Outsmarting Technologies: Rhetoric, Revolutions in Military Affairs, and the Social Depth of Warfare

At least since the 1991 Gulf War, considerable talk of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) has been excited by the advent of precision-guided munitions (PGMs), themselves widely credited with having changed the nature of warfare. To be sure, so-called ‘smart bombs’ and associated marvels of (principally US) military technology mark a watershed, but it is one that turns as much on the deployment of rhetoric as on PGMs themselves. In particular, concomitant rhetorical appeals to ‘costless’ war and meaningful discrimination between combatants and non-combatants are recasting the bases of legitimacy in warfare. However, the techno-fetishism of much of the prevailing discourse on the RMA, overly preoccupied with the capabilities of the weapons themselves, has come at the expense of as full an appreciation of the important senses in which some of the most revolutionary changes currently underway speak more to issues of legitimacy and the social depth of warfare.