Soldiers Future/Present: Popular Images Troops
Wars do make men. And not just real wars. Possible wars, imagined wars,
even unthinkable wars shape men—and women. Just as modern war required
modern soldiers, postmodern war needs soldiers with new military virtues
who can meet the incredible requirements of high-tech war. These new
soldiers are molded, in part, by personnel science and marketing analysis in
uneasy alliance with traditional military discipline and community. But in
another sense it is the weapons themselves that are constructing the U.S.
soldier of today and tomorrow.
Weapons have always played an important role in war, from the gear of
the Greek hoplite to the tankers of the world wars. Today, however, it is not
that the soldier is influenced by the weapons used; now he or she is
(re)constructed and (re)programmed to fit integrally into weapon systems.
The basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these modifications,
whether it is of the "wetware" (the mind and hormones), the "software"
(habits, skills, disciplines), or the "hardware" (the physical body). To overcome
the limitations of yesterday's soldier, as well as the limitations of
automation as such, the military is moving toward a more subtle man-machine
integration: a cybernetic organism (cyborg) model of the soldier that
combines machine-like endurance with a redefined human intellect subordinated
to the overall weapon system.
Current DoD policy is creating a postmodern army of war machines,
war managers, and robotized warriors. Logistics command sees the soldier
as a digitalized "manprint," as Major General Wallace C. Arnold explains
(1995). For him the key issue is the soldier-information interface.
The ideal postmodern enlisted soldier is either an actual machine (information
processing) or will be made to act like one through the
psychotechnologies of drugs, discipline, and management. The ideal
postmodern officer is a skilled professional who manages weapon systems
and sometimes applies them in combat. In all cases soldiers are to be
intimately connected with computers through hard wiring, lasers, and
more traditional soldier-machine interfaces.
That is why in North America the cozy often comical images from
modern war of U.S. (Kilroys, dogfaces, G.I. Joes) and Commonwealth
(wisecracking Tommys, soft-spoken Canucks, loud Anzacs, and silent Gurkhas)
soldiers from World War II (Combat, Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy)
have been shattered. In film portrayals of the first postmodern war, Vietnam,
multiethnic teams of clean-cut born-in-America guys (The Green Berets)
coexist with men trapped in an insoluble moral dilemma (Deerhunter,
Platoon) or even inside of Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War means Vietnam
protests (Coming Home, Fields of Stone), as even the charmed circle of
all-American guys (Tour of Duty) must recognize. The first TV show about
Vietnam, M*A*S*H, was set in Korea during that conflict, but it was always,
psychologically and ideologically, about Vietnam. It was one of the most
successful TV shows ever in the United States, and it still plays out its ironic
antiwar message every day in syndication. Its dark humor is copied by some
(Good Morning Vietnam), and its feminine healing focus by others (China
Beach)] but it remains unique, marking as it does in the mass media the
critique of modern war first elaborated by the poet veterans of World War I
and then by the novelist veterans of World War II.1
As the reasons for war have become less clear, the moral standing of the
participants has also become very confusing to some of us. "Bad guys" and
"good guys" (which translate as "us" and "them" or "friend" and "foe" in the
jargon of counter terrorist experts, police, and the military) are harder to keep
separate when one compares:
• Stateless terrorists and state terrorists
• "Right Stuff' astronauts ("one giant step for mankind") and "TopGun" pilots (killing Mu'ammar Gadhafi s four-year-old daughter with
a smart bomb)
• Jedi Knights (modeled on the Vietcong according to filmmaker
George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars), the nickname given the war
planning staff of General Schwarzkopf's Gulf War command (Gordon
and Trainor, 1995, p. 126), and Rambo (a Nam vet whose first movie
is all about killing policemen)
• Fat Pentagon officers smoking cigars with briefcases full of money (as
shown in countless political cartoons), and naive soldier-engineers
(Jimmy Carter)
• Losing superpower soldiers riding their tanks and helicopters out of
Afghanistan and Vietnam, and the winners
• Good cyborgs (Robocop, D.A.R.Y.L., and hundreds of cartoon and
sci-fi characters) and bad cyborgs (The Terminator and more hundreds
of cartoon and sci-fi characters), often in the same movie (Terminator
IlRobocopU)
• Elite U.S. soldiers invading countries (Grenada, Panama), training
death squads (Latin America), killing civilians with high-tech weapons
(Persian Gulf, Libya), and as victims of terrorism (Marines in
Beirut, woman soldier in Germany, black sailor on hijacked plane,
Scud victims in Saudi Arabia)
• Boring, nerdy war researchers (as characterized in David Broad's book
Star Warriors) and Dr. Strangelove scientists
G.I. Joe is now a TV character who fights more battles with transformers
(robots that can turn into cars and planes) and dinosaurs than any normal
human enemies. Almost all of the violent children's cartoons involve cyborgs
and other strange mixes of the human, the beastly, the alien, and the
technological. Some shows allow the kids at home to join in the fight as well
by using expensive interactive toys. In just the last four years of the 1980s
the main war cartoons included (with their toy companies in bold and their
TV network or producer in small capitals: the interactive Captain Power and
the Soldiers of the Future (Mattel); interactive Photon (MCA-Universal); interactive
TechForce (Axlon); Inhumanoids (Hasbro); Centurions: Power Xtreme
(Kenner); G.I. Joe (Hasbro); Challenge of the Gobots (Tonka); Transformers
(Hasbro); Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, CBS); Rambo: Force of Freedom
(Coleco); Star Wars: Droids (Kenner, ABC); She-Ra, Princess of Power (Mattel);
Thundercats (MCA-Universal); Jaycee and the Wheeled Warriors (Mattel);
Superpowers (Marvel Comics, ABC); Voltron (Matchbox); Lazer Tag (Worlds
of Wonder, NBC); Star Wars: Ewoks (Kenner, ABC); Silverhawks (Kenner);
HeMan & Masters of the Universe (Mattel); Robotech (Matchbox); Dinosaucers
and Dinoriders (Legos).2
Postmodern war is as disjointed as the cartoons, even if it does lack
dinosaurs. It is both the extrapolation of modem war motifs and weaponsinto their reductio ad absurdum and their unabsurd opposite images. So the
atomic bomb and the computer, the two great military brainchildren of
World War II, become nuclear overkill facing hijackers armed with handguns
and the electronic battlefield is overrun (and undermined) by the agrarian
Vietnamese. And, as alluded to above, the common-man foot soldier has
assumed any number of other identities from a female soldier-tech repairing
a faceless machine to an elite bloody-minded covert action warrior using a
satellite to call in a killer droid.
In important ways the spies and spymasters of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies have to be considered the precursors, and the comrades, of
today's soldiers, especially the elite (counter)terrorist troops and commandos
of the Marines and Delta Force. Since the 1950s the CIA has tried to use drugs,
electricity, and hypnotism to turn some intelligence agents, their own and the
opposition's, into functional robots. As one CIA psychologist put it, "The problem
of every intelligence operation is how do you remove the human element'*
(quoted in Marks, 1979, p. 49). Just exactly how successful these attempts have
been is impossible to find out, but several clear trends are obvious:
1. The replacement of most human intelligence collected by agents
with signal and satellite data
2. The widespread experimentation on the use of drugs and hypnosis
to create amnesia and to facilitate the reprogramming of agents
3. The use of direct electrical implants (bioelectronics) to control
behavior
CIA experiments on many animals, including monkeys, dogs, cats,
crows, and various reptiles (among others), certainly took place and may
well be continuing. A CIA document from April 1961 admits that the
CIA had a "production capability" in direct electrical brain simulation
and that they were "close to having debugged a prototype system whereby
dogs can be guided along specific courses." Less than a year later another
CIA report claimed that "the feasibility of remote control of activities
in several species of animals has been demonstrated." It went on to
promise that "investigations and evaluations" would be aimed at applying
"these techniques to man." What the CIA has managed to develop
in the almost three decades since these reports is not public knowledge
but research continued for at least ten years and possibly to this day
Wars do make men. And not just real wars. Possible wars, imagined wars,
even unthinkable wars shape men—and women. Just as modern war required
modern soldiers, postmodern war needs soldiers with new military virtues
who can meet the incredible requirements of high-tech war. These new
soldiers are molded, in part, by personnel science and marketing analysis in
uneasy alliance with traditional military discipline and community. But in
another sense it is the weapons themselves that are constructing the U.S.
soldier of today and tomorrow.
Weapons have always played an important role in war, from the gear of
the Greek hoplite to the tankers of the world wars. Today, however, it is not
that the soldier is influenced by the weapons used; now he or she is
(re)constructed and (re)programmed to fit integrally into weapon systems.
The basic currency of war, the human body, is the site of these modifications,
whether it is of the "wetware" (the mind and hormones), the "software"
(habits, skills, disciplines), or the "hardware" (the physical body). To overcome
the limitations of yesterday's soldier, as well as the limitations of
automation as such, the military is moving toward a more subtle man-machine
integration: a cybernetic organism (cyborg) model of the soldier that
combines machine-like endurance with a redefined human intellect subordinated
to the overall weapon system.
Current DoD policy is creating a postmodern army of war machines,
war managers, and robotized warriors. Logistics command sees the soldier
as a digitalized "manprint," as Major General Wallace C. Arnold explains
(1995). For him the key issue is the soldier-information interface.
The ideal postmodern enlisted soldier is either an actual machine (information
processing) or will be made to act like one through the
psychotechnologies of drugs, discipline, and management. The ideal
postmodern officer is a skilled professional who manages weapon systems
and sometimes applies them in combat. In all cases soldiers are to be
intimately connected with computers through hard wiring, lasers, and
more traditional soldier-machine interfaces.
That is why in North America the cozy often comical images from
modern war of U.S. (Kilroys, dogfaces, G.I. Joes) and Commonwealth
(wisecracking Tommys, soft-spoken Canucks, loud Anzacs, and silent Gurkhas)
soldiers from World War II (Combat, Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy)
have been shattered. In film portrayals of the first postmodern war, Vietnam,
multiethnic teams of clean-cut born-in-America guys (The Green Berets)
coexist with men trapped in an insoluble moral dilemma (Deerhunter,
Platoon) or even inside of Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War means Vietnam
protests (Coming Home, Fields of Stone), as even the charmed circle of
all-American guys (Tour of Duty) must recognize. The first TV show about
Vietnam, M*A*S*H, was set in Korea during that conflict, but it was always,
psychologically and ideologically, about Vietnam. It was one of the most
successful TV shows ever in the United States, and it still plays out its ironic
antiwar message every day in syndication. Its dark humor is copied by some
(Good Morning Vietnam), and its feminine healing focus by others (China
Beach)] but it remains unique, marking as it does in the mass media the
critique of modern war first elaborated by the poet veterans of World War I
and then by the novelist veterans of World War II.1
As the reasons for war have become less clear, the moral standing of the
participants has also become very confusing to some of us. "Bad guys" and
"good guys" (which translate as "us" and "them" or "friend" and "foe" in the
jargon of counter terrorist experts, police, and the military) are harder to keep
separate when one compares:
• Stateless terrorists and state terrorists
• "Right Stuff' astronauts ("one giant step for mankind") and "TopGun" pilots (killing Mu'ammar Gadhafi s four-year-old daughter with
a smart bomb)
• Jedi Knights (modeled on the Vietcong according to filmmaker
George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars), the nickname given the war
planning staff of General Schwarzkopf's Gulf War command (Gordon
and Trainor, 1995, p. 126), and Rambo (a Nam vet whose first movie
is all about killing policemen)
• Fat Pentagon officers smoking cigars with briefcases full of money (as
shown in countless political cartoons), and naive soldier-engineers
(Jimmy Carter)
• Losing superpower soldiers riding their tanks and helicopters out of
Afghanistan and Vietnam, and the winners
• Good cyborgs (Robocop, D.A.R.Y.L., and hundreds of cartoon and
sci-fi characters) and bad cyborgs (The Terminator and more hundreds
of cartoon and sci-fi characters), often in the same movie (Terminator
IlRobocopU)
• Elite U.S. soldiers invading countries (Grenada, Panama), training
death squads (Latin America), killing civilians with high-tech weapons
(Persian Gulf, Libya), and as victims of terrorism (Marines in
Beirut, woman soldier in Germany, black sailor on hijacked plane,
Scud victims in Saudi Arabia)
• Boring, nerdy war researchers (as characterized in David Broad's book
Star Warriors) and Dr. Strangelove scientists
G.I. Joe is now a TV character who fights more battles with transformers
(robots that can turn into cars and planes) and dinosaurs than any normal
human enemies. Almost all of the violent children's cartoons involve cyborgs
and other strange mixes of the human, the beastly, the alien, and the
technological. Some shows allow the kids at home to join in the fight as well
by using expensive interactive toys. In just the last four years of the 1980s
the main war cartoons included (with their toy companies in bold and their
TV network or producer in small capitals: the interactive Captain Power and
the Soldiers of the Future (Mattel); interactive Photon (MCA-Universal); interactive
TechForce (Axlon); Inhumanoids (Hasbro); Centurions: Power Xtreme
(Kenner); G.I. Joe (Hasbro); Challenge of the Gobots (Tonka); Transformers
(Hasbro); Dungeons & Dragons (TSR, CBS); Rambo: Force of Freedom
(Coleco); Star Wars: Droids (Kenner, ABC); She-Ra, Princess of Power (Mattel);
Thundercats (MCA-Universal); Jaycee and the Wheeled Warriors (Mattel);
Superpowers (Marvel Comics, ABC); Voltron (Matchbox); Lazer Tag (Worlds
of Wonder, NBC); Star Wars: Ewoks (Kenner, ABC); Silverhawks (Kenner);
HeMan & Masters of the Universe (Mattel); Robotech (Matchbox); Dinosaucers
and Dinoriders (Legos).2
Postmodern war is as disjointed as the cartoons, even if it does lack
dinosaurs. It is both the extrapolation of modem war motifs and weaponsinto their reductio ad absurdum and their unabsurd opposite images. So the
atomic bomb and the computer, the two great military brainchildren of
World War II, become nuclear overkill facing hijackers armed with handguns
and the electronic battlefield is overrun (and undermined) by the agrarian
Vietnamese. And, as alluded to above, the common-man foot soldier has
assumed any number of other identities from a female soldier-tech repairing
a faceless machine to an elite bloody-minded covert action warrior using a
satellite to call in a killer droid.
In important ways the spies and spymasters of the CIA and other intelligence
agencies have to be considered the precursors, and the comrades, of
today's soldiers, especially the elite (counter)terrorist troops and commandos
of the Marines and Delta Force. Since the 1950s the CIA has tried to use drugs,
electricity, and hypnotism to turn some intelligence agents, their own and the
opposition's, into functional robots. As one CIA psychologist put it, "The problem
of every intelligence operation is how do you remove the human element'*
(quoted in Marks, 1979, p. 49). Just exactly how successful these attempts have
been is impossible to find out, but several clear trends are obvious:
1. The replacement of most human intelligence collected by agents
with signal and satellite data
2. The widespread experimentation on the use of drugs and hypnosis
to create amnesia and to facilitate the reprogramming of agents
3. The use of direct electrical implants (bioelectronics) to control
behavior
CIA experiments on many animals, including monkeys, dogs, cats,
crows, and various reptiles (among others), certainly took place and may
well be continuing. A CIA document from April 1961 admits that the
CIA had a "production capability" in direct electrical brain simulation
and that they were "close to having debugged a prototype system whereby
dogs can be guided along specific courses." Less than a year later another
CIA report claimed that "the feasibility of remote control of activities
in several species of animals has been demonstrated." It went on to
promise that "investigations and evaluations" would be aimed at applying
"these techniques to man." What the CIA has managed to develop
in the almost three decades since these reports is not public knowledge
but research continued for at least ten years and possibly to this day
(Marks, 1979, pp. 209-211).
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