Robowar™ dreams

Abstract

This paper seeks to open up to critical scrutiny the attempts currently being made to re‐engineer post‐cold war US military power to directly confront global south urbanisation. Through analysing the discourses produced by US military commentators about ‘urban warfare’, and the purported military, technological and robotic solutions that might allow US forces to dominate and control global south cities in the near to medium‐term future, the paper demonstrates that such environments are being widely essentialised as spaces which necessarily work to undermine the USA’s military’s high‐technology systems for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. The paper shows how, amid the ongoing urban insurgency in Iraq, widescale efforts are being made to ‘urbanise’ these military systems so that US military forces can attempt to assert high‐tech dominance over the fine‐grained geographies of global south cities in the future. This includes an examination of how, by 2007, US forces, in close collaboration with the Israeli military, had already begun to implement ideas of robotised or automated urban warfare to counter the complex insurgencies in Iraq. The paper concludes with a critique of the urban and robotic turns in US military doctrine.

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was published by the Crisis States Research Centre at LSE in their working paper series (Graham, 2006b).

2 The Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System.