For the Israeli military’s office of public relations, charged with generating propaganda (hasbara) for the security services, the era of proliferating mobile technologies generated considerable anxiety. At issue was the growing number of cameras in the hands of Palestinian civilians and activists in the occupied Palestinian territories, threateningly well-versed in the emerging media economy, with a composite digital literacy was far outstripping that of the military’s PR division. This paper draws on ethnography conducted with this military division in years well before the military’s surveillance infrastructure had been tethered to a drone arsenal, to consider their dream of a field of total visibility and synoptic seeing, of a camera arsenal covering the political theater of military occupation, and therein able to manage every PR threat with the appropriate military-generated image. I particularly am interested in the failures that emerged from military blueprints and trials in their efforts to bring synoptic seeing to reality. Using ethnographic methods to take seriously the everyday limits, stumbles and lapses in Israeli military media capacity, this paper studies the anti-colonial potential of (what I call) an analytics of failure at the dawn of the age of surveillance militarism.