The Machinery Of War

No one has ever yet been able to find the basis of political power or the reason why people always irresistibly and irremediably obey it ... Political power has many dimensions, e.g., social, economic, psychological, ethical, psycho-analytical, and legal. But when we have scrutinized them all, we have still not apprehended its reality ... The disproportion noted above leads me to the unavoidable conclusion that another power intervenes and indwells and uses political power, thus giving it a range and force that it does not have in itself ... One might ask whether technology is not also one of these powers. The answer seems simple enough.

-- Jacques Ellul, The Ethics of Freedom

The most prominent public feature of this deathly Gulf war has been the celebrated vindication of the American technological myth. This technological superiority is evinced in the heaviest (and ostensibly most accurate) bombing in the history of the world. People of faith and conscience have felt the spectacle of this "triumph" as a heavy weight on their souls, indeed as a heart-sickness.

The American people and the nations of the world sit transfixed before images of technical prowess. The machinery of warfare has been named and paraded, analyzed and glorified to death. On television, people watch laser-guided missiles float in the front doors of buildings, as if this were the finals of some video game championship. The papers are full of diagrams and technical descriptions. Popular knowledge of the planes, the weapons systems, and the esoteric acronyms becomes a mark of the well-informed.

What goes unnoticed is the extent to which technology itself has been a driving force in the creation of this war. The technological system has a mind and a logic, an independence and momentum all its own. It is indeed one of the pre-eminent principalities of the present age.

By way of analysis, this is not to minimize the pursuit of resources to oil the imperial machine, the geopolitical realignments, certain economic considerations, the politics of the home front, or any other factor -- but merely to say the weapons have been ravenous for new targets. They have in and of themselves been hungry to be used. I do not personify them unduly. It is plain biblical literacy to comprehend these technological systems as having an inner driving spirit to them. As much as anything, that predatory technological hunger has been pressing toward war.

Technology is a realm of the "sacred" in secularized American culture. High technology saves, mystifies, and accomplishes miracles. It is esteemed as the source and basis of our way of life. Moreover, it has its own priesthood ranked in hierarchies of expertise (and security clearance). Certain things are held beyond the comprehension of an ordinary human being, the "layperson." We have witnessed an astonishing array of military technicians conversing knowledgeably with the nightly news anchor people. The former are matter-of-fact, that latter filled with reverence and awe.

This idolization inflates the power of technology, rendering it at once "necessary" and demonic. Biblically, of course, this is the experience with all the principalities and powers. They are, every one of them, understood as fallen.

Claiming to serve life, they are in fact minions of death. It is, for example, the powers who coalesce and conspire to crucify the Lord (1 Corinthians 2:6-8). In history they are unleashed and out of control.

Plainly put, we are in the possession of our technology, not (as we suppose) the other way around. Jacques Ellul, the French theologian and social historian, is the most lucid commentator on technology as a power. I here suggest an urgent rereading of Ellul in light of this war. Four decades ago he observed the separation of means from ends which was rendering life in Western society absurd.

All that science can do will be used to save one life, and then millions of men will be massacred by bombs, or in concentration camps: both are products of the enormity of means. In this terrible dance no one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Humanity has set out at tremendous speed -- to go nowhere (The Presence of the Kingdom).

The Gulf war is illustrative on the face of it: The official ends and objectives have been repeatedly shifted, but ever since the first placement of offensive troops and equipment, the means have been constant and clear. They predominate utterly over the illusive ends (no matter how fervently and redundantly the president stresses that we all know why we're there).

Those who have struggled with the powers of nuclearism have come to understand some measure how technology determines policy, not vice versa. First-strike counterforce targeting has been less a military and strategic doctrine in search of a means than it has been an emerging capability: "modernization" and improvements in accuracy issuing de facto in a policy of first-strike.

The cruise missile, which was the first line of attack in the Gulf war, is something of a technological parable in this regard. Cruise missiles are small pilotless jet planes. They combine evasive, radar-ducking, treetop altitude with pinpoint accuracy. The Pentagon claims they could launch one from San Francisco and put it through the goal posts at Soldier's Field in Chicago.

Their history originates with Hitler's World War II buzz bombs -- part rocket, part airplane. Early Pentagon attempts to develop the weapon further were essentially abandoned with the successful deployment of ICBMs. However, in the early 1970s, several simultaneous technological breakthroughs -- miniaturization of jet engines (accomplished a few miles from my own hometown), miniaturization of nuclear warheads, electronic mapping and computer guidance elements, and the concentration of jet fuel -- combined in ensemble to represent the possibility of an accurate and effective cruise. Henry Kissinger took the possibility and threatened its development as a "bargaining chip" in arms control talks.

Once developed, all branches of the military fell in love with it. The cruise was promptly deployed in a variety of land, air, and sea-based systems. Moreover, its deployment in the early '80s coincided with the development of the nuclear war-fighting doctrine called "protracted nuclear war," where in a United nuclear exchange in a particular theater of war, Europe say, is envisioned to result not in a full-blown nuclear war, but in a long, slow, "protracted" series of nuclear shots escalating horizontally into other "theaters." This global test of wills was featured to last for a period of weeks or even months.

To reiterate more simply: An ensemble of technologies makes a weapon possible. It is developed as a bargaining chip, but once developed is withdrawn from the table and deployed. Its deployment issues in a new rung on the ladder of escalation dominance; a new element of policy is formalized. Furthermore, it is a policy not of deterrence but implying first-use and nuclear war-fighting scenarios.

Now comes the Gulf war. No surprise really. With the thaw in the Cold War and the demise of Soviet power, it took little imagination to predict that new targets (which is to say new enemies) needed to be located. And so we have (thus far) a "conventional" war in which the cruise has functioned as the first-strike weapon.

Listen again: The enthusiasm for success of the Patriot missile is quickly marshaled to fund the SDI/Star Wars technology. Another first-strike system finds a new mission and new targets (yes, Third World ones) in the "new" world order.

The fact is barely mentioned in public: This war (like Panama) has made first-strike ever more palatable and morally justifiable to the American people. It is simply "pre-emptive" of a greater evil on the horizon. Then again, first-strike weapons, like cruise and stealth, get hungry to try their bite.

I keep thinking of the bombing of Hiroshima. Toward the end of World War II, the Japanese were suing for peace through various channels. An end to the war might have been negotiated. But there was this atom bomb secretly in the technological pipeline. It needed to be used. The will to use it against human beings had to be demonstrated. So "unconditional surrender" was the only offer. It sufficed to continue the war long enough to "test" two bombs against human populations.

That is the only way I can understand the abiding refusal to negotiate an Iraqi settlement. The infamous deadline was no international diplomatic lever. It merely bought time required to set in place the machines, their mechanics, and a massive infrastructure. Finally, the weapons were in place, arched and ready to devour.

I have also been thinking, even as we are urged not to, of Vietnam. In that instance the incremental commitment to war was not led by technology. The "technologization" of the war went hand in hand with Nixon's later policy of "Vietnamization." Too many American body bags were piling up on the planes home. Just as US soldiers were being replaced by South Vietnamese troops, they were also being supplanted by the technology of the "electronic battlefield."

In Vietnam, automated air war technology sought to reduce political costs at home. In this Gulf war, it is clear that one lesson of Vietnam has been learned: no more body counts. Pentagon briefings only confirm in a general way, if emphatically, that we are "killing them."

One suspects (two-and-a-half weeks into the war) that the land assault predicted to take a toll in the lives of U.S. soldiers would be foregone entirely in favor of the unrelenting air war, apart from the fact that other varieties of technology -- other "tools in the box," such as M1 tanks and infrared night-vision equipment -- also need to strut their stuff.

The war in Vietnam entailed not only a systematic attack on truth, but on language itself. We are seeing that carried forward from the outset in the Gulf. At press conferences military technicians speak in a language which is esoteric, arcane, and euphemistic, a jargon of coded phrases and acronyms. We are hearing about this war in the hermetic language of technique.

Cluster bombs (developed for Vietnam and now in use) are not described as weapons of terror spraying metal fragments suddenly and indiscriminately into human flesh (military or civilian) at unpredictable times long after the bombing raid. (By any honest reading, these things are as illegal under international law as gas or germs -- or nuclear weapons, for that matter.) With Orwellian aplomb, they are simply termed "area denial devices." Let's leave it at that.

Vietnam was the war which television technology brought into our living rooms. That is so with the Gulf war, though in a vastly different and more sinister way. Think again of those images from the early days of this war. Many noticed their video game quality, but the observation stops there. This is the first war to be sold to a generation captivated by Nintendo, raised with their hand on the joy-stick and finger on the button. (We had heard how military recruiters hung out at video arcades ready to entice the quick of eye and hand with offers of "the real thing.")

So, who are the good guys? Simply, the ones on this side of the screen. And who are the bad guys? The ones in the target sight. Point the camera, settle the question, and push the button. The consummation of technology utterly replacing ideology is at hand.

Moral solidarity, whether you experience it as patriotism or heart sickness, euphoria or dread, has been fully exposed. The difference in moral culpability between the F-15 pilot seeing the target blow on his screen and us seeing it blow on ours is negligible. And who imagines the people inside?

What we are witnessing is the fusion of the television camera with the weapons themselves. One and the same device. And, in a weird inversion, who is the real target? And why do we feel so deadened and powerless? And why have the media never seemed so fully claimed as an organ of the empire? One and the same device.

Bill Wylie Kellermann, a Sojourners contributing editor, was a United Methodist pastor teaching theology in Detroit and the author of Seasons of Faith and Conscience (Orbis, May 1991), which concerns the biblical basis of liturgical direct action as a response to the powers of technology, when this article appeared.