Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century (review)

In one Clausewitzian sense war is a technique and policy of governance, and it follows that discussion of war can address utopian theorizing. There is an occasional fume of Clausewitz (invoked four or five times) in P. W. Singer's Wired for War, but Singer puts something in this book for everybody. The effects are of timeliness, disunity, shallowness, and disarming gravitas. The book describes a representative inventory of the new technologies for war and the dilemmas that use of such technology will precipitate. It is also part recruiting poster, part a manipulation of the popular perception of how tax dollars are being spent to enable the continued prosecution of war, and part elegy. Its cover proclaims " New York Times bestseller" (although my back-check couldn't verify this), and it is reviewed in about sixty forums.

Wired is timely. Singer's agenda is associated with the Army-sponsored report in late 2009 on neuroscience research on pharmaceutical "fatigue countermeasures" to speed up the physiological repair accomplished in normal human sleep spans, to shorten the spans, "for a payoff in battle [that] would be enormous" (William Saletan, "You: The Updated Owner's Manual," New York Times Book Review, 2 August 2009, 23). It is also related to Mary Favret's War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, 2009). Wired is also, by the way, far better than Charles E. Gannon's Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary Agenda-Settings in American and British Speculative Fiction (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003; reviewed in Utopian Studies 17, no. 3 [June 2006]: 551-53), which Singer does not mention. Serendipitously, Daniel Mendelsohn's analysis of James Cameron's 2010 film Avatar (New York Review, 25 March 2010, 10-12) helps us understand Wired. Mendelsohn believes that Avatar 's alien "Na'vi—with their uniformly superb, sleekly blue-gleaming physiques, their weirdly infallible surefootedness, their organic connector cables, their ability to upload and download consciousness itself—are the ultimate expression of [Cameron's] career-long striving to make flesh mechanical. . . . [The Na'vi are] both admirably precivilized and admirably hypercivilized" (12). In short, the Na'vi are what cyborgs would be if they were organic.

Wired is shallow. It covers a lot: "It will cover everything from [part 1—nine chapters] the resulting shifts in how wars are fought [by digitalized mechanisms] and who [still humans] is fighting them to [part 2—thirteen chapters] important questions that our new machine creations are starting to raise in politics, law, and ethics. War just won't be the same" (41). Part 1, "The Change We Are Creating," has chapter titles such as "Introduction: Scenes from a Robot War," "Robotics for Dummies," "To Infinity and Beyond: The Power of Exponential Trends," "Coming Soon to a Battlefield Near You: The Next Wave of Warbots," and "What Inspires Them: Science Fiction's Impact on Science Reality." Part 2, "What Change Is Creating for Us," has chapters titled "'Advanced' Warfare: How We Might Fight with Robots," "Open-Source Warfare: College Kids, Terrorists, and Other New Uses of Robots at War," "The Psychology of Warbots," "Changing the Experience of War and the Warrior," "Digitizing the Laws of War and Other Issues of (Un)Human Rights," "A Robot Revolt? Talking About Robot Ethics," and " Conclusion: The Duality of Robots and Humans." Wired could be an outline for a scholarly conference.

There are a number of reservations we can have about the book. Its premise is not seriously original. It is a survey of current and theoretical digital technology designed for military actions by the United States and a summary of the highly predictable social, political, and legal problems that will result from this in the next half century. It repeats the facile claim that science fiction is an important predictor of and source of inspiration for future technological developments. Science fiction does not do this...