• • • low end theory

theorizin' on the cheap since '09. for more about me, go here. e-mail: lowendtheory [at sign] lowendtheory [dot] org.

A “working-draft” map of the US military’s counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan.  If it hadn’t shown up in this MSNBC article, I likely would have thought that this was produced by The Onion. Charts like this necessarily attempt to model in two dimensions a reality that will be played out in least three.  A human reality.  Yet they also reveal by virtue of their very existence that this war is as much if not more an invention for computerized projection.  Look how you’re reading this.  Note in the lower left corner the logo for PA Consulting, the now transnational British corporation that emerged during World War II to perform Personnel Administration.  That is, to improve the “productivity” of the work force.  PA was built to build, nurture, and fortify those links between the War Out There and the War At Home by turning a handsome profit off of both. As the article suggests, The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming.  For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war – from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries – are interconnected and must be taken into consideration.  It represents a new approach to war fighting, looking beyond simply killing enemy fighters.  It underscores what those fighting wars have long known, that everything matters. But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security. What frightens me about this image is not only the war that it projects.  I am also, and probably more frightened by its reproducibility.  Another war elsewhere might shift the arrows or require a more or less complicated color code, but the model and its framing would stay essentially the same.  Categories like this end up being instruments of U.S. War Calculus: “Provide Humanitarian Aid” “Cultural Erosion/Displacement” “Expectations for Security, Services, and Employment,” Bloodless categories.  Subject and objectless categories. There really is no explicit mention of violence; no mention of destruction, devastation, except in the mention of insurgency.  What’s so shocking to me about this document is not how complicated it is, how absurd or laughable its abstractions are, etc.  It’s the fact that its function is to represent war without, well, the use of violence that makes a war a war.  That makes war, something experienced on the material scale of the human populations who are involved in it on all sides.

A “working-draft” map of the US military’s counter-insurgency strategy for Afghanistan.  If it hadn’t shown up in this MSNBC article, I likely would have thought that this was produced by The Onion.

Charts like this necessarily attempt to model in two dimensions a reality that will be played out in least three.  A human reality.  Yet they also reveal by virtue of their very existence that this war is as much if not more an invention for computerized projection.  Look how you’re reading this.  Note in the lower left corner the logo for PA Consulting, the now transnational British corporation that emerged during World War II to perform Personnel Administration.  That is, to improve the “productivity” of the work force.  PA was built to build, nurture, and fortify those links between the War Out There and the War At Home by turning a handsome profit off of both.

As the article suggests,

The slide is undoubtedly overwhelming.  For some military commanders, the slide is genius, an attempt to show how all things in war – from media bias to ethnic/tribal rivalries – are interconnected and must be taken into consideration.  It represents a new approach to war fighting, looking beyond simply killing enemy fighters.  It underscores what those fighting wars have long known, that everything matters.

But for others, the diagram represents a fool’s errand that the United States has taken on in the name of national security.

What frightens me about this image is not only the war that it projects.  I am also, and probably more frightened by its reproducibility.  Another war elsewhere might shift the arrows or require a more or less complicated color code, but the model and its framing would stay essentially the same.  Categories like this end up being instruments of U.S. War Calculus:

“Provide Humanitarian Aid” “Cultural Erosion/Displacement” “Expectations for Security, Services, and Employment,”

Bloodless categories.  Subject and objectless categories.

There really is no explicit mention of violence; no mention of destruction, devastation, except in the mention of insurgency.  What’s so shocking to me about this document is not how complicated it is, how absurd or laughable its abstractions are, etc.  It’s the fact that its function is to represent war without, well, the use of violence that makes a war a war.  That makes war, something experienced on the material scale of the human populations who are involved in it on all sides.

Notes

  1. lowendtheory posted this
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