Foreign Security Policy, Gender, and US Military Identity

E. Brunner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137296849
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Differentiation from the Self has been a unifying feature of war stories since they were first told highlighting that war stories are about the production of identity. Based on analysis of military documents, this book aims to unravel some of the gendered ideologies that underpin the link between state identity and foreign security policy

1

Contextualising the Study of Gender and War

It is the aim of this chapter to draw a picture of the context within which both US military perception management operations and their gendered and gendering mechanisms are situated. As it is crucial for the understanding and interpretation of any matter to historicise it thoroughly, this will be the primary intention of the following chapter. The attempt to provide these varying backdrops will proceed from the general to the specific. This means that it will begin with an overview of the general and recent societal transformations before moving on to a more narrow perspective that provides a cursory survey of what is often referred to in the literature as ‘the changing nature of warfare’ and including some of its differing aspects and perspectives. A further aim is to portray matters and enquiries pertaining to the topical area of gender and war and finally to briefly display the recent historical developments of the US military’s manipulative influence operations. In successively addressing these various contexts that are, however, equally relevant for the particular topic of this book, I simultaneously set out the ‘factual’ and the literary context, with the literature gaining in importance the more specific the contexts become. While our aspiration is, of course, to draw a contextual picture of what is judged to be relevant, this picture can never be complete without vastly exceeding the scope of the present undertaking. Since the focus of this book is firmly fixed on the research question as stated in the ‘Introduction’, it is the aim of this chapter to provide a concise but still adequate contextualisation to this end.

General and recent societal transformations

Some of the major societal transformations that have taken place in the last decades are relevant as a general societal context. They are commonplace knowledge and their implications are ‘natural’ to all those who have not consciously experienced the situation before these transformations took place. Including these societal transformations are the discontinuation of conscription in the United States in 1973, the successive integration of women into the US armed forces, the end of the Cold War, and the rise and heyday of neoliberal globalisation, coupled with what is called the ‘information revolution’. Each of these particular developments is spectacular in its own right. Nevertheless, due to the scope and focus of the analysis aimed at here, they will be only briefly addressed in the following. The main focus will be on the ‘factual’ aspects that are beyond controversy.

The abolition of the draft in the United States is often causally linked to the end of the Vietnam War. While Richard Nixon had campaigned in the 1968 presidential election on the promise to end conscription, based on the assumption that protests against the war would cease once a possibility of escaping the draft had been offered, his administration nevertheless continued conscription until 1973, when the United States left Vietnam (Bernstein and Milza 1996), while the war did not really end until the fall of Saigon in 1975 (Mourre 2001). Though the Vietnam War was not the single causal factor for the abolition of the draft, as Stachowitsch (2010) has shown, it is true that the increasingly and outspokenly unpopular war in Indochina and the ultimate American defeat in Vietnam weakened the military as an institution and opened up spaces for social movements and societal liberalisation. In Niva’s words, ‘[t]he defeat in Vietnam created a crisis in American foreign policy by raising fundamental questions about the dominant political and military paradigms of how war could be conceptualized, organized, and fought and fostered’ (Niva 1998: 115). The introduction of the all-volunteer force can be understood as one part of the response to shifting paradigms in the military realm.

With the introduction of the all-volunteer force, the military was forced to compete as an employer with the private sector for young competent individuals, leading to an increase of the salaries paid by the armed forces on the one hand, but also to the intensified integration of women and members of minorities on the other hand, since these were still available at low cost due to their discrimination on the civilian job market (Stachowitsch 2010: 44). Note that women were at this stage increasingly integrated as members of the armed forces in non-combatant functions – in domains such as health care, the armed forces had already de facto depended on women for a long time. In the 1970s, the percentage of women serving in the armed forces, mainly in maintenance, rose to about 8 per cent, then remained relatively consistently on this level before once more increasing to reach 14 per cent at the end of the 1980s and even climbing to 18 per cent in 1995. While many restrictions on women serving in the military were successively abolished, some crucial ones, such as the exclusion from serving in infantry and ground combat troops, submarines, and the Special Forces remain. These restrictions seal off certain qualification avenues for women, so that they are still underrepresented in the higher ranks relative to their overall participation in the military (ibid.: 61).

The end of the Cold War marks a caesura in the structuring of our world over the last decades. Without going into the debate over the nature of the ‘global order’ that has replaced the bipolar rivalry since its demise, we can establish that the implications of this major historical development are manifold, pervasive, and substantial. These implications cover the way conflicts are carried out and wars are waged (see the next section), they cover the perceptions of and responses (or lack thereof) to political and humanitarian crises worldwide, and they also cover the shifting and necessary adaptation of the self-image of the main actor under scrutiny in this book, namely the US armed forces. Abruptly deprived of its longstanding enemy and due to the discontinuation of the single most important conflict that had, for more than 40 years, substantially fostered its identity, the US military had to reorient, find a new enemy, and prepare for a supposedly ‘new’ kind of conflict (Moskos 2000). It is one particular part of this reorientation of the US armed forces that will be scrutinised in this book.

The end of the Cold War appeared in conjunction with a development that originated on the technological level: the so-called information revolution, whose manifold political, economic, societal, and cultural repercussions continue to reveal themselves. Since the holding of information and its potential quantitative and/or qualitative manipulation is a traditional element of state power, the dispersal of access to, and diffusion of, information has disempowered the state and simultaneously empowered non-governmental actors, whether societal or economic. Whether these multiple impacts are perceived as threatening or promising largely depends on what aspect one focuses on: the actual or potential loss of power for the major political entities certainly poses new challenges, while the actual or potential empowerment of the individual ultimately creates opportunities for issue-related global democracy projects, and also for potentially malign non-governmental groups. More precisely, the transnational architecture of the global information network has made territorial borders less significant; as a consequence of an ever growing number of actors being empowered through access to information, the distribution of power has become increasingly volatile and complex not only among state members of international society but also with regard to private economic and political, transnational and non-governmental entities. While ‘already, information capabilities are the central motor of “globalization”’ (Goldstein 2003: 14), this globalisation has particularly empowered the economic realm and disempowered the state as a political entity. In particular, this means that multinational corporations have increasingly secured position from which they can blackmail their host states to accept deregulation. Thus, the so-called information revolution also led to the heyday of the neoliberal world economic order. Whether this particular and exploitative organisational structure is now in decline is a question to be answered in the years to come.

Furthermore, the application of information technologies to both the military and the civilian realms also implies a blurring of boundaries between the political, military, and civilian spaces. Alberts and Papp, authors of a major anthology on the so-called information age, identify four main consequences of this information revolution: traditional power relations are being disrupted, regionalisation and globalisation processes are accelerated, patterns of distribution of wealth are becoming increasingly skewed, and the emerging international system will be more diffuse than the previous one supposedly was (Papp and Alberts 1997). One particular feature is acknowledged consistently in the analyses of these and many other theorists of change in the international realm in general and of the ‘information revolution’ in specific: information is seen as having become a major resource of power. This affects the ways conflicts are carried out and wars are waged, as we shall see in the next section.

The changing nature of warfare

Two separate main bodies of literature address what is often called ‘the changing nature of warfare’. There are those who try to conceive of change as originating purely on the technological level, and from there transform war-fighting and lead to a computerisation of war. And secondly, there are those who try to embed contemporary wars in the current societal transformations and in the geographic location where the violent encounters take place. Mostly, these two schools of thought do not speak to each other.

The literature engaging with both the so-called revolution in military affairs (RMA) and the impact of the ‘information revolution’ on issues of peace, war, and security traces the evolution of military policy and doctrine, the way in which technological change is conceptualised, and the role information plays in relation to the conceiving of power. This literature is vast and disparate, ranging from authors enthusiastically heralding the RMA and its potential impact and advocates of concepts such as ‘information superiority’ and ‘full spectrum dominance’ to others who insistently point to the multiple dangers of applying new informational technologies to the realm of warfare. More precisely, the variations in emphasis generate four different schools of thought: the system of systems school, the dominant battlespace knowledge school, the global reach, global power school, and the vulnerability school (O’Hanlon 2000). From the early 1990s on, the concept of information warfare (Campen 1992) was replaced first by the conceptual pair of ‘cyberwar’ and ‘netwar’ (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 1997a), which focuses more on the organisational implications of so-called information age conflicts (Dunn 2002), and, second, by the concept of virtual war, the showcase for which was the Kosovo conflict, according to Ignatieff (2000). The common premise to these analyses is that information has become the major strategic resource in conflict (though not only here). For Arquilla and Ronfeldt, conflicts in the ‘information age’ are about knowledge (see also Rosecrance 1999) and have not only technological, but also organisational implications. Networked forms of organisation need to replace hierarchical forms of organisation in order to cope with the new challenges posed to the state and its society by threats, which are diffuse, dispersed, nonlinear, and multidimensional. According to these authors, it is technology that ensures the United States continues to ‘keep the edge’ (Carter and White 2001). In this setting, the concept of cyberwar applies to high-intensity conflict involving state entities while ‘netwar’ refers to social conflict involving civil society actors.¹ According to O’Hanlon (2002), the Pentagon, in its Quadrennial Defense Review, has – rhetorically at least – become one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the RMA. This stands in contrast to the largely uncontested observation that military organisations tend to be conservative and stems from the influence civilian leaders had on this very document. Many of the more conservative military strategists try in their analyses to link the innovations forged by the ‘information revolution’ to conventional modes of warfare. Accordingly, information technologies are conceptualised as force multipliers, which do not imply groundbreaking changes in strategic or tactical thinking (Bendrath 1999), similar to the manner in which semantic influence operations are generally conceptualised. According to the advocates of revolutionary change, firepower is no longer decisive in future warfare. Since ‘information superiority’ has become the decisive feature, warfare strategies no longer target the adversaries’ bodies but their minds. Therefore, the argument goes, the perception of the adversary must be influenced so that behavioural change can be achieved without the use of military force.

The main point of contention is, of course, whether warfare in the ‘information age’ thereby has become less bloody than conventional conflict. While some follow the doctrine that conceives of semantic information operations – or perception management – as first and foremost a force multiplier, and second, but no less importantly, as the most effective non-lethal weapon, others insist not only that the bloodiness of a war depends on one’s perspective, but also that the technological and informational ‘superiority is [ ... ] not a guarantee of national security and there is no reason to believe that zero-casualty, zero-risk, zero-defect warfare will actually result in a safer world, or even a world safer just for Americans. Virtual war, therefore, is dangerous illusion’ (Ignatieff 2000: 212). Others identify important tendencies of convergence between the military and civilian technologies, which supposedly lead to the militarisation of society at large and turn every conflict into ‘information warfare’. As a consequence, for example, Krutskikh refers to the ‘sham humanitarian nature of information weapons’ (Krutskikh 1999: 32). Col. Charles Dunlap – whose work is representative of the relatively important strand of literature emanating from military personnel and who is highly reflective on the very concrete questions the US armed forces get involved in while deployed² – points out the need for both statespersons and soldiers to recognise the potential of technology. It is more important though, he argues, that they clearly understand that ‘[technology] will never substitute for answering the kind of “hard questions” of law, ethics, and policy that will continue to recomplicate the moral life on the 21st century battlefields’ (Dunlap 2004: 34).

As I have shown on another occasion (Brunner and Dunn 2009), what can be observed both in this literature and in the contemporary armed forces is an extreme instance ‘of the general technological fetishism of contemporary culture’ (Latham 2002: 245). In certain circles, information infrastructure is considered to be the key to victory in force-to-force combat operations. The meta-rules of this kind of war are set almost entirely in the realm of information and its interpretation. Information becomes a weapon, a myth, a metaphor, a force multiplier, and edge, and a trope – and the single most significant military factor (Hables Gray 1997: 22f). The contemporary RMA is most often ascribed to the application of recent technological developments to the entire range of weapons systems, as well as to information-gathering, communication, and surveillance. These RMA theorists want to shape US military policy around weapons systems that will provide complete situational awareness, full-dimensional protection, precise targeting, and so on – in other words, systems that will provide perfect information at all times (O’Hanlon 2000). While the impossibility of such a dream seems apparent to many, it has, nonetheless, ‘inspired the militaries into developing specific technologies and information-saturated doctrines’ (Hables Gray 2005: 43).

But, as Hables Gray rightly points out, ‘[f]or all the flash of high-tech cyborg systems, war is still political and it always comes down to what is done to messy bodies’ (ibid.: 41, emphasis added). Hables Gray is one of the very few authors to combine technophilia and political analysis in the sense that he strives to embed his observations about the technologically determined changing nature of warfare culturally and societally, linking the current globalisation process with the contemporary conduct of war. Ultimately, he is also fiercely critical of a development that ‘proliferates [war] into culture’ (ibid.: 44). This is also true for Der Derian (2001), who, while examining what he calls the military–industrial– media–entertainment network, shows how the links of this network are becoming increasingly intense and ‘also demonstrates how military thinking makes sense of the new forms of warfare via analogies with business and the market’ (Hutchings 2008a).

What is common to both these authors as well as to those who enquire far less critically as to the implications of rapidly changing technology for warfare is their quasi-exclusive focus upon a mode of conducting violent conflict that is affordable and implementable only for the United States and maybe some countries of the West and some of the traditional strategic counterparts of the United States, such as Russia and China. What is not addressed are the changing features of warfare in the context of so-called failing states, increasingly pervasive privatisation, globalisation, and generally neoliberalised international relations.

The literature that claims to address these questions specifically converges mainly around the term of ‘new wars’ – whether as a standalone (Münkler 2002) or as explicitly opposed to ‘old’ ones (Kaldor 2006). In her much-debated book, Kaldor argues that since the end of the Cold War, ‘a new kind of organized violence developed, especially in Africa and Eastern Europe’ (ibid.: 1) and that the new type of violence it involves is an aspect of the current globalised era. These new wars blur the distinction between war and peace and between soldiers and civilians; increasingly, they render futile the distinction between ‘what is private and what is public, state and non-state, informal and formal, what is done for economic and what for political motives’ (ibid.: 2). In particular, contrasting these ‘new’ wars against the ‘old’ ones elicits three main distinctive features: first, new wars are, Kaldor argues, about identity politics and no longer about geopolitical or ideological goals (ibid.: 7); second, they are fought by means of ‘counter-insurgency techniques of destabilization aimed at showing fear and hatred’ (ibid.: 9) as implicitly opposed to supposedly more ‘civilised’ modes of warfare in ‘old’ wars; and third, new wars rely on the current globalised economy insofar as their actors accede both the local and the global; the ‘fighting units finance themselves through plunder, hostage-taking and the black market’ and also through external assistance from ‘remittances from the diaspora, “taxation” of humanitarian assistance, support from neighbouring governments, or illegal trade in arms, drugs or valuable commodities such as oil or diamonds or human trafficking’. (ibid.: 10). All these features are situated and coming to fruition in the context of a profound crisis of statehood on both the legitimacy and the factual level. It is not surprising, therefore, that Kaldor’s response to the phenomenon of new wars is essentially cosmopolitan law enforcement, a concept that she externalises from the European to the global level in her call for a ‘European capacity for cosmopolitan law-enforcement as a contribution to global security’ and supposedly generating ‘agents of legitimate organized violence, under the umbrella of transnational institutions’ (ibid.: 190). Thus, the crisis of (southern) statehood is in this argument matched by a further delegation of power on the (occidental) supra-state level, in line with her analysis, which ‘links new wars rhetorically to barbarism and disease’ (Hutchings 2008a: 396) that require a ‘civilised’ response, which only the Occident can supposedly deliver.

These two strands of literature that try to describe change in and of contemporary modes of war³ are both highly relevant for the questions addressed in this book. While the first is mainly committed to the paradigm of technological determinism and thus an important backdrop to draw on for the analysis of the doctrine documents, the second allows us to see the bigger picture, which is more diffuse and ambiguous, but no less worrisome, as the thorough analysis of Kaldor establishes. Hence, this backdrop is indispensable for contextualising and historicising the particular military doctrine and products to be scrutinised.

Moving up one level on the scale towards a more specific context again, it is the aim of the following section to set up the specificities for addressing the questions outlined above about gender and performativity in the context of warfare and its analysis. This is where this research makes a valuable contribution.

Gendering international relations and war

Although feminist perspectives did not enter the discipline of International Relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Contextualising the Study of Gender and War
• 2. Making Gender Tangible in Military Discourse
• 3. The Doctrine of Military ‘Perception Management’ in Conflict
• 4. The Practice of Military ‘Perception Management’ in Conflict
• 5. Performing Identity/Foreign (Security) Policy
• Conclusion – Another Gendered Reproduction of the State
• Notes
• Annex – Sources
• Bibliography
• Index