Abstract
This paper forwards a theory of silhouetting in relation to technological augmentation in U.S. Military uniforms and suggests that the increasing utilization of metamaterials, nanotechnology, and surveillance technologies operates under a rhetoric of invisibility that complicates the technologies’ visible destruction. Methodologically, the paper attends to three general technological developments in the evolution of the U.S. Army uniform: the design of the new Army Combat Uniform (ACU); the technological advances in the uniform, including embedded wearables, biometric identification devices, and 3D combat enhancement systems; and the bio-networking, GPS, and digital communication arrays that physically link digital uniforms to a larger geopolitical network of U.S. military strategy and surveillance. Throughout, the work traces the aforementioned theory of silhouetting in relation to select sociopolitical consequences of linking digitally enhanced soldiers into a transnational grid of surveillance.
Highlights
Silhouettes of WarInvisibility in StrategyIn the late afternoon on November 5, 1937, Hitler convened generals of the Reich Chancellery in secret meeting to articulate Germany’s expansionist need for, and entitlement to, greater geo-ethnic territory.1 The minutes’ transcript, presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945, identifies cases for the occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia as well as the compulsory emigration of their inhabitants
War has coveted appearance and disappearance: the tidal-tectonic patterns of the ocean harnessed to conceal naval weaponry, the properties of nuclear and atomic physics manipulated in order to evaporate entire cities, and the warmth of human bodies concealed in order to disappear from heat-seeking missiles
The strategic, technical, and political silhouettes of war that accompany the design and deployment of 21st wearable military technologies will be restricted to an examination of the recent evolution of the U.S Army uniform, increasingly imagined as a digitally enhanced, embodied bio “weapon” that is embedded within communication arrays that physically link ground soldiers within a larger geopolitical network of U.S Military3 strategy and surveillance
Summary
In the late afternoon on November 5, 1937, Hitler convened generals of the Reich Chancellery in secret meeting (later designated the Hossbach Conference) to articulate Germany’s expansionist need for, and entitlement to, greater geo-ethnic territory. The minutes’ transcript, presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials of 1945, identifies cases for the occupation of Austria and Czechoslovakia as well as the compulsory emigration of their inhabitants. The marines’ partners are invisible, watching their performance through the eye of a scope, while the marines stare “down their barrels at dozens of windows that face them, as if waiting for a ghost’s move” (Chivers 2006: 1) Attempting to diminish their visibility, the marines “zig and zag as they walk, and when they stop they shift weight from foot to foot, bobbing their heads. The marines cannot escape the inevitable — though the scope lines are invisible their targets and bodies remain resolutely present on terrain that is everywhere the “front”: “As operations drag on, some marines begin to stop cutting squares Sometimes even those that are moving are still shot” (Chivers 2006: 2). Even on land our presence is surprisingly visible though we hoped to have disappeared
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