Battlespace Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Since WWI, militaries and armed groups have used remote and autonomous explosive traps – landmines, booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – as a kind of deadly architecture to reengineer terrain inhospitable. Until recently,... more
Since WWI, militaries and armed groups have used remote and autonomous explosive traps – landmines, booby traps and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – as a kind of deadly architecture to reengineer terrain inhospitable. Until recently, minefields remained analog, static, and fixed. But technological development and changes in the nature of war have made remote and autonomous violence increasingly mobile, dynamic, and robotic and, rather than being contained in a bounded Cartesian plane, diffused through the very spaces and flows that sustain civilian life. Such “unmanned” weapons are increasingly able to navigate, communicate with each other, identify targets and even kill with minimal human involvement. Mirroring broader changes in the spatial configurations of war, the architectural form of remote and autonomous killing is thus shifting from the two-dimensional minefield to multi-dimensional minespace. This poses challenges to those engaged in humanitarian efforts to demilitarize space. To illustrate these changes, the paper draws on Derek Gregory’s notion of “Everywhere War” and engages in a discursive “archeology” of the minefield as described by US Army mine, booby trap and IED warfare field manuals.
Concepts such as complex adaptative systems, networking and chaos have been around over much of the twentieth century in many fields and disciplines. Yet, complexity thinking is mostly overlooked in the education of future military... more
Concepts such as complex adaptative systems, networking and chaos have been around over much of the twentieth century in many fields and disciplines. Yet, complexity thinking is mostly overlooked in the education of future military leaders. Consistent with the traditional Newtonian reductionist approach, the world is still presented in a linear and causal fashion with ready-made problem-solving methodologies. In this paper, we challenge this linearity and argue that to address complex challenges in a complex world, we should shift to complexity thinking as the principal cognitive imprint. With the multidimensional reorganization of global society, the metaphorical boundaries circumscribing military interventions, the battle-space, become porous and difficult, if not impossible to isolate. Today’s battle-space expands into a complex environment encompassing all societal domains to create the war nexus. Yet we still think of the battle-space as a closed system. To understand this evolving paradigm, leaders at all levels need to process reality in terms of complexity while retaining their operational focus. In time, this shift will provide the institutional capacity to understand, analyze, plan, and act in the current multidimensional war nexus.