Suchman (in Press) Situational Awareness- Deadly Bioconvergence at the Boundaries of Bodies and Machines

8/12/2019 Suchman (in Press) Situational Awareness- Deadly Bioconvergence at the Boundaries of Bodies and Machines

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MediaTropeseJournalVol X, No X (YEAR): xxxxxx

ISSN 1913-6005

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SITUATIONAL AWARENESS:

DEADLY BIOCONVERGENCE AT THE BOUNDARIES OF

BODIES AND MACHINESLUCY SUCHMAN

Situational awareness is defined as theability to maintain a constant, clear mentalpicture of relevant information and thetactical situation including friendly andthreat situations The RSTA[Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and TargetAcquisition] elements must providesituational understanding of the operationalenvironment in all of its dimensionspolitical, cultural, economic, demographic,as well as military factors.

Dostal, 2001

For many of us fortunate enough to remain at a geographical distance from thezones of armed conflict (both overt and covert) in which the United States iscurrently engaged in our names, our understanding of what those conflictsinvolve is dependent entirely on renderings available to us through the media

(see also Federman and Holmes, 2011: 74). While media forms proliferate nowto include not only professional but also participant reporting,1the relationbetween our own bodies and those that are directly involved is for us a remoteone. In this essay I offer some initial reflections on connections between theincreasing emphasis in military and security discourses on keeping our bodies

1See for example Jennifer Terrys powerful pedagogical assembly of YouTube videos createdby active duty soldiers at http://www.vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=7&projectId=86. It isimportant to note that even these renderings are exclusively (and quite literally) from the pointof view of our side. I return to this problem below.


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safe through so called network-centric warfare,2and the project of cutting thenetworks (Strathern, 1996) that might bring our wars too close to home Theseconnections are multiply configured, as some bodies become increasinglyentangled with machines, in the interest of keeping them apart from the bodies

of others. This essay represents the beginnings of an argument regarding theessential and inescapable tension between a commitment to distance on onehand, and to what in military discourses is named the problem of situationalawareness, particularly with respect to the (mis)identification of relevantothers. This tension holds not only for those involved in command and controlof the front lines (the focus of the militarys concerns), but also for those of usresponsible 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 DavidClouds (2011) Anatomy of an Afghan War Tragedy, published in theLosAngeles Times.3The story reports on an incident that occurred in February2010, when a group of around two dozen Afghans4from several smallmountain villages set out in the early hours of the morning in two sports utility

vehicles (SUVs) and a pickup truck. Information assembled after the incidentindicates that they had a variety of missions: some were shopkeepers going toreplenish supplies, others were students returning to school, people going formedical treatment, families off to visit their relatives. There were severalwomen and as many as four children under the age of six. They gathered totravel together over rough mountain roads to the main paved highway thatwould take them on to Kabul and other destinations. Those interviewedafterwards reported that the convoy was motivated by the possibility that one ofthe vehicles might break down along the way, though the travelers were alsosomewhat apprehensive of Taliban in the area.

Unknown to them, a US special operations unit had been dropped into thearea the night before, tasked with rooting out reported Taliban insurgents. An

2

For a compelling introduction to this trope and associated institutions see Der Derian, 2009.3Cloud explains that his story was assembled from previously unreleased military documentsincluding transcripts of cockpit and radio conversations obtained through the Freedom ofInformation Act, as well as the results of two Pentagon investigations, and interviews withofficers involved and with Afghan citizens on the ground. For a further and more detailedreading of this event see Gregory, 2011, and for a summary of the US Forces own assessmentsee http://cryptome.org/2012/03/creech-savagery.pdf.4Drawing 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 widerproblem that it indexes.


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AC-130 attack plane, an armed Predator drone, and two Kiowa attackhelicopters were providing the unit with defensive cover. At 5:08 that morningthe AC-130 pilot spotted a pickup truck and an SUV converging from differentdirections, 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 targetsof suspicion by the Predator pilot, his cameraman, mission intelligencecoordinator, and safety observer at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada.Suspicions were heightened when the convoy stopped and, to quote thecommunications transcripts, 20 military age males were seen to gather on theside 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'sintelligence coordinator agreed. By now the AC-130 pilot and drone crew werejoined by the special operations unit on the ground in Afghanistan via radio,and with a team of screenersenlisted personnel trained in video analysison duty at Air Force special operations headquarters in Okaloosa, Florida. Thescreeners 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 engagementrequires a positive identification that the adversary is carrying weapons andposes an imminent threat. For the next four and a half hours, the Predatorcrew and screeners scrutinized the movements of the convoy, looking forevidence to support that identification. Their problem, as Cloud reports it, wasthat even with the advanced cameras on the Predator, the images were fuzzyand small objects were difficult to identify.5But as an army officer involved inthe incident later explained, We all had it in our head, Hey, why do you have20 military age males at 5 a.m. collecting each other? There can be only onereason, 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 thereport. At the same time, teams of US military linguists and intelligencepersonnel with sophisticated eavesdropping equipment who were interceptingcell phone calls in the area had been listening to chatter that suggested a Talibanunit was assembling for an attack. Despite the lack of precise location for this

5The exact status of imagery from Predator cameras is ambiguous in media reports. Gregory(2011) quotes another article on the incident from the Wall Street Journalin May of 2010,whose authors report that officers who later viewed the feed said that it was clear from thetape 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 commanderand then by the commander to the Predator crew, who took it as furtherconfirmation of positive identification. At 8:43 a.m., army commanders orderedtwo 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, andat 9:15 a.m. the Predator crew noticed three survivors in brightly coloredclothing waving at the helicopters. They appeared to be trying to surrender.What are those? asked the camera operator. Women and children, thePredators mission intelligence coordinator answered. By the US count, fifteenor sixteen men were killed in the strikes and twelve people were wounded,including a woman and three children. Elders from the Afghans home villagessaid in interviews that twenty-three people had been killed, including two boysaged three and four.6

It is the camera operators question, What are those? that I want to focuson in the remainder of this essay. TheLA Timesarticle reports that the AirForce conceded in an internal document that drone crews had not been trainedto notice the subtle differences between combatants and suspicious persons whomay 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 to23 local nationals were killed and 12 others injured, and issues an unequivocalcondemnation of the inaccurate and unprofessional reporting of the Predatorcrew operating out of Creech AFB, Nevada which deprived the ground forcecommander of vital information that would have established that the vehicleswere not a hostile threat. Cloud reports that some officers in the Pentagonconcluded from the incident that an abundance of surveillance information canlead to misplaced confidence in the ability to tell friend from foe. Technologycan occasionally give you a false sense of security that you can see everything,thatyou can hear everything, that you know everything, said Air Force MajorGen. James O. Poss, who oversaw the Air Force investigation. I really do thinkwe 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 orenemy, and the latter are rendered as military targets? And what lessons mightwe learn from this tragedy? Shortly after the event, Cloud reports, GeneralMcChrystal banned the use of the category military age male, acknowledgingthat it implied that every adult man was a combatant.7 In their discussion of

6The difference in these numbers is another symptom of uncertainty, even after the fact,regarding incidents on the ground.7In contrast to this circumspection with regard to acceptable discourse, McChrystal himselfwas 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 ofenemy combatants, Cary Federman and David Holmes (2011) draw on legaltheorist Carl Schmitt to elaborate the ways in which the so-called War onTerror, and states of emergency more generally, are used to suspend recourse to

legal adjudication of the friend/enemy distinction (2011: 74). While Federmanand Holmes are concerned with the philosophical and legal implications of thestrategically vague category of enemy combatant, my focus here is the morespecifically situated and pragmatic problem faced by those charged withpositive identification as a prelude to killing. In his inquiry into what heterms the scopic regimes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs, the AirForces preferred name for drone-centered systems), Derek Gregory (2011)considers discourses of precision and their limits.8Gregorys centralargument is that the lines of sight effected through these regimes areinescapably tethered to the view from our side, while they systematicallyerase 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 atechno-cultural system that renders our space familiar even in their spacewhich 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 ofAfghanistan show stylized landscapes prowled solely by insurgents orterrorists whose cartoonish appearance makes them instantly recognizable but the video feeds from UAVs reveal a much more complicated, inhabitedlandscape in which distinctions between civilians and combatants are intenselyproblematic (2011: 198). He continues:

contemporary counterinsurgency is often described as waramongst the people, where it is formidably, constitutivelydifficult to distinguish between combatants and civilians. As thePentagons own Defense Science Board admitted: Enemyleaders look like everyone else; enemy combatants look like

everyone else; enemy vehicles look like civilian vehicles;enemy installations look like civilian installations; enemyequipment and materials look like civilian equipment andmaterials (Defense Science Board Summer Study, 2004:

"undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system, orwhat NBC News (2010) characterized as his loose lips when it came to his own disparagingremarks regarding the administration.8For a comprehensive, critical overview of the use of armed UAVs by the US military and its

consequences see Benjamin, 2012.


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populations (in the translation of specific events of killing to body counts oneach side). Doing justice to what is made present and what is rendered absentin the mediatization of war goes beyond the limits of this essay, but the effectsare central to the apparatus under discussion. The figure of the cyborg after

Donna Haraway (1985/1991) clearly does work here as well, indexing theimplosion (in this context as well the explosion) of any sense of body-machineboundaries as given or fixed, calling on us rather to treat the creation of lines ofseparation and difference as always contingent, often strategic.

Action at a Distance

According to media reports,10more than 7,000 drones of all types are in useover Iraq and Afghanistan, and remote control is seen as the vanguard of arevolution in military affairs (Der Derian, 2009: 28) in which US military andintelligence agencies are heavily invested, in both senses of the word (seeBenjamin, 2012). In 2001 the US Congress affirmed the Pentagons goal ofmaking one-third of ground combat vehicles remotely operated by 2015 (USCongress, 2000: 38) and began using armed drones in Afghanistan that sameyear (Weber, 2009: 97).11As the authors of the Department of DefenseUnmanned Systems Roadmap, 20072032 observe,

For defense-related unmanned systems, the series of regionalconflicts in which the United States has been engaged since theend of the Cold War has served to introduce and expand thecapabilities of unmanned systems technology to war fighters.This conflict-driven demand has ensured the technologysevolution and continued funding, with each new conflictreinforcing the interest in such systems. (2007: 48)12

10See 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 conductedover 300 drone strikes in Pakistan and additional strikes in Yemen and Somalia, killing 3,000people including between 500 and 1,000 civilians. Seehttp://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/, accessed Feb. 2, 2012.11For further detail on the history of the deployment of armed UAVs see Gregory, 2011.12This excerpt is quoted in Weber, 2009. Her chapter offers a wider consideration than Iprovide 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 asyet in Webers assessmentin human rights and ethics discourses. She provides furtherevidence as well for civilian casualties from drone strikes. For an extensive consideration ofautonomous 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 ofDefense updated its twenty-five-year research plan under the title, UnmannedSystems Integrated Roadmap 20092034, with $21 billion allocated for thefirst five years of research, development, and deployment. As of 2010, the Air

Force was spending nearly $3 billion a year buying and operating UAVs andtraining more pilots to fly unmanned than manned aircraft13(Markoff,2010), and by 2011 the amount of money being spent on research for militaryrobotics surpassed the entire budget of the National Science Foundation(Mulrine, 2011). Recent announcements regarding reductions in the 2012Defense 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 Obamaadministrations proposed budget still exceeds that of the last years of the Bushadministration.14

So how might we theorize the entangled relations of this ever expandingapparatus of networked warfare, and the intensified commitment to greaterdetachment of our bodies from its effects? The inter-relation of body-machine intimacies and the problematics of separation are at the core of war

fought by remote control. InNuclear Borderlands (2006), Joseph Masco citesWalter Benjamins thesis on the correlation between more powerful destructivetechnologies and a reorganization of the human sensorium.

Each new means of destruction [Benjamin argued] required agreater level of social anesthesia to normalize its impact oneveryday life The industrial revolution restructured everydaylife around repetition (the factory assembly line), speed (citylife), and technologically-mediated violence (industrialaccidents and mechanized war). The repetitive shocks to thebody as sensory organ produced by these new social formsrequired a new means of processing stimuli, a system based noton engaging ones environment but on insulating and protectingthe sensorium from it Rapid technological change has

produced a reversal of the polarity of the human senses, whichincreasingly work not to engage the world but to insulateindividuals from it. (2006: 9)

Benjamins premisethat new modes of technological mediation are leading to

13As Gregory (2011:195) points out, while UAVs do not carry a pilot, around 185 personnelare 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 incontemporary forms of remotely-controlled war fighting. The US media, atleast, are fascinated with the geographical distance between the pilots ofremotely 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 themountains of Afghanistan. And there is no question that the logic of remotelycontrolled warfare is based on the promise that our bodies (the presumedaudience for these stories) will be kept in safe spaces as they project lethal forceat a distance. At the same time, it seems clear that the present moment ischaracterized by configurations that conjoin persons and bodies separated inspace into increasingly intimate relationships. Commentators on contemporarywar fighting emphasize the sense of proximity that arises from tightly coupledsystems of satellite surveillance, networked communications, and remotecontrol. This description, from an article by staff writer David Zucchino in theLA Timesin February of 2010, provides a sense for the assemblage.

After arriving for his shift [as a Predator drone pilot based atCreech Air Force Base], on a mild day bathed in brilliant

sunshine, [Sam] Nelson received a battlefield briefing and thenopened the door to his officethe ground control station. Hesettled into the cockpit seat, known to pilots as the NaugahydeBarcalounger, facing computer screens displaying live imagesfrom the mountains of Afghanistancolor during the day,black-and-white at night. As in any other cockpit, he hadreadouts for engine speed and temperature, altitude, fuel, pitchand roll angles, as well as other flight data. At his fingertipswere two keyboards. He could type messages in chat roomsconnecting him to scores of military personnel and analystsworldwide, and he could call up maps, satellite images andintelligence reports. He talked by radio with groundcommanders and troops who saw the same live images on theirlaptops and hand-held radios.

In this article, titled Drone pilots have a front-row seat on war, from half aworld away, Zucchino continues:

For the first time in warfare, troops on the ground can see theenemy miles away on live video feeds. The psychologicalchallenges are unique: Pilots say that despite the distance, thevideo feed gives them a more intimate feel for the ground thanthey would have from a speeding warplane Locked in on amission, they often forget theyre in Nevada. Capt. Mark Ferstl,


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a former B-52 pilot, said drone pilots typically feel moreintimately involved in combat than they did when they sat inactual cockpits. When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to40,000 feet, and you dont even see the bombs falling, Ferstl

said. Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or thats theway it seems.15

We might compare these accounts to descriptions by Karin Knorr Cetina andUrs Bruegger of the phenomenal fields of financial traders intimately tetheredto global markets (2002),16or to Rachel Prentices research on the intimacies ofrobotically assisted minimally invasive surgery (2005). Thinking throughPrentices work in particular raises questions regarding the relevancies, andrelations, of persons and bodies in these configurations. In the case of surgery, afamiliarity with the body of the other may be the most crucial mode ofknowing: the surgeon may have detailed knowledge of my shoulder, forexample, in ways that require little knowledge of other aspects of me as aperson. In the case of remotely controlled killing, in contrast, the differencebetween 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) ofpersons. And it is there that the problems arise.One military advisor, in asymposiumpresentation at the US Army and Marine Corps CounterinsurgencyCenter in 2010, concedes that visual imagery is clearly insufficient and urgesthat optimal engagement of UAVs demands a nuanced understanding of theenvironment gained only through interaction with the population on thegroundUAV use is not a panacea [sic] for face-to-face interaction (cited inGregory 2011: 209).

My concern with these topics is in part an extension of my longstandinginterest in questions around the human-machine interface, including howagenciescapacities for actionare distributed across different configurationsof persons and machines (Suchman, 2007). How, I am now wondering, might Iusefully mobilize and extend these arguments to aid efforts to documentand

15Gregory (2011: 197) observes that a constant refrain of those working from Nevada is thatthey are not further away at all but only eighteen inches from the battlefield: the distancebetween the eye and the screen. This sensation is partly the product of the deliberate inculcationof a warrior culture among UAV pilots, but it is also partly a product of interpellation, ofbeing drawn into and captured by the visual field itself. Gregory urges us to attend to thedifferent forms of intimacy implied: when officers at Creech Air Force Base argued that theamount of time spent surveilling an area from a UAV creates a greater sense of intimacy thanis possible from conventional aircraft, they were describing not their familiarity with thehuman terrain of Afghanistan but their identification ofand crucially withAmericantroops in the battlespace (200, original emphasis).16See also Nadesan, 2011.


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interruptwhat international studies scholar James Der Derian (2009) hasnamed the growing military-industrial-media-entertainment network? DerDerian argues that this MIME-net is the basis for the infrastructure thatsupports what he calls virtuous war.

At the heart of virtuous war is the technical capability andethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualizeviolence from a distancewith no or minimal casualties17Fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real-timesurveillance and TV live-feeds, virtuous wars promote avision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars Virtualitycollapses distance, between here and there, near and far, fact andfiction. It widens the distance between those who have and thosewho have not. (2009: xxxi-iv)

We might understand the suicide bomber in part as a desperate response tothese developments: in the absence of high tech weaponry, what is available isyour own body, the ability to put your body in proximity with others andbecome, yourself, a weapon (Vurdubakis, 2008).

Robots on the Ground

ANew York Timesseries titled A New Generation of Robotic Weaponsopens with the statement that for research and development in armed robotics,distinguishing friend from foe is especially challenging (Roberts andOConnell, 2010). In 2009 Penguin Press released Peter Singers Wired forWar: The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the 21stCentury. The booksrelease was accompanied, at least within the United States, by extensive mediacoverage. In one interview on research and development in military robotics,Singer explains:

Theres incredible work on social robots that can recognizefacial expressions and then, in turn, give their own facial

expressions. And this is going to continue, because you haveMoores Law going on here, where our systemsourmicrochips are doubling in their computing power just aboutunder every two years or so. And that means that the kind ofsystems that we have today really are the Model T Ford.Theyre the Wright Brothers flyers as compared to whatscoming. If Moores law holds true, the way it has held true forthe last several decades, within 25 years our systems may be as

17No casualties to our side, that is.


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much as a billion times more powerful than today. And so thisall sounds like science fiction, and yet it is real right now. Its atechnologic 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 pronouncementregarding technological futures effects on its audience. Along with its headymixture of alarm and enthusiasm, Singers statement evidences somesignificant ellipses. We can begin with the claim that social robots canrecognize facial expressions and in turn, give their own facial expressions. Ihave written at length about the sense of recognition involved in socialrobotics, where normative classification schemes are encoded and matched toanalyzable features of a corpus of facial imagesand its limits in capturing thedynamic contingencies and subtleties that we assume in face-to-face interactionamong human (or even nonhuman) animals (Suchman, 2007; 2011). We mighteven question the premise that the robot has a face, other than as a surfaceonto which are written modes of animation, designed to invite their recognitionby 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 theintimation is that this ability could underwrite the robots discrimination offriend from enemy, we have seen that even among humans this remains one ofthe most challenging problems of contemporary warfare, where the boundariesof the battlefield are no longer clearly designated, and the sympathies of othersare complex and difficult to discern.

The social robots progress in Singers account elides these problematicsthrough a non-specific this that is going to continue, gratuitously linked toMoores Law.19A technical observation/projection regarding increases in theprocessing speed of microchips, so-called Moores Law, is cited endlessly tosuggest the inevitability of any and all forms of technological progress, asprocessing speed is generalised to computing power. Power is, byimplication, a categorical good, as our systems endow new agencies not onlyto 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 analogyto two iconic inventions/inventorsthe Model T and the Wright brothers

18RU Sirius, (2009, May 20), Wired For War or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and LetDystopian SF Movies Inspire our Military Bots, [Editors Blog]. h+.http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/robotics/wired-war-or-how-we-learned-stop-worrying-

and-let-dystopian-sf-movies-inspire-our-, accessed Feb. 7, 2012.19It is worth noting that Gordon Moore himself, in his address on receipt of the 2002 BenjaminFranklin Institutes Bower Award for Business Leadership, disclaimed the characterization ofhis observations as a law (personal communication).


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cited in contemporary technological discourses as at once a sign of possibilityand a mark of primitive originals to be surpassed beyond their inventorsdreams through subsequent, and increasingly rapid, development. While offeredas comparisons, these two figures appear in this passage less because they have

any logical or technological relation to the military robot, than that they, likeMoores Law, are taken as incontrovertible proof of the speed of technologicalchange. The twenty-five-year time frame is a standard unit for the long termin research and development discourse (long, that is, but still within ourlifetimes), while the reference to science fiction anticipates and pre-empts ourscepticism, collapsing present and future, fiction and nonfiction into aninescapable right now, in which it is already too late to change course.Finally, and most importantly, we need to note how Singers assertion helps toperform the technological and political realities that it purports innocently toannounce. It is that which makes it so important for us to question the relationsof cultural imaginaries to actual material practices, to articulate both theirdifferences and their entanglements.

Most commentators on military robotics, including its critics, are capturedby the prospect of fully autonomous lethal robots. Responding to the US

Armys Future Combat Systems document,20Robert Sparrow (2007) arguesthat if we take this prospect seriously, unresolvable ambiguities surroundingquestions of responsibility for actions taken in the case of artificially intelligentrobotic weapons (particularly in relation to the automation of targetidentification) render their deployment irremediably unethical. In taking up thepossibility that future wars will be fought by robots, Peter Asaro (2008) drawson Michael Waltzers much cited textJust and Unjust Wars(1977/2000) toexplore the question How Just Could a Robot War Be? Asaro lays out anumber of scenarios, then examines their logics with reference to Just WarTheory, the principles underlying most of the international laws regulatingwarfare, including the Geneva and Hague Conventions. Asaro points to theargument by proponents of artificially intelligent robots that, insofar as humansoldiers 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 thisimaginary the irreconcilable subject positions of the warrior hero discussedby Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (2011: 89), called upon to beperfectly compliant but also, at least in his/her popular cultural figurations, toresist when the situation demands it. The notion that the soldier can be at oncean evacuated subject and an autonomous outlier, Epstein and Steinberg observe,

20Available 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 thesame time that it is belied by actual military proceedings.21

The logic of super morality is, nonetheless, inspiration for Ron Arkin, aroboticist at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of Governing Lethal

Behavior in Autonomous Robots (2009). Arkin embraces the inevitability ofarmed robots: in his words, the trend is clearwarfare will continue andautonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct (2009: 29). Heproposes to design what he describes as an ethical governor for lethal robots,citing the feedback controls built into the steam engine that first inspiredcyberneticist Norbert Wiener. Arkins project assumes that actions can beclassified as ethical or unethical according to a calculus: starting with apotential lethal action and subtracting the various ethical responses to thesituation equals an unethical response. Arkins approachis to translate thecorpus of codified, written military law developed over the last 150 years intoterms that robots would be able to understand and interpret themselves. Heargues that creating an ethical military robot is easier than many other types ofartificial intelligence because the laws of war are clearly stated in numeroustreaties. We tell soldiers what is right and wrong, Arkin observes in an

interview with MSNBC, We dont allow soldiers to develop ethics on theirown.22 Robots, he argues, might be better equipped than human soldiers toadhere to these ethical codes insofar as they are ruled by reason rather thanpassion, by a dispassionate rather than fearful response. Robots dont have aninherent right to self-defense and dont get scared, he observes. Therefore, therobots can take greater risk and respond more appropriately.

Arkin assumes, inter alia, that Laws of Armed Conflict and Rules ofEngagement resolve questions of ethical conduct in war fighting and could beeffectively encoded within the control architecture of a robotic systemthattheir implementation is a technical matter of correctness and reliability. ButAsaro reminds us that the Laws of Armed Conflict comprise what hecharacterizes as a menagerie of international laws and agreements (such asthe Geneva Conventions), treaties (such as the anti-personnel landmine ban),

and domestic laws, and the Rules of Engagement (ROE) rest on the principlesof discrimination and proportionality. As Asaro explains, the ROE are devisedto instruct soldiers in specific situations, and take into account not only legalrestrictions but also political, public relations, and strategic military concerns They often appear ambiguous or vague to the soldiers on the ground who

21See, as just one example, the case of Bradley Manning, http://www.bradleymanning.org/.22Eric 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-warriors-will-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 bylawyers, while the principle of proportionality is abstract, not easilyquantified, and highly relative to specific contexts and subjective estimates ofvalue (2009: 21). These are far from algorithmic specifications for decision-

making and action, in other words, not least (as in the case of recent contestsover who is protected under the Geneva Conventions) over the identification ofa combatant. In contrast, Asaro points out that Arkins ethical governorassumes a situation in which civilians have evacuated the war zone, and anyonepointing a weapon at US troops can be considered a target. But the earlieraccount of civilian deaths in Afghanistan exemplifies the failure of thisassumption in the US War on Terror, along with guarantees of certaintyregarding the presence of a weapon in the hands of a militant, or its intendedtarget. More generally, the terrain of ethics is not that of singularity or certaintybut rather of equivocality,23in the form of a politics of care that assumescapacities of response-ability that are presupposed by ethical codes, but cannever be fully specified by them.

The solution to the limits of robot autonomy is generally seen as keepingthe 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 inmilitary robotics. One of the primary vendors of military robots24is thecompany iRobot, founded by Rodney Brooks, director of MITs ComputerScience and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. iRobot is the producer of twonow famous robots, the PackBot, hailed by CNN in August of 2002 as the USArmys first battlefield robot and the newest recruit to the ground war inAfghanistan, and Roomba, the intelligent floorvac, described by its creatorsas the first automatic vacuum cleaner in the United States. These two devices,both built on the navigational techniques for which Brooks is famous, stand asmilestones in the delegation of dirty human labor to machines. As an article intheBoston Business Journalin 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).

23Thanks for Deborah Steinberg for this point (personal communication).

24Other major manufacturers are Foster-Miller, Inc. and QinetiQ.


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

Far from any discomfort with the ways in which narratives of military warfighting might sit alongside civilian domestic life, this image from iRobotswebsite and most of the stories that iRobot tells of itself not only celebrate therange of the companys products, but actually draw attention to the parallelsbetween them. Here we see figures of PackBot and Roomba side by side and asif at the same scale, the former lending power to the latter, while being renderedmore benign in the process. In the background, muted to avoid anyovershadowing of the focal figures (or potentially messy details of their realworld circumstances), human associates of each are pictured in the naturalenvironments of the devices use. The iconic male figure of the soldier in thefield walks toward, and through its orientation suggestively protects, the pre-ambulatory toddler sitting at home at the feet of what we assume to be hercaregiver/mother. Moreover, the text that accompanies these images suggeststhat the soldiers body is an object of protection as well, as here and elsewhere

Joanne Muzak User 17/5/12 12:09

Comment [1]: Do you have permission fromcompany to reproduce this image? The questionpermission here is a bit tricky. On the one hand,could be argued that this is fair use. On the otherhand, this is clearly promotional material, whichalways needs permission, and they seem especiaconcerned with demonstrating trademarks, whic

makes me think we should seek permission.


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iRobot reiterates the purpose of its products as saving soldiers lives. Onceagain this life-saving role is effected through an erasure of the wider scenes ofwarfare, including inevitable killing, that comprise the context and necessitatingconditions 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 itsopposite and object. iRobot delivers into these spaces innovation in the formof robot workers dedicated to the safety and comfort of their human proprietors:from cleaning floors to disarming explosives, we constantly strive to findbetter ways to tackle dull, dirty and dangerous missions.25And while Packbothas 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 theLA Timesissued another story, based on a not yet releasedPentagon report, offering details of an incident in April of that year in which amarine staff sergeant and a navy medic were killed in Helmand Province byfriendly firespecifically a Hellfire missile fired from a US Predator drone(Zucchino and Cloud, 2011). The two, along with another marine, hadseparated 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 thePredator overhead picked up heat signatures of the three men and detectedmuzzle flashes as they fired their weapons. This time, the Pentagon reported,analysts in Indiana watching the firefight via live video feed from the droneexpressed doubts about the targets identity as Taliban fighters. At one point theanalysts described the pair as friendlies, but then withdrew thatcharacterization, saying that they were unable to discern who the personnelwere. At another point, the analysts reported that gunshots were oriented tothe west, away from friendly forces. But the Predator pilot in Nevada and themarine commanders on the ground were never made aware of the analystsassessment. The analysts told investigators later that they didnt believe thatthey 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 theincident, who was shown the video images from the drone feeds, said it wasimpossible to see uniforms or weapons. You couldn't even tell they werehuman beingsjust blobs, he said. This was, according to the Pentagon, thefirst known case of friendly fire deaths involving an unmanned aircraft. The

25Note that the triplet dull, dirty, and dangerous appears as well in the Department ofDefenses roadmap (2007: 34, quoted in Weber 2009: 89).26

For more on iRobots 710 Warrior see http://robotfutures.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/arming-robots/.


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report blames the attack on a fatal mix of poor communications, faultyassumptions and a lack of overall common situational awareness. It concludesthat no one involved in the attack was culpably negligent or derelict in theirduties. This was, in other words, a normal accident (see Perrow, 1999).

In Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction ofTargets (2007), visual historian and cultural studies scholar Caren Kaplanexplores the history of the translation of the aerial view from geography intosurveillance and war fightingan assemblage aimed not only at mapping butacting in real time within the territory mapped, specifically, in order to kill. AsKaplan observes in the editors introduction, the piece expands explicitdiscussion of the politics of vision through an experiential dimension thatdeliberately foregrounds the highly artificial nature of seeing from above.This includes the presence of scrolling, mobile text, and multiple windows thatcontinually interrupt and partially or wholly block the view, as well as imagesthat 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 andwhat 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 byinfrastructures of power that we would do well to remember and question.

Kaplans experiment raises the question of how the science andtechnology/media studies sensorium might help us to articulate the implicationsof these particular bioconvergences of bodies, technologies, and media. BrunoLatour has famously used the example of the handgun as a device to thinkabout questions of responsibility, when sociotechnical assemblages redraw ourunits of analysis. He writes:

You are different with a gun in your hand; the gun is differentwith you holding it. You are another subject because you holdthe gun; the gun is another object because it has entered into arelationship with you. The gun is no longer the gun-in-the-armory 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 isfixed. When the [two] are articulated they becomesomeone/something else. (1999: 17980)

Latours relatively homely example is a tool with which to rethink questions ofresponsibility, away from the National Rifle Association-engenderedpreoccupation with the question of whether guns kill people or people killpeople, 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/powerand technology involved in the convergence of bodies and lethal technologiesbecomes clearer.

To say that the dispositif essentially has a strategic characterassumes that it is a matter of a specific manipulation of relationsof force, a rational and focused intervention in these relations offorce, either to develop them along a particular direction, or toblock 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 directsour attention, that indicates a way forward for critical scholarship. One focus inarticulating the dispositifof remotely controlled war fighting, it suggests, mightbe the limits of know-how implied by the militarys own trope of situationawareness and, more specifically, the contingent and vital problematic ofdiscriminations among and between bodies and persons. How do bodiesbecome persons within these apparatuses, and persons become targets? AsDeborah Steinberg observes (personal communication), an irony here is thatwhile discussion of objectification has tended to focus on processes of personsbecoming bodies, this case study demonstrates the countermovement, where(distinguishable) personhood is the object of the lethal exercise. This remains aparticular form of recognition, however, which sustains its objectifying effectsthrough categorization.

While science fiction and popular culture anxiously anticipate a future ofautonomous robot soldiers, more intimate configurations of human andmachine are presently in play in the form of these new arrangements for theprojection 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 ofdecision itself. Arguably always a fictive prelude to action, the moment ofdecision becomes further distributed across messy assemblages ofsociotechnical mediation that presuppose the recognizability of their objects, atthe same time that those objects become increasingly difficult to define. Thelimits of knowledge are a problem that loops back as well to the question withwhich I began, regarding the implications of a population (in which I includemyself) systematically insulated from the lived realitiesthe horrorsof war


Comment [2]: Clarify Emphasis original oradded?

Lucy Suchman 27/5/12 15:44

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


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


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by geographical distance and technological, discursive, and ideologicalmediatizations. The task for those many of us who remain at 30,000 feet is atleast to make visible that which nineteenth-century military theorist Carl vonClausewitz famously describes as the fog of wara fog that intensifies as the

machinery of surveillance and precision expandsand the correspondinginadequacies of our own situational awareness, as further confirmation of theurgent and compelling obligation that we bring these operations to an end.


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Documents

Suchman (in Press) Situational Awareness- Deadly Bioconvergence at the Boundaries of Bodies and Machines