Through the Crosshairs

Roger Stahl

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813585260
• eBook ISBN: 9780813585277
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

Now that it has become so commonplace, we rarely blink an eye at camera footage framed by the crosshairs of a sniper’s gun or from the perspective of a descending smart bomb. But how did this weaponized gaze become the norm for depicting war, and how has it influenced public perceptions?
 
Through the Crosshairs traces the genealogy of this weapon’s-eye view across a wide range of genres, including news reports, military public relations images, action movies, video games, and social media posts. As he tracks how gun-camera footage has spilled from the battlefield onto the screens of everyday civilian life, Roger Stahl exposes how this raw video is carefully curated and edited to promote identification with military weaponry, rather than with the targeted victims. He reveals how the weaponized gaze is not only a powerful propagandistic frame, but also a prime site of struggle over the representation of state violence.  

1

A Strike of the Eye

It was a war between the watchers and the watched.

—Kevin Robins

A peculiar image attended the birth of television broadcasting. In 1928, Ernst Alexanderson, chief consulting engineer at General Electric’s research and transmission facilities in Schenectady, began experimental transmissions from the tower of W2XAD. Among the handful of moving pictures first sent through the airwaves was a remarkable sci-fi vignette of a missile as it headed for downtown New York City. The image appeared from the perspective of a camera housed in the missile’s nosecone. In a separate room, journalists hovered over octagonal screens described as “about the size of a postage stamp” (three by three inches) scanning at sixteen lines and twenty-four frames per second.1 Through this diminutive window, the city rose up to meet their eyes, stretching in all directions, until a dark screen announced the missile’s detonation.

General Electric’s choice of material betrayed a tendency for the camera to align with the weapon. A few years earlier at RCA’s laboratories, Vladimir Zworykin had imagined affixing his iconoscope, the first practical television camera, to surveillance rockets much as the military had done with still cameras.2 The W2XAD broadcast effectively dramatized his vision for those attending the historical event. This included a visitor from the British Royal Air Force who remarked that such a weapon would be an interesting possibility for future wars.3 In the decades to come, science fiction indeed became science fact. Not only did optically guided munitions invade the battlefield; these ways of seeing bled onto the public screen. At first, mass audiences received only scattered glimpses, issued through newsreels and television broadcasts, shot from the perspective of the bombardier and gunner. By the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s, an entire nation huddled around the television, like those who had come to witness the first television broadcast, to watch missiles close in on targets through nosecone cameras. Thereafter, the pictures came faster and faster, arriving in rapid-fire bursts from guidance cameras, targeting systems, reconnaissance satellites, and drones. As the twenty-first century caught its stride, a new visual economy fully penetrated the Western mediasphere. Today, these grainy, gray-toned, half-minute weapon-cam clips—some dead silent, others perforated by the staccato of radio voices—seem to be everywhere. They scan the ground, strafe white-hot clusters of infrared bodies, and spurt great inky clouds of destruction. They star in military press conferences, loop in network news b-roll, spread virally across social media feeds, make cameos in action and sci-fi movies, and superimpose themselves on interactive panels in video games.

In 2016, the satirical news site the Onion correctly diagnosed this state of affairs with a story entitled “Obama Gently Guides Michelle’s Hand as She Maneuvers Drone Joystick.” The scenario mixed the romantic and the macabre for its comedic effect. In the photoshopped image, the first couple sits in front of a bank of control monitors, which illuminates them like a warm fireplace. They gaze longingly through the drone’s targeting camera rather than at each other. Barack whispers sweetly into Michelle’s ear. With the squeeze of a trigger, they dispatch a Hellfire missile via radio uplink on some luckless locale. Indeed, the marriage between the camera and our weapons of war has been thoroughly consummated in the intervening years since Alexanderson’s broadcast, even to the point that it can stand up to parody. The Onion’s send-up is less about life in the exotic corridors of power, however, and more about everyday life in front of the screen. Michelle Obama’s strange initiation might as well be our own. It is we who have absorbed the weapon-camera’s point of view, and it is we who lean forward toward the crosshairs that indelibly mark our contemporary screens.

This seduction of the eye happened gradually as the electronic flotsam of the war machine accumulated. What seemed only the by-product of our most advanced targeting systems began to flicker across the collective visual field via official military public relations, leaks, and fictional entertainment. At a certain point, perhaps through sheer force of numbers, the view through the weapon itself earned a primary place in the presentation of war in the postindustrial West. These images, after all, wielded the ultimate strategic advantage in this skeptical age: the ability to bill themselves as unfiltered, unadulterated, unprocessed, and unblinking—leftover artifacts of a technical process rather than calculated pieces of propaganda. Instead of staking a position in an adversarial argument, they presented themselves as the eye’s most powerful ally, its ultimate prosthesis. Our defenses down, they invaded public consciousness to plant their flags with imperial bravado. There it is, each iteration seemed to say, the unfathomable essence of war in its rawest and most immediate form. And here we are, as fate would have it, not just on what the consensus has declared the “right side of history” but on the right side of the screen.

Although such images seem self-apparent, bureaucratic, and almost innocent, even the simplest questions invite more: Who issues them, through what channels, and to what advantage? How are they selected, and how selective are they? What are the processes by which they are captioned, interpreted, and narrativized? How do these practices of watching coalesce into civic rituals? And what kind of citizen-subject do these gazing rituals ultimately imply? In traversing this field of questions, this book contends first that the view through high-tech weapons has come to dominate the Western presentation of war. To a significant degree, the civic eye has migrated from the third-party witness to the first-person constituent of the weapon’s gaze. Not only does the citizen increasingly apprehend war through this aperture, this gaze has become a powerful means through which the military-industrial-media complex apprehends civic consciousness—suspending it, as it were, in a projected beam of light. This realignment, what I will refer to throughout as the “weaponized gaze,” is anchored in the imagery of the targeting camera. The process can be defined more broadly, however, as the range of discursive practices that channel the civic understanding of violent conflict through the military apparatus. This alignment serves a disciplinary function by displacing the civic impulse to deliberate matters of state violence with a presentation of the world through the uncritical, docile circuitry of the weapon, whose purpose is to be fired. Such invitations have proliferated in recent years, working to harmonize the citizen with the dictates of military public relations.

The progressive retooling of the civic eye has a history that extends back through the twentieth century and beyond. By way of introduction, we begin by sketching the battlefield marriage of eye and projectile, including the thematic threads that have bound the two historically. The next section tracks the moments in the twentieth century when this marriage began to go public, a series of signature images that paved the way for the mass exposure of the weaponized gaze. The chapter rounds out this discussion by offering a theoretical take on the role of these images in producing the citizen-subject. On the whole, this opening salvo is intended to soften up the target, to clear the conceptual way for the case studies in the following chapters, which begin with the smart bomb videos of the early 1990s and continue through the likes of the satellite, drone, sniper, and helmetcam. Doing so will help us understand not only how we have come to see the world through these eyes but also possibilities for seeing otherwise.

If Looks Could Kill

Weapons have always functioned as communicative channels. The expression that a missile “sent a message” may seem like a recent by-product of information warfare, but the notion has been embedded in our language for a very long time. This dual sense is captured in the English word missive as well as in the Latin root of all three, mittere. Arguably, the ability to send a message has been the weapon’s essential function from the invention of the spear forward. When hot, weapons perform a “show of force” beyond their capacity for instrumental violence. When cold, they radiate signals designed to deter, intimidate, and terrorize.

Beyond their symbolic function, weapons channel perception. Violence has always kept close quarters with vision in particular, a historical affinity that can also be detected in language and mythology. Until the sixteenth century, for example, the word explode (from the Latin explaudere) meant to clap someone off stage. The Renaissance introduction of black powder repurposed the term’s logic of annihilation-through-visual-exposure. Suddenly the battlefield became the stage off of which one might be violently clapped. This equation appears in the fables of Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus, which include his instructions to his musketeers in the early 1600s not to fire until they “see their own image in the pupil of their enemy’s eye.”4 Here the eye not only appears as target but also functions as a mirror (pupil as the “little person” reflected) that marks oneself as target. The mythology of the American Revolutionary War carried forth a version of this image when the generals of the rebel army at Bunker Hill supposedly ordered the insurgents to “not fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” Later, Napoleon proved his fondness for the term coup d’oeil (“strike of the eye”), which military theorist Carl von Clausewitz picked up as a way to express the genius some generals display in glancing at a situation and, in ein Augenblick, issuing a strategic decision.5 The English description of a target as a “bull’s-eye” appeared in the language around the same time, suggesting that the shift to the supremacy of artillery, evident in Napoleon’s conquests, demanded a more prominent role for terms that cast war as a contest of vision. In the following century, it became common to speak of theaters of war, a term first uttered by Winston Churchill in 1914 that helped to metaphorically transition the battlefield from stage to screen.6 Now American soldiers commonly speak of “lighting up” a target, a colloquialism that again conflates exposure with annihilation, the act of illumination-by-spotlight with the act of destruction-by-projectile.

If vision and violence marched in tight formation, the same held true for their technological progeny, the camera and gun. Indeed, the two inventions indeed seem to have been composed of the same substance and separated at birth. George Eastman of Eastman Kodak adopted the methods of interchangeable parts gleaned from the gun industry. In 1885, the company developed flexible film by coating paper in the same guncotton (nitrated cellulose) widely used at the time as an explosive. A guncotton-based celluloid came about four years later, permitting a one-hundred-exposure film roll. Around the same time, in 1866, a French inventor working in the arms industry made the first smokeless gunpowder out of gelatinized guncotton, lowering the brisance of the explosive material so it could be used as a propellant. This paved the way for the development of cellulose-based cordite used in pin-fired rounds. As Paul S. Landau puts it, “Breech-loading guns and the Kodak Camera not only drew on the same language; they both sealed the same sort of chemicals in their cartridges.”7

Later, the machine gun inspired the invention of the motion picture camera. The Gatling gun (revolving barrels) and the Colt (revolving magazine) gave Frenchman Jules Janssen the idea in 1874 to create a camera that could take a rapid series of pictures through time. Etienne-Jules Marey refined the technique for his flipbook-producing “chrono-photographic rifle,” which—due to its wooden stock, sight, and oversized “barrel”—could have been mistaken for a gun.8 Carl Akeley modeled his Akeley Pancake Camera, which was standard equipment in early twentieth-century motion pictures, quite explicitly on the machine gun and turret. His initial goal was to invent a weatherproof and portable instrument to accompany the hunting rifle on African safari trips, which George Eastman himself sometimes attended. Akeley eventually took his camera hunting but not before the Army Signal Corps took it to World War I. Well aware of the resemblances between his camera and the weapon, he liked to recount the story of a group of German soldiers who mistakenly surrendered to one of his cameras in France.9

One could continue listing such correspondences into infinity, but we ought to step back to ask what they tell us. Thankfully, much of the necessary conceptualizing has been done by media and social theorist Paul Virilio, whose work is absolutely key to orienting the current investigation. It is worth dwelling for a moment on his masterpiece, War and Cinema, which tracks this coevolution: both the inspiration of the weapon on camera development and the camera’s deployment on the battlefield as a sighting and surveillance device. Virilio observes most elegantly: “Alongside the ‘war machine,’ there has always existed an ocular (and later optical) ‘watching machine’ capable of providing soldiers, and particularly commanders, with a visual perspective on the military action under way. From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon.”10 Out of this fusion has arisen the dictum, reflected in the words of Undersecretary of Defense W. J. Perry in the 1970s, that to see a target is to destroy it.11 In his characteristically aphoristic style, Virilio reformulates this in the idea that light has always been the “soul of the gun barrel.”12 He points to the metaphors of light in the blitzkrieg, the monstrous flashbulb effects in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and, in general, the feverish application of optical machinery to the battlefield since the beginning.

In Virilio’s view, therefore, the history of war has been a “history of rapidly changing fields of perception,” a contest of optical power where parties vie for absolute authority through light speed and the perfection of battlespace awareness.13 He is characteristically ahead of the curve in describing how technological advances in tracking systems have made literal the figural correspondences between the eye and the weapon. At the end of War and Cinema, published in 1984, he notes that in the new era of electronic warfare, the projectiles had awakened and “opened their many eyes”: “The fusion is complete, the confusion perfect: nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye; the projectile’s image and the image’s projectile form a single composite . . . The old ballistic projection has been succeeded by the projection of light, of the electronic eye of the guided ‘video’ missile.”14 This passage foresees the centrality of optics in the “smart bomb” and the later era of the drone, where neologisms like “non-kinetic warfare” acknowledge target illumination to be as significant as the dark “kinetic” task of “putting warheads on foreheads.”15

We endeavor here to extend some of Virilio’s more compelling observations into the future that is now, but we must also mark a departure from his approach. He expends much of his attention on the camera’s battlefield application, which takes the form of strategies, tactics, and logistics regarding surveillance, simulation, and dissimulation. His detours into the public arena are by comparison sparse and sporadic. When he does discuss military propaganda, he describes the cinematic camera as a weapon aimed at the civilian nervous system to build mythologies, aggregate attention, and manipulate morale. In Virilio’s estimation, however, the two realms—battlefield vision and the process of catalyzing public opinion—never quite meet. It is as if they are two soldiers, back-to-back, firing their weapons at two different fronts. As such, his otherwise wide-ranging analysis never extends to the notion that the “soul of the gun barrel” might align its point of view with the soul of the public.

This is forgivable in the case of War and Cinema. The Persian Gulf War was still almost a decade off. Weapon’s-eye footage had yet to take center stage through its use in military public relations, and the cultural discourse that would train the public eye to see war through the targeting lenses of the war machine was still in its nascent stages. In Virilio’s writing about the Persian Gulf War...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1. A Strike of the Eye
• Chapter 2. Smart Bomb Vision
• Chapter 3. Satellite Vision
• Chapter 4. Drone Vision
• Chapter 5. Sniper Vision
• Chapter 6. Resistant Vision
• Chapter 7. Afterword: Bodies Inhabited and Disavowed
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author