It seems like yet another testament to Dwayne's postulate that in the long term there is no technological fix that can stop determined low-tech human inventiveness.
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Thanks for the plug.
Let's riff on this for a few minutes. What do I mean when, as Michael wrote, I say there's "no technological fix"?
Postmodern militaries -- such as the ones you'll find sheltered in the Pentagon and its little brother, the IDF's General Staff -- are fixated on achieving spatio-temporal command and control of a battlefield (and by "spatio-temporal" I'm following, to some extent, David Harvey's work on investigating means of control in the postmodern era: of turning the built environment into a physical extension of philosophies of coercion).
It's common for nuevo style Pentagon strategists to refer to a 'battlefield' as a "battlespace". It's a silly word but if you take it seriously you'll understand the point of view shift from Clausewitzian theories of warfare to those shaped by our age of Playstation, XBox and Wii.
...
Postmodern (i.e., information besotted) militaries try to virtualize real space.
By applying a web of surveillance technologies to an area, pomo militaries hope to achieve a level of information about reality equaling the docile contours of a virtual reality (VR) space (after repeated and dedicated play, gaming terrains eventually hold no surprises because all of their elements and behaviors are, sooner or later, completely know-able).
Above, I used the word "docile" to describe virtual reality spaces. I was borrowing an idea from computer scientist and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker who has written extensively about the impossibility of creating completely convincing VR. The real problem, Rucker writes, isn't a lack of processing power and machine sophistication. Those are surmountable challenges. The real problem is that we live in a non-docile world, one which obeys discoverable rules but which still produces innumerable surprises (Chomsky, writing about his theorized language engine, called this the "infinite use of finite means").
VR, by its nature, is a docile world and for that reason will never be as rich as actually existing reality, no matter how convincingly the computer generated trees sway in the algorithm generated breeze.
What does any of this have to do with warfare?
By applying surveillance and control technologies to the world -- laying these methods over reality like a thin blanket -- pomo militaries are trying to turn a non-docile world, the real world, into a docile VR "battlespace". They're trying to have the same level of total information about real spaces that we acquire about VR spaces.
Long term (and that's the key thing to remember) this is doomed to failure. Not, mind you, because of the 'indomitable human spirit', though that plays a role. But rather, because, outside of very confined and limited areas, it isn't possible to virtualize reality.
The Israelis are trying to turn the occupied territories into virtualized -- that is, completely understood and controllable -- spaces. As we've seen, this effort has yet to produce the desired effect.
Doug wrote:
Yeah, but [the failure of tech] probably won't stop the Israelis (or Americans, in different places) from bombing anyway, will it?
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No it won't.
Mass bombing happens when total information methods fail. And since these methods almost always fail, mass bombing occurs. It's a bit of a tautology but true nonetheless. Remember what happened to Fallujah. Prior to the US' assault we were assured that the Pentagon knew where all the "bad guys" were and routinely killed them with startling accuracy. They were taking out "high value targets", destroying the "infrastructure of terror". Well, smart bombs do work; if the USAF wants to hit my car with a laser guided missile while I'm cruising down the road I have close to zero hope of getting out alive.
That means it's easier than ever to kill people. But it doesn't mean it's easier than ever to control space and movement, which is really what the command and control tech is about. The Marine incursion into Fallujah which was, in many ways, an old fashioned house to house struggle my Grandfather would've recognized, happened in large part because the project to meter the space failed.
After the city's destruction, Fallujah was turned into a lab for studying the virtualization of actual space. Residents were forcibly assigned RFID tags, their comings and goings heavily monitored. Other panopticon tech was applied.
This seemed to work for awhile. Car and suicide belt bombings decreased. Gun battles became rare. But monitoring is labor intensive. We can't depend upon artificial intelligence which, to paraphrase Rucker again, is at the moment mostly a series of 'clever parlor tricks.' Eventually, weaknesses are exploited (and not all are technical, bribery is still a valid and effective system hack). Bombings and gun battles returned to what the US media vaguely called 'Anbar Province'.
SA wrote:
I'm skeptical about the unstoppable power of low-tech human inventiveness. Israel built a wall to keep out suicide bombers and the suicide bombing almost totally stopped.
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Well in 2006 Haaretz reported that Shin Bet minimized the wall's role.
Shin Bet: Palestinian truce main cause for reduced terror
<snip>
This is the third year in a row in which the number of terrorist acts has been reduced sharply. At the height of the intifada, in 2002, 450 Israelis were killed by terrorists. An equal number of Israelis were killed in traffic accidents in 2005. In other words, the number of terror fatalities in 2005 is less than one-tenth of the number of traffic accident fatalities.
The Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces attribute the reduction mainly to the improvement in their joint capability to foil terrorist attacks and to act against terrorist organizations.
The security fence is no longer mentioned as the major factor in preventing suicide bombings, mainly because the terrorists have found ways to bypass it. The fence does make it harder for them, but the flawed inspection procedures at its checkpoints, the gaps and uncompleted sections enable suicide bombers to enter Israel.
[...]
full at --
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=664916>
.d.