What does a Weapon See: hbo goes to War 1

Michael J. Shapiro

University of Hawai’i

Introduction: Seeing Darkly

In Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist, Bob Arctor has himself as an object of surveillance because he leads a double life. In one as Bob, he is a member of a household of drug users; in another he is Fred, an undercover police agent assigned to collect damaging evidence on the household’s drug culture. The household is surveilled with the feed from six holo-scanners planted inside and transmitted to a safe apartment down the street on the same block. But what is seen though the scanners is not clear to Bob/Fred, who is seeing himself among others:

What does a scanner see? he asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.¹

Like industrial equipment, automobiles, and a wide variety of communication apparatuses, surveillance technology is part of a complex form of agency; it is constituted as "man-machine assemblages." For example, in the case of automobility, the car is a “machinic complex”:

constituted through its technical and social interlinkages with other industries, car parts and accessories; petrol refining and distribution; road building and maintenance; hotels, roadside service areas and motels; care sales and repair workshops; suburban house building; retailing and leisure complexes; advertising and marketing; urban design and planning.²

The human-automobile relationship thus resides in an apparatus or dispositif, an extended network of commercial relations situated in an ideational field of diverse marketing and legitimating discourses that sponsor and normalize those relations. Similarly, a weapon, aside from its operation as part of the killing operations of a fighting force, is a complex design and commodity that emerges from extensive interactions among political, commercial and knowledge agencies, all involved in the larger (media-propagated) motivations associated with global structures of enmity and national structures of career advancement and prestige. However weapons move in a more contentious world than automobiles: “World weapons might look a lot like world cars on a wall map, but their implications are far different”³; aside from their emergence as commodities, the vagaries of mergers and transversal relations among friends and enemies, create tensions between their economic and their political and security aspects and thus create inhibitions with respect to who gets to hold or use them.

Certainly what has been modernity’s most basic “machinic complex,” is the soldier holding a rifle, an assemblage that has energized weapons markets as well as a wide variety of agencies. For example, during the long cold war, the U.S.’s military rehearsed a wide variety of models but ultimately failed in attempts to acquire a gun with the reliability of the famed Russian-invented (and since widely distributed) Kalashnikov: “the world’s primary firearm,”⁴ which according to Ordell Robbie (Samuel Jackson in the film Jackie Brown (1997)), is “the very best there is when you absolutely, positively got to kill every motherfucker in the room.”⁵ However, a much larger space than a “room” houses the targets in war confrontations, and because the war crimes-inhibiting ROEs (rules of engagement) require difficult discriminations among the bodies that are to be killed, the issue of seeing from a distance becomes paramount. Therefore, rather than elaborating the complex and politically fraught process in which the U.S.’s armed services selected the (often badly flawed) competitors to the Kalashnikov, I want to focus on the visioning accompaniments to the firing of the guns they did acquire.

Just as in Dick’s Scanner story, vision - seeing “clearly or darkly” - becomes a vital concern, in on-the-ground battlefield engagements, soldiers must rely for their discrimination of appropriate targets on the optical equipment that either accompanies or is built into their guns. And as targets have become increasingly apprehended by a command-implemented, weapons-mediated perception, what has descended is a “darkness of voluntary blindness”⁶ to the legitimacy of the targets. Accordingly, in an episode reported in Evan Wright’s ethnography of a U.S. Marine assault force during the second Gulf War, he refers to the Humvee-commanding, Sergeant “Brad Colbert’s,” “night vision capabilities on his rifle scope,” which along with the vision equipment in his vehicle, turn out to be less than adequate because “in the cramped Humvee,” it’s too difficult to maneuver in a way that will clarify what his driver is seeing on his thermal imaging device inside the Humvee. And adding to the problem, “The NVGs” [Night Vision Goggles] Colbert has on “give their wearer a bright gray-green view of the night and offer a limited, tunnel-vision perspective but no depth perception.” ⁷ These images from the HBO version of Wright’s ethnography show us what kinds of technologies of seeing are involved (Figures 1,2 and 3).

Figure 1: Brad Colbert’s Scope

Figure 2: Seeing Through Brad Colbert’s Scope

Similarly, what has occurred in the evolution of the military’s war dispositif - its network of decision-making and implementing agencies, along with the discourses of militarization that sustain them - is that apparatuses of perception are playing a more important role than those that generate firepower. In Virilio's succinct phrase, "eyeshot will then finally get the better of gunshot" (although given the contemporary technologies, both “shots” often come from the same apparatus, e.g., weaponized drones).¹¹ As has become increasingly clear, a major consequence of that shift toward technologically mediated vision, which yields the "derealization” of the target, has been a shift in the agency of the authorization of killing. The weapons themselves, with greater or lessor determination by their users and those who command the users, make targeting decisions. For example, as I have noted elsewhere (referring to the episode when the missile firing system on battleship Vincennes shot down an Iranian passenger plane over the Persian Gulf), the decision to fire a missile was taken by the ship’s “Aegis” system as the radar siting of the plane entered a computer program whose icons did not distinguish an Airbus from an F-14 Tomcat fighter.¹² Crucially, the increased perceptual participation by weapons themselves complicates the issue of determining agency in judgments of war crimes and atrocities. Although much of the war crime/atrocity issue in recent years surrounds airborne weapons, I want to go to the ground first and pick up the story of what weapons see and who or what they target at the point at which the military gaze began to be directed through armored vehicles: tanks, Humvees and LAVs (Light Armored Vehicles).