racial repression, nominated such acts as constituting an ‘international conflict’, and extended to them the protections of international law.  Several states have refused to ratify the AP, including the United States, Israel, Iran, India and Pakistan.  Charlton’s original objection was to the use of air power outside declared war zones and against civilian subject populations: an objection that many would argue continues to have contemporary resonance in the CIA-directed drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere.

But Charlton’s masters (and, ultimately, Charlton himself) ‘dissevered’ the meaning of ongoing state violence in the periphery from prospective state violence at the centre.  ‘Home is the space of the total war to come‘ – the Royal Air Force evidently believed that lessons learned in the colonies could be repatriated to the metropolis – and this would necessarily involve the breaching of state borders.  War from the air thus dissolved the distinctions between military and civilian spaces, as Giulio Douhet prophesied in the 1920s:

‘By virtue of this new weapon, the repercussions of war are no longer limited by the farthest artillery range of guns, but can be felt directly for hundreds and hundreds of miles… The battlefield will be limited only by the boundaries of the nations at war, and all of their citizens will become combatants, since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offensives of the enemy. There will be no distinction any longer between soldiers and civilians.’

Few military experts in Britain talked about Douhet before the 1930s, but Charlton had read him in French translation, referring to him in his Cambridge lectures published as War from the air: past, present, future (1935): John Peaty calls him ‘Douhet’s leading disciple in Britain.’  But in Charlton’s view war from the air also redrew the contours of military violence so that they no longer lined fronts but bounded areas.  In principle this transformation of the target space provided for two different strategies, though in practice the differences between them were as much ideological as they were substantive.  Air strikes could take the form of either area bombing, levelling whole districts of cities, or so-called ‘precision bombing’ that would dislocate strategic nodes within a networked space, and it was this that Charlton believed was the key to aerial supremacy:

‘[T]he nation conceived by air-power theorists was a discrete entity unified both by the interlocking systems, structures, and forces that would constitute its war effort and by their collective targetability in the age of the bomber. As the proxy space for total war doctrine, in other words, air-power theory provided limitless occasions for representing the national totality. The common figures of “nerve centres,” “heart,” and “nerve ganglia” all participated in the emergent trope of an integrated national body whose geographical borders, war effort, and vulnerability were all coterminous.’

Penguin-S8 Air Defence of Britain

In War from the air, Charlton had advocated a devastating attack on the enemy capital:

‘It is the brain, and therefore the vital point. Injury to the brain means instant death, or paralysis, whereas injury to the body or the members, especially if it be a flesh-wound, may mean nothing at all, or, at most, a grave inconvenience.’

And in his contribution to The air defence of Britain, published in 1938, Charlton used the figure of the ‘national body’ to underscore what he saw as Britain’s vulnerability to air attack: ‘We are laid out, as if on an operating table, for the surgical methods of the bomber.’  As it turned out, of course, air strikes were even less ‘surgical’ than today’s aerialists try to claim, but as I showed in ‘Doors into nowhere’ (DOWNLOADS tab), these bio-physiological tropes were refined by Solly Zuckerman when he sought to provide a scientific  basis for the combined bomber offensive during the Second World War.

wp0a26afc9_1b-1But precisely because the enabling experiments for these operations were carried out in a colonial laboratory, ‘outside the boundaries of the national body’, this couldn’t qualify as war – so this was ‘interwar’ in quite another sense too – and, Charlton notwithstanding, the ‘bombing demonstrations’ that took place in Iraq and elsewhere were not subject to much critical scrutiny or public outcry in Britain.  On the contrary, within the metropole they were turned into popular entertainment at successive air displays at Hendon in North London in the 1920s (see below) (though, prophetically, by the 1930s, the pageant staged bombing runs against ‘the enemy’, and in War over England (1936) Charlton envisaged Britain forced to surrender after a devastating German air attack on, of all things, the Hendon Air Show) .

_hendon-pageant-1922

flight19220629p371

I think this argument could profitably be extended, because the desert ‘proving grounds’ had a cultural-strategic significance that, as both Priya Satia and Patrick Deer have shown, can be unravelled through another figure who also enters this problem-space, albeit in disguise, T.E. Lawrence or ‘Aircraftsman Ross’ (I’ve suggested some of these filiations in ‘DisOrdering the Orient’)….

I hope I’ve said enough to whet your appetite.  This is a rich argument about war’s geographies, at once imaginative and material, and my bare-bones’ summary really doesn’t do it justice.  An introductory footnote reveals that the essay, and presumably Paul’s previous ones, will appear in a book in progress (and prospect), Archive, Bomb, Civilian: Total War in the Shadows of Modernism, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.