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Deterritorializing War: America’s Special Operations and the Dark Arts of Networked Warfare in the Middle East and Beyond
Abstract
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, there has been an expanding shadow war of assassinations and drone strikes across physical borders in such peripheral localities as Pakistani tribal areas, Yemen and Somalia in which violence is largely disappeared from media coverage and political accountability. While some argue that this new deterritorialized form of warfare is being driven by the technological innovations of drone warfare, this paper will argue that the key innovation has been the increasing social adoption of networks as the primary organizational form of American military engagement. Drawing upon the speculative theorizing of Hardt and Negri in their work Multitude, who contend that wars today will increasingly be fought through the organizational form of networks (“All wars today tend to be netwars”), the paper will trace the rise of the network form within the US military through the expansion of the power and influence of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) across the US military after September 11, 2001 culminating in the leading role of JSOC kill/capture networks commanded by General Stanley McChrystal during the 2007 “surge” in Iraq. The new modalities of networked warfare were then expanded to Afghanistan and, more discretely, to Pakistan through the spread of JSOC, fusion centers and joint commands across the military under the Obama administration. This has resulted in the increasingly deeterritorialized form of targeted warfare that is taking place today in such locales as Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere. While proponents of the new form of targeted warfare tout that it does not put America soldiers at risk and removes the heavy footprint that stirs up militant opposition, the paper will conclude by discussing the dangers these increasingly permissive and deterritorialized network forms of warfare pose for democratic accountability and strategic rationality. In particular, the paper will contend that the deterritorialization of war makes it more likely that war will become, as Hardt and Negri warn, a permanent social condition; both a procedural activity and an ordering, regulative activity that creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of power aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life both at home and abroad.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Security Studies