Of course, there was the additional problem of how to legally justify these hybrid operations, the enfants terribles of the police and the army. At the levels of both warfare theory and international law, they seemed to be conceptual monstrosities. But we shall be returning to this point.
In any case, a new strategic doctrine became necessary. Researchers set about defining the "manhunting theoretical principles" that could provide a framework for such operations. George A. Crawford produced a summary of these in a report published in 2009 by the Joint Special Operations University. This text, which set out to make "manhunting a foundation of U.S. national strategies," in particular called for the creation of a "national manhunting agency," which would be an indispensable instrument for "building a manhunting force for the future."
The contemporary doctrine of hunting warfare breaks with the model of conventional warfare based on concepts of fronts and opposed battle lines facing up to each other. In 1916, General John J. Pershing launched a vast military offensive in Mexico in an unsuccessful attempt to lay hands on the revolutionary Pancho Villa. For American strategists who cite this historical precedent as a counterexample, it was a matter of reversing polarity: faced with the "asymmetrical threats" posed by small mobile groups of "nonstate actors," they should use small, flexible units, either human or -- preferably -- remotely controlled, in a pattern of targeted attacks.
Contrary to Carl von Clausewitz's classical definition, the fundamental structure of this type of warfare is no longer that of a duel, of two fighters facing each other. The paradigm is quite different: a hunter advancing on a prey that flees or hides from him. The rules of the game are not the same. "In the competition between two enemy combatants," wrote Crawford, "the goal is to win the battle by defeating the adversary: both combatants must confront to win. However, a manhunt scenario differs in that each player's strategy is different. The fugitive always wants to avoid capture; the pursuer must confront to win, whereas the fugitive must evade to win." The hostile relationship now boils down, as in a game of hide-and-seek, to "a competition between the hiders and the seekers."
The primary task is no longer to immobilize the enemy but to identify and locate it. This implies all the labor of detection. The modern art of tracking is based on an intensive use of new technologies, combining aerial video surveillance, the interception of signals, and cartographic tracking. The profession of manhunters now has its own technocratic jargon: "Nexus Topography is an extension of the common practice of Social Network Analysis (SNA) used to develop profiles of HVIs" Nexus Topography maps social forums or environments, which bind individuals together."
In this model the enemy individual is no longer seen as a link in a hierarchical chain of command: he is a knot or "node" inserted into a number of social networks. Based on the concepts of "network-centric warfare" and "effects-based operations," the idea is that by successfully targeting its key nodes, an enemy network can be disorganized to the point of being practically wiped out. The masterminds of this methodology declare that "targeting a single key node in a battlefield system has second, third, n-order effects, and that these effects can be accurately calculated to ensure maximum success."
This claim to predictive calculation is the foundation of the policy of prophylactic elimination, for which the hunter-killer drones are the main instruments. For the strategy of militarized manhunting is essentially preventive. It is not so much a matter of responding to actual attacks but rather of preventing the development of emerging threats by the early elimination of their potential agents -- "to detect, deter, disrupt, detain or destroy networks before they can harm" -- and to do this in the absence of any direct, imminent threat.
The political rationale that underlies this type of practice is that of social defense. Its classic instrument is the security measure, which is "not designed to punish but only to preserve society from the danger presented by the presence of dangerous beings in its midst." In the logic of this security, based on the preventive elimination of dangerous individuals, "warfare" takes the form of vast campaigns of extra-judiciary executions. The names given to the drones -- Predators (birds of prey) and Reapers (angels of death) -- are certainly well chosen.
Gregoire Chamayou is a research scholar in philosophy at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. He is the author of A Theory of the Drone (excerpted above) and Manhunts: A Philosophical History . He lives in Paris.
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Copyright 2015 by Gregoire Chamayou. This excerpt originally appeared in A Theory of the Drone published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.
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