During wartime, it is often said that mass media – and especially television – are agents of war. Television has even been described as the continuation of war by other means; the screen has been conceived of as the actual battleground and viewers have been considered the soldiers occupying it. The contemporary television war has popularized this view, but media history has always known that all of the important innovations in media technology originate from war and military technology. For nearly 20 years, media historians have claimed that war is the father of all media and that the history of modern media is the history of modern warfare (this is particularly prominent in Kittler 1985a and Bolz 1989). As a result, it has become rather banal to talk about the aforementioned alliance between television and warfare, to describe television as an agent of war, and to explain television as a key weapon or arena of war.

The following contribution will reconstruct the connection between war and television in a different way. In the process, it will be revealed that this connection obviously exists but that it is very different from what is generally assumed. I will show that television – regardless of its technical origin – is a rather ineffective weapon that is ill-suited to the demands of warfare. This is due to the basic constitution of television as a dispositif.