The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, "Battlespace Awareness," and the Structures of the Imperial Gaze

Abstract

This paper explores the role of aerial and satellite imagery in the US military's command, control, and intelligence (C4I) systems, with an historical focus on the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Using satellite imagery for military intelligence and warfare is part of an ongoing effort in the US Department of Defense to make all cartographic and topographic space, and the objects in it, totally visible and "transparent," what the US military calls "total battlespace awareness." It is where imagery production is attached to concrete and purposive action in the abstract realm of "battlespace," an example of how the mundane and the monstrously violent intersect around the production of visual data and artefacts. Borrowing a metaphor from Paul Edwards, I suggest that satellite imagery can not only "open up" the world (making it transparent), but can also "close down" geographical space under a regime of surveillance and violent military control. The discursive power of aerial and satellite imagery is derived from its position as an objectifying transcendent gaze, above and beyond subjectivity (Donna Haraway's "God Trick"), and when these images are disseminated in the mass media as testaments to military prowess, they become visual representations of geographical domination (as in Denis Cosgrove's "Apollonian Eye"). In this sense, satellite imagery, photo reconnaissance, and imagery interpretation are rich sites and artefacts for exploring how power and national sovereignty turn on the visual.