After years of reading around him, I finally have dug into a text by theorist Manuel De Landa. A friend recently gave me her copy of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines and I've thoroughly enjoyed working through it over the last few weeks. In this writing project, De Landa reads military history in relation to philosopher Gilles Deleuze's notion of the "machinic phylum," a term Deleuze used to describe the paradigm of self-organization. The text repositions the military as an abstract entity and provides an alternate history of technology that deals exclusively with the will of the military machine. The following excerpt outlines De Landa's conception of the elements of military metabolism:

If we think of tactics as the art of assembling men and weapons in order to win battles, and of strategy as the art of assembling battles to win wars, then logistics could be defined as the art of assembling war and the agricultural, economic and industrial resources that make it possible. If a war machine could said to have a body, then tactics would represent the muscle and strategy the brain, while logistics would be the machine's digestive and circulatory systems: the procurement and supply networks that distribute resources throughout an army's body. pg. 105

In essence, the military state is rendered as a self-aware apparatus with an endgame of making the most efficient use of the tools and resources it has available at its disposal to achieve its goals.

In working through military history, De Landa addressees numerous themes including: troop formation, training psychology, urban fortification, projectile weapons and guerilla warfare. The onset of the industrial revolution and Taylorization create a new paradigm which is in turn eclipsed by our current informatized age:

If Frederick the Great's phalanx was the ultimate clockwork army, and Napolean's armies represented the first motor in history, the German Blitzkrieg was the first example of the distributed network: a machine integrating various elements through the use of radio communications. As the flow of information in a system became more important than the flow of energy, the emphasis switched from machines with components in physical contact with each other to machines with components operating over geographical distances. And if a Turing machine is an instance of the Abstract motor, then several computers working simultaneously on a given problem correspond to the third in the series clockwork-motor-network: a parallel computer. pg. 158

One of the interesting things about this 1991 text is that it anticipated the extensive attention that would be devoted to the "network" paradigm. I've read through The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture and Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and found the treatment of topics like emergent intelligence and AI in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines far more satisfying than in these other texts.

Originally posted on Serial Consign ( )

http://imaginaryyear.com/raccoon/book...

Manuel DeLanda's preeminent virtue as a scholar is the way in which he applies the ideas of complexity theory (emergence, feedback, etc.) to the historical record, and War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) follows this template, looking at moments where technological developments (the conoidal bullet, wireless technology) spur military systems to evolve (a process which, in turn, triggers other armies to evolve in response).

If you accept this premise (fail to at your peril), it naturally suggests that the militaries of today will one day evolve even further. So in addition to sketching out historical instances of this sort of thing, DeLanda spends a lot of time drawing attention to contemporary developments in technology or military theory that might be putting us on the road to future phase shifts that might spell Bad News for soldiers and civilians alike. Artificial intelligence, RAND-style war game simulators, and predatory machines (of the sort outlined in DARPA's "Strategic Computing Initiative") all come in for an extended critique, although DeLanda seems more optimistic about technological systems that don't take human beings "out of the loop" (the book ends with an appreciation of humanist interface designer Doug Engelbart).

All in all, this book is pretty essential reading for anyone interested in the "machine" part of the war machine, although it could definitely benefit from a little revision and expansion: some of the Cold War anxiety undergirding the book has lost some of its edge in the intervening years, and I could stand to lose some of it in favor of having DeLanda as a guide through past two wars (although War was published in 1991, Desert Storm hardly ranks a mention, a little odd, given the use of Israeli-built Pioneer UAVs in that conflict). ( )