Locating lethality: Knowledge regimes, assemblages, and the ontologies of war

In their paper, ‘Powers of War’, Barkawi and Brighton contend that fighting constitutes the ontology of war. Citing Clausewitz, they observe that the uncertainty of the physical struggle comprises the opportunity from which politics and society can be made over.Footnote ⁸ As such, war implies antagonists, an enemy, or some ‘other’ that must be combatted. Viewed instrumentally, fighting is a matter of producing certain effects on an enemy so as to engender political change. Barkawi and Brighton go further than this, however, asking epistemic questions about how fighting refashions subjects and discourses and transforms perspectives in ways that stretch well beyond the strategic calculus to form what they describe as war/truth. In these conditions the battlefield creates the opportunity for unmaking and remaking what might be considered an epistemological given. The uncertainty produced by combat thus occurs at two levels: not only in terms of war's political-strategic logic but also in terms of what constitutes a knowledge claim about fighting and battle and the implications such knowledge claims have for war and society.

Barkawi and Brighton highlight the generative nature of war in order to establish the central concerns of critical war studies, a field that aims at tracking the disruptive epistemic effects of fighting as it remakes social and political order. As Astrid Nordin and Dan Öberg observe, however, this formulation of ‘war-as-fighting’ also has the effect of reifying ontologies of war such that ‘politics, ethics, security or gender risk being forced through the mould of this particular ontology’ irrespective of ‘whether this is actually taking place or not’.Footnote ⁹ Instead Nordin and Öberg ask ‘what does the idea that war is antagonistic and generative obscure?’Footnote ¹⁰ Citing the example of target processing they draw attention to the relentless, 24-hour, 365-day a year process of putting ‘warheads on foreheads’.Footnote ¹¹ This process involves an ongoing cycle that removes the antagonisms of the physical struggle and instead replaces it with staff work and doctrine. The result, they argue, is one where the operationalising of warfare ‘is making war in the Clausewitzian sense disappear’ even as it reinstantiates itself in television, art, computer games, military recruitment, and the arms industry.Footnote ¹² While these locations might not be central to a philosophy that frames war-as-fighting, they nonetheless still constitute significant sites from which to track war's ontological grounding. The cumulative effect of Barkawi and Brighton and Nordin and Öberg, is, then, to both retrieve fighting from technocratic descriptions of war and to find ways of extending the field of critical war studies into domains that stretch beyond the physical struggle. Curiously, however, despite the fact that science inspired the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century strategists like Bülow and Jomini – contemporary strategists with predispositions rivalling and more scientific than those of Clausewitz – neither Brighton and Barkawi nor Nordin and Öberg discuss how scientific analysis says something about the ontology of war.Footnote ¹³

As it stands, then, while critical war studies has explored how the uncertainty of war relates to war's ontology, the field has downplayed the significance of those strategists seeking to reduce the uncertainty of combat by scientifically quantifying battlefield variables. Instead, by restoring fighting as the central feature of war, Brighton and Barkawi follow the Clausewitzian formula that war ‘belongs not to the province of arts and sciences, but to the province of social life’.Footnote ¹⁴ Clausewitzian interpretations dominate contemporary debate on war. It does not follow, however, that scientific knowledge has no bearing for those working in the field of critical war studies. For if fighting constitutes war's ontology then scientific analysis of the battlefield denotes a unique sociological site for tracing the structures of knowledge as it relates to combat. Indeed, when viewed conventionally, the methodological foundation of science offers the means by which an objective yardstick can be developed for defining the reality of battle. According to this line of reasoning, the scientific method itself represents a process by which a disorderly judgement about fighting becomes a socially accepted scientific fact for those administering war.

That is not to say that the scientific method and its approach to the production of facts have escaped the critical eye. On the contrary, social theorists like Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar have developed an anthropology of the laboratory that deconstructed the scientific method along sociological lines. This revealed the socio-technical processes that are inherent in the production of scientific facts and showed how the imposition of various frameworks by scientists was designed to reduce background noise so that they could impose order out of confusion.Footnote ¹⁵ As Latour and Woolgar demonstrate, the decisions about what background noise ought to be reduced are themselves framed by inter-subjective cultures that are engendered through the craftlike practice of the scientific activity itself.Footnote ¹⁶

When applied to critical war studies, Latour's and Woolgar's seminal analysis has important ramifications in a discussion of war's ontology. In the first instance, Latour and Woolgar recognise how technology itself is constitutive of science, framing and shaping the scientific imaginary. In the second, they create the necessary conditions for applying a variety of methodologies – whether Actor Network Theory or approaches based on assemblages – to an analysis of war, technology, and the science of killing.Footnote ¹⁷ These methods bind the social structures of meaning to the martial technologies under investigation in the same way that technology is constitutive of science.

By opening the lethality black box, then, we can start to see how the technologies of war are a constitutive part of the reification of war-as-killing. More than this, lethality not only constitutes a particular type of knowledge regime that has in some way become subsumed into notions of fighting but also produces end states with ontological consequences. Ontologically speaking, the question of life and death is binary. Humans are either ‘alive’ or they ‘are not alive’. Yet as will become evident, when it comes to questions of lethality, the methodological challenge of defining a crossover point between being and nothingness is scientifically and technically disobedient. Laboratory experiment has been unable to generate the level of certainty necessary to define the optimal process of killing in war. On the battlefield the technological expressions of this uncertainty typically manifest themselves in either ‘overkill’ or defeat; where overkill is scientifically determined as the over application of lethal force. Consequently, Barkawi's and Brighton's argument that ‘the chaotic and unpredictable unmaking of certainties’ through fighting also has parallels in the scientific realm of lethality.Footnote ¹⁸ This stems from both the inability to reproduce battlefield conditions in the laboratory and the unique socio-technical challenges that frame the process of trying to model the point at which life becomes death.

In this respect, as Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar argue, functional interpretations of technology do not help generate more certainty in how lethality is defined.Footnote ¹⁹ To suggest otherwise produces two theoretically loaded observations. Firstly, a functional interpretation implies that weapons produce definable outcomes. Secondly, and flowing from this, a functional interpretation implies that a weapon has some inherent design capacity that is essential to the technology itself. In terms of theory, both of these propositions are problematic as they denote technological determinism and treat technology as an independent variable rather than a constitutive feature of a socio-technical framework.

At an empirical level, however, the challenge of trying to define lethality emerges at the very moment that scientists seek to analyse the phenomenon. While evaluating wound and terminal ballistics provides the hope that ready measurements of battlefield practices might be made, producing scientifically valid conceptions of lethality is made complex in that every single use of a weapon on the battlefield is necessarily unique to the circumstances of its discharge.Footnote ²⁰ Given the range of unknown variables that cannot be accounted for, logically, its results cannot be reproduced in an open system. A causal explanation of lethality thus requires the creation of a closed environment under laboratory conditions, shooting bullets into blocks of wax or simulant gels. In these instances, the variables can be isolated and mathematical conclusions drawn. Such an approach nevertheless assumes an essentialist reading of a weapon, one where its meanings are defined by its function.

In these circumstances, when thinking about weapons and their effects, an anti-essentialist heuristic shows how lethality gains meaning within a socio-technical framework of relationships. Like Latour's and Woolgar's work on the laboratory this makes it possible to analyse the way that a particular interpretation of lethality is reinforced as a social fact for those engaged in ordnance design, development, and use. This analysis, in turn, helps us to understand the criteria for developing a scientific explanation of killing in war and provides us with the means for showing how science is institutionalised and legitimated through the military and out into its associated industrial supply chains. As will become clear throughout the rest of this article, this further demonstrates how countervailing structures of evidence and value judgement overlap and frame the epistemology of lethality.

A short history of lethality

Historicising notions of lethality reveals the many cleavages and contrasting frames for making sense of an increasingly industrial and scientific approach to producing death. The concept of lethality emerges from and is bounded by the state's technical capacity to engage engineers, scientists, soldiers, and surgeons. These constituencies bring with them their associated habitus and modes of classification. As notions of lethality move from subjective reasoning to social fact, an analysis of how War/Truth – at least as it might be made sense of through techniques of killing – stabilises and becomes open to further investigation. More than this, by historicising lethality, the very bedrock upon which the martial traditions develop their legitimacy gets thrown into a new light, a process which in itself demands further explanation.

Far from originating in military discourse, the concept of lethality has its roots in the bureaucratised efforts of local officials, engineers, and doctors who sought to protect community health and sanitation in the nineteenth century. As a field of investigation, it brought together a variety of different professions and experts looking to use large-scale data collection methods to interpret and manage morbidity in population groups, what Foucault identified as biopolitics.Footnote ²¹ Working at different ends of the problem, these professions sought to improve the effectiveness of public engineering or make interventions to treat disease. While such efforts might have universal application, a measurement of their success in reducing morbidity could not, however, be assumed. This became much more readily apparent in the 1890s when officials of what would become the World Health Organization started on the production of an International Classification of Disease. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star demonstrate, different medical establishments in different parts of the world recorded death in different ways. As a consequence, classification of morbidity could not be readily universalised, because social mores particular to a political community – matters, for example, related to race, gender, marital status, class, or colonial status – would typically frame and/or override medical judgement.Footnote ²²

The notion that lethality might be a way to think about optimising killing rather than preventing death had not been seriously considered within the military and its associated industrial supply chains even as the First World War took its toll on empires at war. Optimising lethality was not the driving concern of engineers working on armament design. Instead, engineering imperatives relating to standardisation, mass production, and the commodification of weapon's technology underpinned the ambition of engineers who sought to further refine tolerances in armament design.Footnote ²³ Of course, artillery and ordnance designers had worked on this for centuries.Footnote ²⁴ But by the mid-nineteenth century, standardised approaches to industrial manufacturing and innovations in ordnance design opened up questions that demanded methodological changes to how lethality was defined. This prompted a number of investigations into the penetrative effects of ammunition from which a rule of thumb definition of lethality emerged. This gauged lethality by how deep a bullet might travel into wood.Footnote ²⁵ By the 1880s, this had further iterated into expressions of lethality framed by whether bullets could kill a cavalry horse.Footnote ²⁶

At the turn of the twentieth century the meaning of lethality changed once again, this time along racially motivated lines such that modes of killing among European powers was deemed to be methodologically different to those used against colonial insurgents.Footnote ²⁷ Prompting the Indian Army to develop the dumdum bullet, this became most obvious during the colonial campaigns on the North West Frontier. The dumdum subsequently became a bone of contention during the Boer War where Britain was chastised by its European rivals for using ammunition designed for ‘savage’ warfare against colonists of European descent. For the critics, if the dumdum could be used against white Dutch descendants then what would stop military practices from uncivilised colonial wars creeping into warfare between European powers? If this possibility was to be prevented, then a more precise definition of lethality would be required, one that might find force in the 1899 Geneva Convention on humane weaponry.Footnote ²⁸

Framed by increased medical engagement with bullet effects,Footnote ²⁹ the definition that the armed forces arrived at had to balance what soldiers believed to be militarily expedient with what European powers considered to be internationally acceptable. The concept of lethality thus morphed from the need to knock down cavalry horses towards a definition that emphasised ‘stopping power’. This reflected the general distrust of soldiers who concluded that small calibre ammunition produced insufficient power to stop an enemy dead in their tracks. Formally codified by the American small arms designer Captain Robert Thompson and the military surgeon Major Louis LaGarde, the notion that ordnance lethality should be defined by stopping power proved to be enormously persuasive for soldiers.Footnote ³⁰ For not only did the concept appear rooted in the experiments and calculations of a credible medical authority but it also resonated deeply with those soldiers who also sought mechanical certainty in the production of battlefield wounding. Even before practitioners and strategists like Clausewitz had observed that ‘war is the province of uncertainty’, the military had long understood that chaos and complexity was the norm in battle and had sought ways by which to limit its effects through drill and repetitive movement.Footnote ³¹ However, drills and movement were subject to human frailties. By contrast, Thompson and Lagarde offered the technological means by which they could further guarantee the result of battle. When it came to the tactical engagement, then, the best way to achieve a level of certainty that left no room for doubt about the outcome of firing a rifle was to adopt a weapon that would assure the soldier they could stop someone dead.

Intimately connected to the desire of weapon designers to win contracts with the US Army, the Thompson/LaGarde definition of stopping power offered a veneer of scientific authority that proved persuasive to those responsible for weapon acquisition. Nevertheless, with the US Army engaged in what became a controversial re-evaluation of its small arms requirements in the 1920s and 1930s, ordnance officials found themselves turning to the US Army's medical establishment to arbitrate between ammunition designs and in the process sharpen up the science of killing.Footnote ³² Although senior American commanders who had not been on the front line remained wedded to marksmanship, many officers in the US military concluded that the infantry would need greater firepower if they were to win tactical engagements.Footnote ³³ The engineering challenge that emerged out of this clash of expectations within the US Army involved the establishment of at least two boards of investigation – colloquially known as the Pig and subsequently the Goat Board – and resulted in ordnance officials abandoning the stopping power criterion in favour of kinetic energy.Footnote ³⁴ Specifically, the Americans claimed that 58 ft-lbs (80 joules) of kinetic energy was required in order to guarantee death.Footnote ³⁵

Despite the emergence of the kinetic energy criterion, a scientific method had never been formally applied to the problem of lethality prior to the Second World War. Engineers and medics were responsible for defining the technological challenge of producing lethal effect. The result was a mode of thinking rooted in surgery, engineering mechanics, and framed by an appreciation for metallurgy. The goal was to develop an absolute criterion that would help ordnance designers and manufacturers by offering specific values from which to design and build equipment. Like life and death, the engineering assumption was that a technology either had the capacity to kill or it did not. In this context scientific investigations into the empirical effects of ordnance on the human body were unnecessary: medics and surgeons could offer an appropriate indicator of lethality without the need to undertake the systematic collection of data from First World War battlefields. Scientific explanations that sought to develop and test different hypotheses about lethality were unnecessary in the circumstances as it was assumed effective explanations could be deduced from what limited data had already been collected.

With the advent of the Second World War, however, scientists began to challenge the mindset that assumed lethality was in some way obvious. Central to this effort was the work of the anatomist Solly Zuckerman.Footnote ³⁶ Concluding that no data of any real scientific value had been collected during the First World War, Zuckerman initially headed off to the battlefields of Northern France in early 1940. Collecting cadavers, Zuckerman put himself in a position to test existing theories of lethality and in the process help to refashion the discipline along more scientific lines. Although the data he was able to collect was limited by the speed of the German advance across the Low Countries, Zuckerman had sketched out enough of a research programme that he could go back to the UK and justify further investigations. The opportunity for this came as a result of the Luftwaffe bombing campaign against London in the latter half of 1940.

Eventually culminating in a research paper known as RC350, Zuckerman and his team established that the 58 ft-lbs kinetic energy criterion might have offered a rule of thumb for engineers but that it did not in fact offer a scientific basis for describing lethality.Footnote ³⁷ On the contrary, the British scientists established that the momentum lost by a missile travelling through the body was directly proportional to the degree of tissue destruction. The greater momentum, the greater the tissue destruction. Furthermore, statistical analysis showed that the 400 mg weight of ordnance implied by the 58 ft-lbs criterion was way above the threshold needed to generate death. In fact, projectiles weighing as little as 52 mgs, or 1/20^th of a gram, projectiles that were tiny compared to observations taken from the battlefield, were sufficient to produce hospitalisation.Footnote ³⁸ The kinetic energy criterion of 58 ft-lbs was not sophisticated enough for Zuckerman et al.

Instead, what Zuckerman could show was that there was a probabilistic relationship between the ordnance's momentum and the likelihood of hospitalisation. However, if the 58 ft-lbs, ‘all or nothing’ criteria lacked precision then the probabilistic calculations that emerged out of the momentum criterion created controversy with American engineers, medics, and scientists. On the one hand, a probabilistic calculation implied lethality wasn't a binary affair. On the other, it seemed to offer an explanation as to why some soldiers would keep shooting even after they had been wounded by enemy action. Zuckerman's research into the science of lethality thus implied a rational explanation for how battlefield context, psychology, and adrenaline might have an impact on tactical engagements.

The opportunity to scientifically demonstrate how psychology and adrenaline had an impact on combat effectiveness and hospitalisation arrived out of operational research undertaken by Zuckerman following the failed Allied raid on Dieppe in 1942. Previously, the conventional understanding of the fight or flight reflexes had been shaped by war in the colonies. Axiomatically, as Charles Callwell demonstrates in his book Small Wars, European powers considered these wars to be of a different nature to war in Europe.Footnote ³⁹ In medical circles the result was an attitude that emphasised the differences between white and non-white soldiers. Thus Surgeon-Major J. B. Hamilton could write, ‘As a rule when a “white man” is wounded he has had enough, and it quite ready to drop out of the ranks and go to the rear, but the savage, like the tiger, is not so impressionable, and will go on fighting even when desperately wounded.’Footnote ⁴⁰ In his analysis of the Dieppe raid, however, Zuckerman effectively took race out of an explanation of fight or flight.

Asked by Lord Mountbatten, the chief of Combined Operations Command, to establish what went wrong during the raid, Zuckerman established that many of the Canadian troops found themselves stuck and unable to clear obstacles or scale the seawall. With their backs to the sea and in the teeth of heavy German fire from deep entrenchments and pillboxes, Zuckerman's analysis revealed that soldiers fighting in such desperate conditions would carry on using their weapons irrespective of the wounds they had received. Zuckerman later surmised that they did this because they knew they were helping their comrades who were trying to escape.Footnote ⁴¹ This wasn't a matter of race, gender or training. Rather it was a question of circumstances and the probability that soldiers would be struck by ordnance with sufficient momentum as to produce hospitalisation.

For those American engineers wedded to the absolute criterion of wounding, Zuckerman's research findings appeared to undermine and refashion a whole field of ordnance engineering and design. This was particularly problematic to those in the American Medical Corps and Ordnance Corps who had instilled so much of their reputation and authority into defining lethality as a relationship to kinetic energy. Initiating a series of studies that sought to test the validity of Zuckerman's findings, Colonel George Callender, the commandant of the Army Medical Center arranged for teams of pathologists to collect data from battlefields in Burma, Bougainville, and Italy and from the Eighth US Air Force engaging in the strategic bombing of Europe.Footnote ⁴² Callender had hoped he could do more but it was impossible to field sufficient numbers of pathologists to cover all the fighting fronts, and so he was forced to take a more limited approach to data collection in the hope that this analysis would place Zuckerman's own research into statistical context.Footnote ⁴³

Beyond data collection from the battlefield, Callender sought to undermine the momentum criterion by engaging a Princeton zoologist, Professor Edmund Newton Harvey, in primary laboratory analysis. In contrast to Zuckerman, what Newton Harvey and his colleagues observed was that a bullet travelling at high velocity created a permanent and a temporary cavity within a victim. Using ballistic gel as a datum, photographs showed that bullets created a temporary cavity that expanded and contracted several times along the missile's trajectory before collapsing completely. The bullet also created a permanent cavity, which remained even after the missile had passed through the body. Even though at first sight tissue destruction seemed limited to the permanent track, in fact the trauma to the body was considerably more widespread. Unconvinced by Zuckerman's claim that there was a relationship between a projectile's loss of momentum inside the body, the depth of the projectile inside tissue, and the need for hospitalisation, Newton Harvey reported that ‘Study and measurement of temporary [wound] cavities show that the total volume of the cavity is proportional to the energy delivered by the missile.’Footnote ⁴⁴ Subsequent research came to the conclusion that 58 ft-lbs was indeed a fair approximation for the required energy needed to cause the kinds of cavitation that had been identified in the photographs. American scientists could thus reassure the US engineering and ordnance community that the energy criterion provided a rough estimate of the wounding power of small missiles.Footnote ⁴⁵

Empirically speaking, then, the science of killing evolved such that primarily British and American scientists working at the time of the Second World War produced conflicting analyses of lethality. By the mid-1950s, scientific agreement had still not been reached. That is not to say that decisions about ordnance were put on hold. Indeed, as Erik Prokosch elaborates, the early Cold War witnessed some significant developments in the technologies of death.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, this was not achieved on the basis that the science was in any way settled. British and American engineers still needed to satisfy the requirements of their user communities. Whether these requirements were met in the most optimal manner as defined by a scientific analysis of the alternatives could only be determined in accordance with national perspectives.

After the war, with the debate still unresolved one way or another, US definitions of lethality increasingly held sway over the approach taken to ordnance design. This was not a function of any one piece of analysis being more correct than another but rather reflected the pattern of investment into primary research on lethality. With the formation of NATO and the rebuilding of Europe, there was little need for European powers to press their research community into working on questions of lethality. Instead, states were preoccupied with the high politics of nuclear weapons and deterrence. Consequently, the debates between 1955 and 1979 tended to be controlled by the US, the one power that continued to invest in primary research into lethality. The only concession that the United States was prepared to make to Solly Zuckerman and the British analysis from the Second World War was to recognise the importance of velocity for delivering increased kinetic effect. This in turn led to evolution of the Small Calibre, High Velocity bullet concept that underpinned the ammunition for the M16 rifle.

Unable to reach some form of agreement on processes of lethality, scientific communities in Britain and the US could continue to develop explanations according to their own principles. The mechanisms that might have helped facilitate the stabilisation of a theory of lethality could not be defined. Instead the result was a multiplicity of interpretations. This only changed as the British withdrew from undertaking primary scientific research into lethality, thus conceding the field to their American partners. This in turn conceded the definition of lethality to American researchers and a community of non-scientists who had an interest in sustaining the kinetic energy criterion and in effect legitimated existing ordnance design and production practices. Indeed, while other theories have come and gone (see Table 1), what has emerged out of the various investigations into the science of killing is a multiplicity of approaches that reinforce pre-existing design choices about ordnance.

Table 1. Summary of effectiveness criteria.

Source: Kneubuehl et al., Wound Ballistics, p. 185.

As this short history of lethality demonstrates, there have been multiple and contested interpretations of how bullets shatter bone. This has not produced a Newtonian or Einsteinian revolution in the way militaries define lethality. Rather, there has been a symbiotic relationship between those technicians working on evolutions of weapon technology and the way that they have sought to convince military officials to adopt and procure their inventions. These webs of relations have typically been framed along lines of nationality, theories of race, and the prejudices of soldiers and engineers. By retelling its history, we can see that there is no pure science of lethality; only a science that is framed by the exigencies of military strategy and the demands of the state as enabled by engineers. Out of this process the language of kinetic effect – as opposed to the language of momentum effect – has been cemented into the lexicon of those military-technical officials who were working on how to deliver combat effectiveness on the battlefield.

Overkill, counterinsurgency, and military doctrine

In terms of the contemporary international norms of war, it is taken as axiomatic that there is a legal distinction between killing in war and killing in peace. When at war, society consents to the taking of life as morally, socially, and legally acceptable. If soldiers kill without the authority afforded by the state, then they break the law. Given these constraints, it is no surprise that the training, psychology, and doctrine that sustain a soldier's ability to kill are a source of significant discussion.Footnote ⁴⁷

As Tony King argues, however, matters relating to training and psychology can also be reframed as indicators of the growing professionalisation of the armed forces; a professionalisation that is expressed through an increasingly sophisticated use of Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) now exploited by the infantry in Close Quarter Battle.Footnote ⁴⁸ These TTPs demand the highly controlled use of force in order to deliver precise tactical effects. As such, soldier professionalism is expressed in terms of avoiding overkill through the careful application of technique and the avoidance of inefficient, unnecessary, or inadvertent use of violence.

What has not been subject to any rigorous analysis, however, is how the science of lethality has been operationalised to reinforce and legitimate martial practices as understood through doctrine. As this section shows, the military legitimacy of these practices is based on a series of contested understandings of lethality which themselves only become readily apparent when thinking through the language of kinetic effects as applied in the realms of counterinsurgency (COIN). By creating a space for questioning the science of killing in COIN, it becomes possible to show how the binary conditions that frame an analysis of lethality in conventional war also break down. This then exposes the military to more fundamental questions about the instrumentality of war, the value of military life, and the effort that armed forces make to maintain the notion that war has utility.

When it comes to counterinsurgency and ‘wars among the people’ the initial impulse of the armed forces is to try to control the theatre of war.Footnote ⁴⁹ In part this is managed by controlling the reproduction of ordnance's brutal effects in the media in order to shape popular responses to acts of violence. In practical terms this means minimising obvious bloodshed and ‘eliminating the visage of death from television’.Footnote ⁵⁰ During the first Gulf War, managing the media involved embedding journalists into military structures in an effort to make it easier to direct the way that reporters visited the battlefield. By extension this gave military planners a mechanism for shaping what appeared on CNN and the evening news.Footnote ⁵¹

Framing the way reporters work in an effort to influence the strategic narrative is not the only way that armed forces have sought to control the theatre of war. On the contrary, armed forces have long understood that they also need to control technology and warfighting doctrine so that they produce violent effects in specific ways.Footnote ⁵² Precision-guided munitions, for example, offer the intoxicating possibility of a clean war. But notions of a clean war can even be found in the way that armed forces have regularly sought to reduce the blood and gore that is produced from low-technology ordnance like small arms ammunition. These efforts have the benefit of reducing shock for soldiers while limiting the negative media connotations that might emerge from accusations of pursuing a policy of ‘overkill’. Thus, for example, in the 1970s during the IRA insurgency, the British Army was very keen to find a bullet that had ‘the same accuracy as afforded by the current rifle but which does not penetrate nor make a wound of dreadful appearance’.Footnote ⁵³ In seeking a technical fix, the Army recognised that both their existing service ammunition and their soldiers’ inability to shoot accurately had the potential to unhinge a strategic narrative that was otherwise framed in terms of supporting the police in their endeavours to protect civil society.Footnote ⁵⁴

Consequently, in the context of counterinsurgency, applying force judiciously and in ways that create definable military effects has been particularly important. In these circumstances, although they might otherwise be engaged in what some might describe as a police action,Footnote ⁵⁵ militaries are very keenly aware that if they are to retain their own chain of command and avoid excessive civilian oversight then they must carefully balance the way lethality is represented. Gung ho expressions of military masculinity are reframed in terms of professional TTPs and calibrated applications of violence so as to justify the way that force is employed.

With the advent of web 2.0 technologies, however, professional TTPs as they are applied to COIN can only go so far. Put simply, technological overkill produces dramatic results that are readily amplified online, irrespective of whether armed force is employed in conventional or irregular operations. The explosion of digital imagery through social media, whether it has been produced by soldier body cams or citizen journalists, places even more emphasis on adopting weapons that limit bloodshed. Failure to take this into consideration plays into the hands of those who use digital media and military spectacle to manage how the battlefield is represented among civilian audiences; audiences who otherwise might be persuaded to join or withdraw from getting involved in combat.Footnote ⁵⁶

Nevertheless, sustaining military legitimacy through media manipulation is but one side of the challenge of contemporary war. The other and arguably more difficult question facing military planners concerns the way that doctrine and technology are standardised so as to further control the precise delivery of military effects. Post-Iraq and Afghanistan these concerns find their most mediatised expression in the form of drone warfare, technologies that shape the martial gaze while enabling greater precision in the use of airpower.Footnote ⁵⁷ In terms of doctrine, in the early 2000s, the Americans framed their application of these technologies through the lens of an Effects Based Approach to Operations (EBO). According to EBO, planners would define the kinetic and non-kinetic – sometimes described as influencing – effects that they wanted to achieve and work backwards to precisely apply a range of military capabilities to deliver that outcome.Footnote ⁵⁸

Although EBO was eventually rejected by General Mattis in 2008, the notion that the armed forces were interested in creating ‘effects’ continued to find its way into military discourse especially as it related to COIN doctrine and operations in the human domain.Footnote ⁵⁹ The British Army's Countering Insurgency Field Manual, for example notes that, ‘Often, the most effective activities are in the psychological domain and are designed to persuade and influence target audiences using non-kinetic means’ but that ‘If physical destruction is required to achieve the desired effect, then the commander must consider and balance the potential negative impact it may cause against the expected benefits.’Footnote ⁶⁰ By the time American and British armed forces had properly updated their COIN manuals to more effectively engage in the Global War on Terror the language of kinetics as a way of producing a clinical lethal or societal effect had become widely accepted.

Following the end of counterinsurgency missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the question of lethal and non-lethal effects is now firmly embedded in US military doctrine for all types of operation, whether conventional or irregular. Thus, in the 2018 version of the US armed forces capstone doctrine publication known as Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations it is taken for granted that today's threats can ‘increasingly synchronise, integrate, and direct operations and other elements of power to create lethal and nonlethal effects’.Footnote ⁶¹ The challenge for American forces will be to evaluate the outcomes of these lethal and non-lethal effects through battle damage assessment; assessment that is designed to demonstrate the feedback loops between the application of force and the consequence of that activity.Footnote ⁶²

Using technology to buttress the utility of doctrine in war is, however, sharply exposed as a purely rhetorical fix when set against the way that lethality criteria apply in domestic law. To be sure, different jurisdictions have viewed lethality differently over time. What was legally acceptable in a colonial context far exceeds what was legally acceptable in metropolitan Europe. Even today, hollow point ammunition – ammunition that has similar effects to dumdum bullets – is not subject to the Geneva Conventions when used domestically by lawfully authorised institutions such as the police. At the same time, in an effort to control the public's access to firearms, countries such as Britain have sought to carefully define lethality and rewrite the legal definition of a firearm in increasingly restrictive ways. Thus, as far as Britain's Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is concerned, a firearm is a ‘lethal barrelled weapon of any description from which any shot, bullet or other missile can be discharged’. Even more critically from our point of view, the CPS goes on to state that while the notion of lethality is complex and subject to the decision of a court of law on advice of the Forensic Science Provider, air weapons with a kinetic energy at the muzzle of greater than 6 ft-lbs are ‘specially dangerous’.Footnote ⁶³

The contrast between the 6 ft-lbs and the 58 ft-lbs lethality criterion is clearly framed by the constraints and perspectives of different legal and military technical communities. The British approach to firearms control reveals a discrepancy in how the state defines lethality when overseas in a war compared to at home within civil society. So long as these two conditions can be kept separate then the inconsistency need not be problematic. Unfortunately, however, when the military are employed in policing actions in support of a counterinsurgency it becomes readily apparent that lethality has contextually dependent meanings that reflect expediency and political choice. In a COIN operation, should the military definition of lethality apply or the domestic definition?

In the mid-1990s the effort to reconcile these different definitions of lethality found some resolution in the concept of ‘less than lethal’ weapons: weapons with a kinetic energy criterion of less than 58 ft-lbs.Footnote ⁶⁴ During the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the niceties of this technological fix were exposed for the rhetorical contradictions that they contained. Less than lethal weapons could be just as dangerous when used inappropriately as their conventional equivalents. Moreover, the failure to apply domestic policing criteria during these operations meant that intervening powers would not make use of forensic techniques for gathering evidence about a soldier who had discharged their weapon and where civilians had been injured or killed. That this did not happen betrayed the cultural predispositions of those powers engaged in civilising unruly parts of the world through military intervention.Footnote ⁶⁵

The practical implications of these different definitions of lethality thus manifest themselves in paradoxical ways when the context changes from domestic policing to military intervention followed by maintaining law and order overseas. What is revealed is the unscientific and contextually specific nature of the military's approach to lethality. During wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as repeated cases of military abuse surfaced, service personnel and military contractors struggled to determine whether their activities ought to be framed in terms of domestic law or whether some other legal framework applied.Footnote ⁶⁶ If domestic law pertained and lethality was defined in non-military terms then the potential was that whole realms of military activity would become illegal.

When military power is applied in contexts other than conventional warfare, it becomes easier to see how technology and doctrine sloganise kinetic effects in ways that sustain the utility of force and subordinate science to war. Domestic definitions of lethality betray the contested nature of the kinetic energy criterion and imply that the amount of kinetic energy needed to produce death is framed by military rather than scientific considerations. An examination of military doctrine demonstrates how kinetic effect is further reified so as to preserve the legitimacy of military power beyond irregular and into broader, more conventional operations. These reifications are in turn sustained through martial, legal, and technological practices so as to frame an argument that buttresses claims about the instrumental utility of military power. This resonates with what Nisha Shah describes as an ontology of lethality that ‘delimits the arsenal of acceptable weaponry’ and opens up the discussion as to why the armed forces privilege interpretations of lethality that support their technological choices.Footnote ⁶⁷ This then points us towards exploring the politics and preferences of those engaged in framing the technologies and techniques of martial practice.

Legitimation, military power, and the military's lethality taboo

Given the examination so far, it is clear that the science of killing has produced a number of ways of making sense of the term lethality. These interpretations have been marshalled and then reified in doctrine and technology. The argument made here now turns to the way that questioning this ordering of lethality has been rendered taboo by the armed forces themselves as they seek to restrict discussion that undermines the efficacy of the military use of force; a discussion that if properly examined would by implication have the potential to delegitimise military activity. Far from being arbitrary, then, avoiding discussion of lethality reflects the politics and preferences of those engaged in ‘contemporary sovereignty-as-decision-making’.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is not just the instrumentalisation of knowledge for the purposes of securing life/death. Rather the science and its supporting mechanisms legitimate the interests of the various associated social groups engaged in these activities, working in such a way as to ensure certain martial practices can continue without cross-examination.

The question of lethality – as it has been cashed out in terms of kinetic energy – thus constitutes a foundational knowledge regime upon which the structures of military power have become staked. Investigations into the nature of lethality help to expose the military's social order and its relationships to science, technology, and the wider industrial and social processes that constitute various types of militarism.Footnote ⁶⁹ The kinetic energy criterion is how the military define what comprises an effective munition for causing death. As we have seen, however, civilian definitions of lethality also have a bearing on how death is produced. It is evident, then, that as a mode of delivering military effects, lethality has a unique power that serves as a socio-technical metaphor, determining whose life is valued and how death is distributed on the battlefield. In this respect, the fact that military definitions of lethality apply in irregular civil-military contexts like counterinsurgency shows how socio-technical choices privilege the value of an intervening force over those of the civilians that are to be won over.Footnote ⁷⁰

The act of opening up the technological black box and investigating the question of lethality offers a further explanation for why the armed forces have chosen not to question the kinetic energy criterion too closely. To do so reveals that military life is valued over and above that of an adversary or a civilian. Left unstated, this in turn creates space for a lethality taboo such that the taboo and its transgression are placed in ‘a paradoxical relationship in which each causes the other’.Footnote ⁷¹ To question the 58 ft-lbs criterion is therefore self-defeating, undermining the efficacy of armed force in ways that delegitimise military activity but also the activity of scientists, ordnance manufacturers and all of those involved in the wider social structures of militarism. The science of killing accordingly enables military power to be expressed through technology but the military itself cannot afford for the various conceptions of lethality to be closely questioned for fear that it would undermine the utility of force.

This examination into the epistemology of lethality thus reveals that uncertainty isn't simply constrained to what Clausewitz might describe as luck or chance but also stretches right up to the limits of what is both scientifically knowable and militarily acceptable to investigate. Further, it demonstrates that the social mechanisms put in place to make sense of what is otherwise unknowable are designed in such a way as to perpetuate a mode of thinking about war that enshrines a particular ontological outlook. That ontological outlook reinforces the utility calculations that underpin our conceptual understanding of strategy and war. What this outlook does not do is take into consideration the problem of defining the ontology of war given the unstable definition of lethality.

In this respect, at the centre of this epistemology of lethality there is an expanding symmetry of explanation such that the social processes that enframe and explain micro-level causal chains mimic the macro-level goal of the strategist trying to control campaign narratives. As a feminist and gender-based analysis demonstrates, this can be seen in the way that combat is constructed as a normative category that enables military masculinities to make sense of and discipline battle.Footnote ⁷² According to this line of argument the empirical foundations upon which notions of combat are framed privilege forms of gender and power relations so as to essentialise the space as predominantly male. Similarly, modes of constructing lethality reify the utility of force in ways that try to make the battlefield predictable in an effort to stabilise martial control of combat.

The object of this science is, then, to measure and make sense of what is otherwise opaque and riven with anecdote and at the same time to help impose order on the uncertain. Finding ways to (mis)represent war has always been an object of those who are engaged in prosecuting it. By applying a frame of reference drawn from Science and Technology Studies, however, the strategic goal of controlling narratives nonetheless takes on new resonance. As Barkawi and Brighton observe, power shapes war and truth in terms that characterise and legitimate political violence for those societies engaged in war. This applies equally to those actors engaged in framing the way violence is optimised through definitions of lethality. In both cases uncertainty can be tracked back to an inability to trace a causal chain of events from the strategic to the tactical level. This isn't just a limitation of the scientific method but more deeply speaks to whether an ontology of war can be rendered transparent.Footnote ⁷³

Investigations into the epistemology of lethality thus reveal something that is missing from literature on critical war studies. Brighton argues that war ‘forces the unmaking and remaking of social and political meaning in ways that defy prediction’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The attempt by armed forces to impose order through science – irrespective of the precision of the analysis – is nevertheless an attempt to make war predictable. The accuracy of these predictions may well prove to be uncertain. It remains the case, however, that the armed forces themselves have sought to tame the unknowable battlefield through technology even as fighting has sought to unmake the truths produced from war. In this respect, the epistemology of lethality reveals the countervailing and multiple truths that coexist and must be controlled if military instrumentality is to be sustained.