Digital War

Light-speed, contemporary war, and Australia’s national defence strategic review

Publication type: Journal Article
Publication date: 2024-05-02
Journal: Digital War
SJR: —
CiteScore: —
Impact factor: —
ISSN: 26621975, 26621983
Abstract

In our hyperconnected contemporary world, military and civilian digital and cyber technologies rely upon uncontested and uncongested access to frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). This reliance enables light-speed signalic connectivity, interconnectivity, operability, and interoperability of the systems and devices that perpetuate twenty-first century modes of information, remote, hybrid, and digital warfare. Informed by cultural theorist Paul Virilio’s commentaries on speed, light-speed, and war, this article examines speed as an inflection that insidiously underpins the Australian Government’s 2023 National Defence: Defence Strategy Review (DSR) (public version). This is not an exhaustive study of light-speed or the DSR. Rather, this article aims to show how speed and light-speed, used as investigatory lenses, can provide critical insights into relationships between contemporary technology, and war. To this end, the article refers to US and UK defence and government electromagnetic spectrum policy statements, interpolating them into motivations for AUKUS, and the DSR’s positioning.

Found 6
By date By citations
Springer Nature
Sharded War: seeing, not sharing
Merrin W., Hoskins A.
Digital War , 
2024-01-03,  citations by CoLab: 3 ,  Abstract  
AbstractThe digital maelstrom of images, videos, messages, comments, uploaded via smartphones to Telegram and TikTok and globally remediated, place war today increasingly in plain sight. But visibility is no sign of recognition. Rather, social media shape sharded war, namely that which users experience through split, splintered, fractured, personalised, streamed and shattered feeds. Algorithmically, but also personally fed digital realities, make war as an always-on informational battle against everyone with a different opinion. In this way, using content-driven regulation, moderation and fact checking, to blunt the billions of shards of the horror of wars unfolding in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel, misses the target. Sharded war is ultimately unverified and uninspectable, in its paradoxical mix of personalised form and global scale, but also in exploiting the weakest link in the hierarchy of attention of regulators. Social media increasingly platform violence, threatening claims, narratives and realities, readily seen and experienced, but not shared.
The Persistent Appeal of Chaoplexic Warfare
Bousquet A.
2023-07-31,  citations by CoLab: 2 , 
Radical War
Ford M., Hoskins A.
2022-07-01,  citations by CoLab: 17 ,  Abstract  
AbstractThis book examines the digital explosion that has ripped across the battlefield, weaponizing our attention and making everyone a participant in wars without end. "Smart" devices, apps, archives, and algorithms remove the bystander from war, collapsing the distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon. This has ruptured our capacity to make sense of war. Now we are all either victims or perpetrators. In Radical War, Ford and Hoskins reveal how contemporary war is legitimized, planned, fought, experienced, remembered, and forgotten in a continuous and connected way, through digitally saturated fields of perception. Plotting the emerging relationship between data, attention, and the power to control war, the authors chart the complex digital and human interdependencies that sustain political violence today. Through a unique, interdisciplinary lens, they map our disjointed experiences of conflict and illuminate this new, dystopian ecology of war.
Oxford University Press
Chaoplexic warfare or the future of military organization
BOUSQUET A.
International Affairs scimago Q1 wos Q1 , 
2008-09-01,  citations by CoLab: 38 ,  Abstract  
Scientific methods and concepts have been exerting a powerful influence on the exercising of armed force since the Scientific Revolution and the dawn of the modern era. In association with the respective technologies of the clock, engine and computer, the scientific theories of mechanism, thermodynamics, and cybernetics have all in turn been recruited to shape distinct approaches to the challenges of imposing order on the chaos of the battlefield. Today, it is on the basis of the new sciences of chaos and complexity that the latest regime of the scientific way of warfare is being erected. Chaoplexic warfare draws on the study of nonlinear phenomena of self-organization to propose a radical decentralization of armed forces through the adoption of the network form. For all its present flaws, network-centric warfare and its operational concepts of self-synchronization and swarming mark an important step on the path to chaoplexic warfare.
Taylor & Francis
Cyberwar is coming!
Arquilla J., Ronfeldt D.
Comparative Strategy scimago Q3 , 
1993-04-01,  citations by CoLab: 163 , 
citations by CoLab: 1 , 
Found 1
By date By citations
SAGE
Surrendering to ‘too powerful’ technologies: From the F-111 to the MQ-28 Ghost-Bat drone
Brimblecombe-Fox K.
Media, War and Conflict scimago Q1 wos Q2 , 
2025-01-10,  citations by CoLab: 0 ,  Abstract  
Against a background of contemporary hyperconnected warfare and accelerating advances in drone/robotic systems, this article discusses the airborne drone in relation to concepts of surrender, both historic and contemporary, literal and metaphoric. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s (2002[1991]) observation that, during the first Gulf War, ‘technologies employed are too powerful’, the author examines how continuing military aspirations for technological speed and lethality represent surrender to the lure of techno-power. Two incidents of human beings surrendering to drones, in Kuwait in 1991 and in Ukraine in 2023, anchor an exploration of literal and metaphoric surrender implications. This discussion is expanded through a military aviation history lens and an art historical perspective. The latter includes close visual and contextual analyses of James Rosenquist’s 1964–1965 painting F-111 and the author’s multi-piece 2022–2023 painting Ghost Bat.

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Media, War and Conflict
Media, War and Conflict, 1, 100%
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SAGE
SAGE, 1, 100%
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