Der Derian is quick to both discover and uncover the relationship between the military with the media, particularly in his analysis of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). Describing its role as the “bureaucratically designed code for the identification, preparation, and, if necessary, eradication of the enemy [it] effectively maps, in both the digital and cartographic senses of the word, the operational requirements and global contours of virtuous war” (108-109). As the pinnacle of a series of reviews and reorganizations of the armed forces throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, the QDR almost completely restructured the basis for funding what would be the most expensive defense budget in the world in 2000. (Nevermind what it has blossomed into since then.) Der Derian is justifiably puzzled by the need for this defense budget: “just where is this enemy who justifies such expenditure?” (110). What he sees as a disproportionately high cost of protecting our security leads to a connection between defense budget spending with the role and ubiquity of simulations, dissimulations in the post-Gulf War I world.

Pulling from Jean Baudrillard’s own connection to Francis Bacon, Der Derian sees the nature of simulations as forcing those at the military’s helm to leave “behind the reality principle that would allow them to distinguish the feigned from the real” (117). The very nature of simulation for Der Derian (and Baudrillard, and perhaps Bacon, as well) is such that despite their falsities, their “always already” connection with un-reality, they produce “real symptoms, hyperreal effects” that further fuel and manipulate “a fear of the future or a nostalgia for a mythical past [dominating] all other forms of representation” (116, 117). Thus, as these war games, war simulations, become increasingly digitized, taking us further away from the reality of blood, guts and dead bodies, the nature of simulations and dissimulations begin to mutate into a precarious area where “distinctions between the simulated and the real begin to break down” (116).

Der Derian’s treatment of the inevitable marriage between the military and technology and the media reveals, as well, a new kind of “race” in the late 20th and early 21st century. However, instead of nuclear arms, now we find ourselves racing (and, perhaps, as Paul Virilio would say: speeding) to secure our position in the world as top dog. The armed forces’ Joint Vision 2010 “full spectrum dominance” emphasized that “everything from the highest intensity conflict down to shows of force and peacekeeping, you should have dominance at every level, to excel at whatever level” (193). If in the past we could rely on the dead body to signal our victory and their defeat, this was quickly changing. Der Derian writes, invoking a kind of nostalgia that:

The dead body—on the battlefield, in the tomb of the unknown soldier, in the collective memory, even on the movie screen—is what gives war its special status, what trumps any lesser issues, such as those expressed in my question. This fact, the material facticity of the dead soldier, can be censored, hidden in a body bag, air-brushed away, but it provides, even it erasure, the corporal gravitas of war. (165-166)

And, under the umbrella of information warfare—infowar—Der Derian emphasizes that cyberwar leaves behind not only the old methods for waging war, but moves increasingly away from the geopolitical and more and more toward the electromagnetic. In this age, the body begins to disappear and the war is now fought as more of a “contest of signs than of soldiers” (118).

But what happens to our soldiers—and our enemies—when our sight of them is replaced by the images of them? What happens when speed, vision, and substitution dominate (120)? Will the “battlefield in which networks, systems, robots, and smart weapons target each other, and all damage measured in flesh and blood becomes ‘collateral’” become less of a game or simulation and more of the wartime norm (148)? Der Derian seems apprehensive about the increasing reliance and interconnectivity between the war machine and the media.

Jacob Schuman in last week’s literature review pointed out that Der Derian is standing upon the shoulders of both classical international relations giants and French, Argentine and German figureheads. And in the last part of Virtuous War, Der Derian summons the work of French continental theorists Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and, of course, Virilio.

If we are to keep in the back of our minds (much as Der Derian does throughout his journey) that “all but war is simulation,” we are left to beg the question of what happens when war itself becomes a simulation (149). For Der Derian, “reality is the first casualty of simulated warfare” and he seems to find it necessary to repeal classical international relations thought in order to begin integrating the increasing presence of the virtual in questions of global security and the doctrine that “information plus technology equals security” (144, 115). Global security has yet to incorporate the “new mimetic codes of technoscientific authorities and media elites” as part of its greater discourse and Der Derian proposes to put the pedal to the metal by using “archival research, empirical techniques and critical theories … [preferring] to mix and match, plug and play, in the hope of finding the combination that provided the deepest insights and illuminated the gravest dangers” (209, 210).

Thus, perhaps Der Derian’s “always already” “post-post-modern man” is the one most adept at identifying and being critically aware of the military’s relationship with the media in this Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (MIME-NET) as the rest of us find ourselves:

entering a digitally enhanced virtual immersion, in which instant scandals, catastrophic accidents, impending weather disasters, ‘wag-the-dog’ foreign policy, constructive simulations, live-feed wars, and quick-in, quick-out interventions into stillborn or moribund states are all available, not just primetime, real time, but 24/7, on the TV, PC, and PDA. (209)

For Der Derian, his journey concludes with a realization that in order to continue exposing and understanding the cracks and challenges posed by MIME-NET, he has to develop a “virtual theory of war and peace” (209). His virtual theory constructs not so much a world ex nihilio but one ex machina—a world “where there was none before” (211). Thus, to represent a world more and more interlaced with virtuality, he introduces the concept of interzone: “neither realist nor idealist, utopian nor nihilist, but an interstice in which future possibilities are forged from the encounter between critical imagination and technological determinism” (211). He confronts the fact that war and peace have traditionally been approached by what is being represented and proposes to take a step backward, to reexamine the big picture and question the processes we have used to explore how “reality is seen, framed, read, and generated in the conceptualization and actualization of the event” (217). The image is heightened by its speed, its omnipresence and from a global, worldly, international perspective, it seems that the consequences are grim:

Individual completeness is now dependent on simulators of proximity (TV, the Web, mobile phones) as highly effective as flight-, weapons- or driving-simulators, drawing, in this case, on an imposture of immediacy that is more dystopian than ever. (2)

Virilio writes in this essay, “Ground Zero,” that we now rely on technologies bringing us as close to reality as possible, without ever reaching reality itself: the imposture of immediacy as a reality twice-removed. Thus, technology offers a deceptive promise of universal truth and knowledge. The immediacy and proliferation of the image is nothing more than a dystopia; as visualization and virtualization become increasingly intertwined with one another, the enemy becomes nothing more than an interface, something we unconsciously detach ourselves from as soon as the machine is turned off.

Der Derian echoes this sentiment with a conclusion at once poignant and foreboding. As the media can and does “substitute” realities, the “viewer-subject” assumes the role of the photographer and eventually the camera itself; “critical consciousness, along with the body, goes missing” (215). His self-reflective loss toward the end of Virtuous War gives one cause to stop and think: if Der Derian is only able to realize “how detached, how clinical” he has become in his approach after this virtual journey which has taken him from the Mojave Desert to Washington to France to countless conferences, lectures, press conferences and at last to Jerusalem, what will it take for the rest of us (and an increasingly detached audience, passive observers, the watchers and not the doers) to see the person as a living human being, no longer rendering him as a pixilated image, comprised of too many truths and realities for us to begin to identify and appreciate.

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(1) Paul Virilio. Desert Screen (London: Continuum, 2002) 87.

(2) Paul Virilio. Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002) 41.