“All are struggling with the uncertainties of the post-cold war era.” (xxii)

“Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety – indeed, the range – of dreams.”
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin could not have predicted the state of war today, but his words ring true for our current state of affairs. The two opening chapters of James Der Derian’s book, Virtuous War, describes just this present state of war and how its has come to the point of not just being virtual, but virtuous. Der Derian’s travelogue through his investigation of Fort Irwin to the Salisbury Plan and Andrew Marshall brings in theorists Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin to understand the virtuosity of war. These theories applied to concrete examples in reality expose the dream we live in today, where “realism has become virtual” (37). Virtuous war is a technological running of war from a distance that displaces both viewers and fighters. It is Der Derian’s project to investigate this dangerous, current state of war and its implications in our interwar period through critically questioning this new space of technologies and war.

The fifth dimension is now upon us in the form of virtuality. This higher level is defined from the post-Ford, postmodern, post-cold war state of affairs. Here we are in flux. All ethical change is influenced by technology. Der Derian’s definition of virtuous war: “diplomatic and military policies are increasingly based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compulsion” (xv). Taken away from previously understood ways of war, virtuous war works to threaten violence at a distance. This network of fear and terror is brought to us, the viewer, through virtual technologies and we are left detached from war. For the fighters of such pixilated wars, they learn to kill, but not take responsibility for their actions. They too have become displaced and detached actors. The military now aided by computer games and other virtual technologies has created warriors in “cyberspace,” to use William Gibson’s 1987 term. Here is the “edge of globalization” (xviii) where the virtual has collapses all distance and left a dangerous space for war to inhabit.

“New technologies of imitation and simulation as well as surveillance and speed had collapsed the geographical distance, chronological duration, the gap itself between the reality and virtuality of war. As the confusion of one for the other grows, we face the danger of a new kind of trauma without sight, drama without tragedy, where television wars and video games blur together.” (11)

Der Derian’s first stop is Fort Irwin where the virtual war trainings first began in 1981 with Operation Desert Hammer VI. This simulation of war was created with the belief that such practice would enhance combat, especially the efficiency and speed of war. The question to be asked then is if war can be scripted from a distance, tested out like a mathematical equation? Carl von Clausewitz, a 18th century Prussian strategist, warned of the dangers of scripted war and the sheer arrogance of any leader to believe in such predictions of war. Today, we have a cyberdeterrent that proves these old theories wrong. The cyberdeterrent is the digitized superior who enacts war from a distance. It is the replacement to the cold-war nuclear balance of terror. The danger of the cyberdeterrent lies in the danger of all media – it is not readily apparent or visible. Digitization is a force multiplier of war, making it faster, more efficient, and smarter; however never without consequences.

“Deterrence precludes war – the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy – it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra

Der Derian’s near death experience out in the field proves this theater of war and the consequences of deterrence. As a viewer of the simulated, practice battle, there is much confusion to the untrained eye. For instance, Der Derian stayed too long to catch a photograph of an oncoming tank. In his epiphanic moment of traumatic voyeurism, Der Derian experienced what few will ever. The collision of reality and simulation, a reality of death twice displaced. This 5th dimension battlefield that is there, but not there. The effect on both warrior-gamer-soldier and viewer is the splitting of the self, a fragmentation between simulation and experience that blurs reality. This dangerous situation trains soldiers to kill, but not feel for their killings. It trains viewers to watch, but not connect with the representations shown. War becomes a copy of a copy of a game played in Fort Irwin.

“What is qualitatively new is the power of the MIMENET to seamlessly merge the production, representation, and execution of war. The result is not merely the copy of a copy, or the creation of something new: It represents a convergence of the means by which we distinguish the original and the new, the real from the reproduced.” (xx)

The new virtual alliance, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, in this hyperreality created Third Wave Warfare. This warfare is defined like a video game or cyberpunk novel. For example, Bruce Sterling, a writer for Wired magazine, was assigned to write the press packet for the Office of the Secretary of the Army. Invoking these rhetorics of science fiction and gaming the twenty-first century army reads well. However, their vision speaks to the hyper-postmodern condition of relative safety and dynamic instabilities. The cyberdeterrent is the twenty-first century army because it is a simulation, a spectacle, and a sheer technology. As a hybrid being, like a Borg on Star Trek, it is in the order of metaphysical signs.

“The pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war and peace, is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra

Next, Der Derian brings us to venture a look into the Salisbury Plan. From August 1927-1931 in Britain, the Salisbury Plan acted out “battles” like a laboratory testing a new form of warfare. The event was a huge success in performative spectacle. The first report, “Tidworth Tattoo – Modern War Staged,” explained the positive response from the audience on trains viewing the fight. It also brought to light how the modern machines of man worked in the realm of exhibition. Around the same time the concept of television was beginning to form. The idea of “seeing by wireless” was tempting and intriguing. The first broadcast was a missile attack onto New York City. These two examples of the desire to watch from a distance were not unknown to the American army.

Coming back to the interwar period, Der Derian sought out Andrew Marshall, officially the director of the Office of Net Assessment. This man’s work brought about a revolution in military affairs as he set up the first systems to measure how the military was performing during the Nixon era. What Der Derian’s interview brought out was that the interwar can be considered a revolution in technology, like the 1920s. In the period of the 1920s, as mentioned above, a “military technical revolution” occurred. The outcome was not clear, the factors had changed, and the forces multiplied. It was also a period of illusion, self-consciously thinking about what the world was going to look like after such technologies. In our similar period, it too must be our effort to self-consciously think about the revolutionary implications of technology on warfare.

With this turn of events, Der Derian turns to theory to look at such implications. Beginning with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche on understanding virtual powers through his theories of security and sovereignty. With life’s uncertainties, power rules through a virtual security in debt to the death of our ancestors. Fear becomes death and the repressed. The “good life” is security from those fears given to use by the sovereign power that prevents all struggle. Thus, a sovereign state is unnatural. Realism is built into this system as a means of check, a claim to world order. However, realism is virtual – it is “a perverse mimesis of the living other” (37). Nietzsche writes: “Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.” War is the ultimate ratio between realism and sovereignty because it is an expression of those two illusory powers. Herein Nietzsche we find the core of the sovereign problem.

Moving onto Walter Benjamin opens up the power of mimesis or representation in interwar period. Mimesis, for Benjamin, is “imitation and repetition as a fundamental force in human development” (41). As in development of language and children, mimesis involves an important function of play. This play is the play of signs, called semiotics. The mimetic has a paradoxical danger for political problems because of this play and shirting “phase transition” between order and disorder. To quote Benjamin: “I am speaking here of an identity that manifests itself solely in the paradoxical reversal of the one into the other (in whichever direction).” There is a problem of identity with mimesis because, as seen in questions of violence, reality is dreamlike. Modes of knowing and ways of being are thrown into the air.

“I came to realize that the interwar was as much an invocation of a dream, conveyed in the guise of the virtual and inevitable reality, as it was a demarcation of past history.” (46)

Benjamin asks his readers to find a critical consciousness to battle this mimetic allure, and Der Derian takes up this mission for the interwar period. As subjects of mimesis we have unstable and fragmented identities. The methods of sovereignty and realism are to soothe us through deterrence of realism. Follow Der Derian’s travels through the rest of the book for a deeper look into such critical questioning of this virtual dream reality.