Towards a third image of war: post-digital war

Abstract

To see war as post-digital is to see how digital innovations have already been integrated into how militaries, media and societies wage, resist and understand war. Digital war is already historical. The logics of digital technologies have been integrated into the logics of pre-existing, traditional media and into long-standing geopolitical and military logics that drive war. The field of war and media is stuck between two images: continued efforts to document non-digital war and its established questions concerning legitimacy, authority and war’s lessons, and startled claims of novelty, rupture and transformation so total that they inhibit efforts to explain how war is changing. Post-digital war offers a third image, but how to see post-digital war? I propose specific approaches to seeing that can allow us to address its scale, heterogeneity and locality as well as the ethics of human and posthuman behaviours; to see more but retain the ability to ask the most important, long-standing questions about why and how war occurs or does not. This is an unashamedly extensionist view of historical, technological and disciplinary change. Post-digital war may not be the term the field arrives at, but it indicates a third image and perspective that prevents war escaping explanation.