Virilio's wager is that the 1999 Kosovo air war is not a Balkan episode but the opening event of a new planetary order, and that its failure is precisely what installs that order. Operation Allied Force fails as a military and political operation, and that failure discredits coalition warfare (NATO) and coalition politics (the UN) at a stroke, clearing the ground for an American supremacy that needs neither adversary nor partner: a second deterrence that is cybernetic and aero-spatial rather than nuclear. Its instrument is not the bomb that lands but the accident that is engineered, war conducted through orbital surveillance, information saturation, the interruption of a nation's electricity and airwaves, and the deliberate spread of systemic breakdown, in a conflict where the civilians are the casualties and the soldiers are the protected species. What the four articles track cumulatively is the passage from a war of territory to a war of the atmosphere, the airwaves, and the infrastructure, and past that to a globalitarian biopolitics Virilio is willing to call post-human.
The book gathers four short articles written into the event as it unfolded, not a treatise composed after it. The dating is the frame:
The first three articles reprinted here were written between 19 April and 15 June 1999 during the Kosovo conflict. The first was published on 27 April in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The fourth was completed on 5 July.
The French original is Stratégie de la déception (Galilée, 1999); Chris Turner's translation appeared from Verso in 2000, and this Radical Thinkers edition in 2007. The volume is dedicated to Father Patrick Giros and opens under an epigraph drawn from NATO's own Secretary-General, which sets the book's suspicion of the Alliance's very reason for being:
The Atlantic Alliance is perhaps in the end more a bastard child of the Communists than a child born because we wanted it.
Paul-Henri Spaak, Secretary-General of NATO.
The title carries a doubleness the English cannot hold, and the whole book turns on it. The translator flags it at the outset:
It is always disappointing to report something lost in translation. In this case, the element lost is that of disappointment itself, for this is, of course, the everyday meaning of the French word 'la déception'. The term does, however, also have a more recondite military sense, the déception of missiles being the overall process of the deflection of such weapons from their course (this part is, technically, their séduction) and their redirection to some other – preferably harmless – target. Virilio uses the term to refer to this bundle of techniques of decoying, distraction and disinformation which make up a classically 'deceptive' strategy in the modern English sense. However, in his title he is alluding also, and more directly, to the (possibly intended) disappointment and disillusionment which remains after the massive Allied military efforts in the former Yugoslavia, where, were we nineteenth-century speakers of English, we might contend (pace Jamie Shea) that 'never was expectation more completely deceived'.
Chris Turner, translator's note on the French title.
Both senses run at once through everything that follows: déception as the military art of decoy, distraction and disinformation, and déception as the disappointment that is the war's actual residue. The reconstruction below keeps Virilio's own order, four articles across four chapters, because the argument is cumulative. Chapter 1 descends from the terrain of the Balkans to the atmosphere itself and arrives at the weapons ecosystem and its cybernetic accident. Chapter 2 anatomizes global information dominance and the war of the airwaves. Chapter 3 names the second break, with NATO, and the second deterrence, and works out its logistical logic. Chapter 4 carries the whole into law, the humanitarian pretext, and a biopolitics that ends on the abolition of the human.
The chapter opens on Vauvenargues and turns the epigram against NATO's planners, indicting a war fought with no distance between political aim and chosen means:
'Reason deceives us more often than nature,' claimed Vauvenargues. However that may be, the nature of the terrain in the Balkans seems to have been totally left out of account in the reasoning of NATO's war leaders. In allowing no tactical distance between their political goals and their chosen means of action, the strategists of the Atlantic Alliance have once again revealed the shakiness of their military conceptions and the fragility of those scenarios in which, since the end of the Cold War, the technical illusionism of the United States has found expression.
The first move reads Blair's slogan as a confession that the physical conditions of battle no longer count:
In a recent interview, Tony Blair declared: 'This is a new kind of war, about values as much as territory.' In so saying, he indicated, if not that geopolitics had followed history in coming to an end, at least that the Allies have now ceased to attach importance to the physical conditions of a battle being fought against a well-entrenched adversary in an environment which is both geologically and geopolitically tormented.
Wesley Clark's boast about precision supplies the counter-image, the “highest proportion of precision weaponry” immediately shadowed by apology:
General Wesley Clark, an enthusiastic supporter of warfare remote-controlled by satellite from space, pointed out on 13 April 1999 in Brussels: 'This campaign has the highest proportion of precision weaponry that has ever been used in any air operation anywhere.' This massive use of high technology, though purportedly employed to avoid causing 'collateral' damage, would not prevent the Commander-in-Chief apologizing shortly afterwards for a number of 'regrettable incidents', such as the bombing of refugee columns.
Clark is read not as NATO's spokesman but as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon's revolution in military affairs. The chapter's architecture is a descent, from terrain to atmosphere, and its first term is the generalization of automatic strikes into the “open sky” of tele-war. This is the first appearance of the Open Sky / Open City pairing that returns in Chapter 2:
Those theorists have for some years now been minded to extend automatic missile strikes indefinitely: over deserts (Operation Desert Fox in Iraq) and across countries over-flown with impunity (anti-terrorist operations in Sudan and Afghanistan), as though the aim were henceforth to extend the Open City concept of past territorial conflicts to the air-space of sovereign nations, with the 'open sky' of tele-war now strategically complementing the economic deregulation of air transport, which was given that selfsame code name: Open Sky.
The desert tactics that worked in the Gulf cannot work in a “geological fortress,” so NATO is dragged into a military cul-de-sac. The pivot of the chapter is proliferation: the strikes are counter-productive twice over, accelerating the very refugee catastrophe they invoke and provoking weak states to arm. Virilio hands the logic to The Times of India, quoted whole because the reasoning is the evidence:
The nations which wish to preserve their strategic autonomy and their political sovereignty have no other option than to maintain their nuclear arsenals, develop missiles and attempt to improve their military capabilities. The latter aim being long-term and expensive, the cheapest way in the meantime – before strategic parity is achieved – is to concentrate on missile development. It is to anticipate this logic that the United States decided to develop an anti-missile defence and to prevent the acquisition of those technologies by other countries.
The Times of India, 2 April 1999 (Virilio's note 4).
From proliferation he draws the masked question of the war, stated under the hedge he will repeat, that the verdict holds whatever the battlefield outcome:
So far as the conflict in Kosovo is concerned, then, whatever the outcome of that conflict, the question arises – a question masked since the pseudo-victory in the Gulf War – of an unbalance of terror in which the infinite spread of weapons of mass destruction would no longer leave any room for inter-state deterrence.
To locate the failure, Virilio compresses the history of air power into a single arc from Douhet to Hiroshima:
The theory of air power, first propounded by the Italian Giulio Douhet, was an attempt to build on the theory of sea power. The idea of winning a war from up in the sky – that Marinettian, Futurist vision – was soon taken over by the founder of the Royal Flying Corps, General Trenchard, who tried out the use of massive air raids on rebel tribes in Britain's Near Eastern colonies. Later an American, General Billy Mitchell, had the idea of combining air and naval forces, becoming the advocate of the aircraft carrier. In spite of the Luftwaffe's offensives, the 'Blitz' and the strategic bombing of Germany in the Second World War, Douhet's theory that air forces could win a war without support from land forces was not to receive confirmation until Hiroshima, when a single B 29 bomber and a single atom bomb put an end to the war in the Pacific.
Kenneth Bacon's 16 April claim of a residual chemical capability in Yugoslavia becomes the occasion to redefine the “duty to intervene” as a limit that is not moral but tactical, of the same order as Cold War deterrence, which Virilio names a crime:
This is not an ethical limit, as one might naïvely believe, but a strategic limit, such as the limit which, in the case of nuclear deterrence more than forty years ago, imposed the terroristic equilibrium between East and West – but did so at the cost of putting all life on the planet under threat of extinction. This was a genuine crime against humanity, though no penal sanction will ever be taken against it!
The war's political form is then read through the NATO decision procedure, the first locus of the “silence procedure” that returns at page 38:
When you see the nature of the decisions taken by the military general staff of NATO, in which the nineteen capitals of the Alliance have to give the same 'mission order' in what the generals refer to as a silence procedure – a process whereby they give the green light by implicit consensus – you can see how limited are the prospects for this form of 'politics continued by other means'. The need to arrive at a consensus of NATO member states on every tactical operation and target can only produce losses of precious time for action on the ground, seriously prejudicing that speed which is the essence of war.
The trap in Blair's “universal values” is that a war for human rights forecloses its own ending:
When you claim to prosecute a war in the name of 'human rights' – a humanitarian war – you deprive yourself of the possibility of negotiating a cessation of hostilities with your enemy. If the enemy is a torturer, the enemy of the human race, there is no alternative but the extremes of total war and unconditional surrender.
The counter-example is Rabin's riposte to Sharon in the Knesset, that peace requires the enemy:
'You negotiated with the terrorist Arafat, which is shameful!' taunted the general. To gales of laughter from the Israeli parliament Rabin retorted: 'But, my friend, to make peace you have to negotiate with the enemy!'
From this Virilio names the new form and its psychic register in one move:
The introduction of the superiority of 'universal values' over political territory goes together, then, with a stealthy, discreet invention (in this respect it is similar to many of the craft involved in the Allied air offensive): the invention of a secular holy war, for which the fundamentalism of the 'duty to intervene' might be said to lay the ground. Behind this sudden de-territorialization of a conflict which President Clinton still refuses to call a war lies, then, the tragi-comic infantilization of this century's end, when the impeachment procedure against the American president is still present in all our memories.
The infantilization thread runs through Clinton's diminished war-leadership after “Monicagate” to the figure of the warrior-child, where the riddle's punchline does the theoretical work:
'What difference is there between an adult and a child?' a Las Vegas hotel-owner was asked. Answer: 'The price of his toys!' With the doctrine of the 'revolution in military affairs', American technology seems to be becoming today, for Bill Clinton, a sort of Wonderland in which the warrior, like a child in its playpen, wants to try out everything, show off everything, for fear of otherwise seeming weak and isolated.
The toys are costed and named, the B2's price set against a nation's GNP and Bill Gates enlisted as the prophet of the whole disposition:
In Kosovo, as not so long ago in Iraq, the last great power has both to engage in a sympathy offensive (the term is apposite) and establish its global hegemony by exhibiting its arsenal of weapons, including Cruise Missiles and F 117s, already used in Iraq, and the B2 bombers, each of which has a unit cost equal to the GNP of a country like Albania. And another illustration of this infantilization is provided by Bill Gates who in a recent book, among other things, extols the positive role played by the 'Falcon View' software in destroying bridges in the Balkans.
Scorning 'nature' in the name of 'computer reason', fin-de-siècle America (unlike the America which contributed to the salvation of the free world) is transplanting its systemic rationality into programmed automata, into 'smart' missiles, as though the world were a toy or a war game and Bill Gates its prophet; a prophet who in 1998 did not hesitate to lecture Bill Clinton himself on the importance of a power which is perhaps no longer the power of the political sphere and the elected statesman, but rather that of the computer engineer, the programmer.
The descent then reaches the atmosphere by way of space law. Virilio quotes Senator Neuvirth on satellite power as a “sector of sovereignty”:
Satellite observation and multimedia development are expressions of a historic change. Technological development is increasingly putting society at the heart of space affairs. Possessing means of observation and action, having a choice of response, being less predictable – these are so many characteristics which define a power. Keeping the space sector, like defence, outside the European Union, shows that governments have not yet manifested a strong desire to integrate this other sector of sovereignty.
Senator Lucien Neuvirth, chair of the French Parliamentary Committee on Space, in Le Figaro, 5 May 1999 (Virilio's note 7).
Space law, on this reading, simply reissues the old law of the sea:
With its calls for independent access to, and navigation in, space, and independence in the observation of the earth, space law takes over almost word for word the old language of maritime law.
Which lets him pose the book's “eccentric question” and convert strategy from geography into ecology:
we may now, with regard to national sovereignty, ask the eccentric question par excellence: is orbital space destined in the future to supplant territorial space? If this were indeed the case, strategy would become not so much a matter of geography as of ecology, and the aureole which can be seen only from extra-atmospheric space, the 'light glow' produced by the ring of oxygen which encircles the earth and makes it habitable, would have become the last stage [scène] of history.
The thin atmospheric layer becomes the new arena, successor to Lebensraum, with the vertical winning out over the horizontal:
With air and space law henceforth taking precedence over the law on the ownership and use of habitable lands, this slim atmospheric layer would then emerge as an arena of political conflict to succeed the devastating myth of Lebensraum. To lead the nations of the twenty-first century, it would no longer be a question so much of observing what is happening on those countries' frontiers, as what is happening above them, towards the firmament, and this would be no small matter, since this 'lofty, extraterrestrial vantage point' would cancel out any geopolitical perspective, the vertical dimension winning out by a very long way – or, more exactly, from a very great height – over the horizontal.
The target is no longer the enemy's machines but the air the enemy breathes, which is why the casualties invert:
Gradually becoming an unhealthy climate, a noxious atmosphere, not so much by the emission of poison gases as by the unleashing of repeated magnetic storms, total war is now directed not so much against the enemy's war machines as against the atmospheric ecosystem of the target country. Hence the strange inversion in the nature of the victims of a conflict unleashed 'in the name of human rights' – a conflict in which most of the casualties are civilians and the military personnel appear to be a protected species.
The chapter ends on the object the whole book will circle, the weapons ecosystem and its accident. This is the first locus of “weapons ecosystem,” carried again at page 44:
The war with zero deaths for the military, but also zero victories in political terms, such as we are seeing in Kosovo, will give way to a weapons ecosystem capable of setting off the chain reaction of a full-scale cybernetic accident, in which disruption of the airwaves will predominate over the ravages caused by bombing. Further reinforcing the disorder and chaos occasioned by viruses and other 'logic bombs', the pollution of magnetic fields will render wholly unpredictable the episodes of a conflict which will have itself become surrealistic!
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