class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide # Dirty Wars ## War in a Goldfish Bowl ### Jack McDonald --- class: inverse # Lecture Outline .pull-left[ How does the changing observability of armed conflict shape the conduct of war? What have we learned that could help us to understand this problem? ] .pull-right[ - The Observability of Armed Conflict - Epistemic Approaches to War - The Duty to Know in Armed Conflict - Recognition Systems and Armed Conflict - Conclusions and Connections ] ## Main Points Communications technology has re-shaped the ability of militaries to observe one another, and also third parties to observe war This is most prominent in contemporary tracking of armed conflicts by NGOs and OSINT investigators Understanding social knowledge generation can explain different perceptions of levels of civilian casualties in armed conflict ??? --- class: inverse # Part 1: The Observability of Armed Conflict ??? --- # War in a Goldfish Bowl .pull-left[ ![Ukraine doxxing](img/r4/doxx.png) ![Biometrics in Iraq](img/r4/biometrics.jpg) ] .pull-right[ Information communication Information processing Information theory Non-human computation Non-human sensing ] > the constitutive activties of sensing, imaging, and mapping have combined to bring perception and annihilation into ever closer alignment. Antoine Bousquet, _The Eye of War_ ??? --- # Information Processing and the Rules of War .pull-left[ If information processing defines the information age, what about: - Public information processing in armed conflict (crowdsourcing) - Privately contracted information processing - The status/nature of information infrastructure (Amazon AWS, etc) - Epistemic challenges of digital technology (Deep fakes, etc) - Authoritarian use of "liberation technologies" (Recognition systems) ] .pull-right[ ![The Crowd](img/r4/crowd.jpg) ] ??? --- # OSINT and Data Journalism .pull-left[ ![AIRWARS map of Iraq/Syria](img/2020/airwarscrop.png) ] .pull-right[ > Accountability can be roughly defined as the ability of one actor to demand an explanation or justification of another actor for its actions and to reward or punish that second actor on the basis of its performance or its explanation. Edward Rubin, _The Myth of Accountability and the Anti-Administrative Impulse_ Two elements: Answerability, sanctions Hence, transparency (forcing agents to provide information) "Who is responsible?" = "Who can I punish?" ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .question[What kind of transparency do/would you expect of your own military when engaged in an armed conflict?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 2: Epistemic Approaches to War ??? --- # Measuring War and Warfare .pull-left[ ![Counting the dead at Crecy](img/r3/crecy.jpg) ![Battle deaths](img/r3/battledeath.png) ] .pull-right[ > Why do the datasets exclude indirect deaths? It’s not to write these kinds of suffering out of the history books, but because direct deaths are the only ones that can be counted with confidence. Steven Pinker, _The Better Angels of Our Nature_ > Death is final and corpses are easier to count than the wounded. That fewer people are dying in war, however, does not mean that war is at an end. Indeed, it does not even necessarily mean that war has become more humane. Tanisha M. Fazal, _Dead Wrong?_ ] ??? If we understand war through battlefield mortality, what do technologies that decrease said mortality do to our perception of war --- # Well, How Do People Die? .pull-left[ ![Bellamy mortality chart](img/r3/mortality.png) ] .pull-right[ > Exsanguination causes about 50 per cent of all deaths. Trauma to the central nervous system causes about one third of all deaths. Sepsis/multiple organ failure causes less than 10 per cent of all deaths. Ronald F. Bellamy, _The Causes of Death in Conventional Land Warfare_ ] ??? /// --- # War and Public Health > we have redefined complex emergencies as situations in which mortality among the civilian population substantially increases above the population baseline, either as a result of the direct effects of war or indirectly through increased prevalence of malnutrition and/or transmission of communicable diseases, particularly if the latter result from deliberate political and military policies and strategies (national, subnational, or international). > Such emergencies have resulted during the past 30 years in the development of the two new scientific fields of emergency public health and public nutrition. > In absolute terms, the major causes of mortality during emergencies are essentially the same as in developing countries: diarrhoeal diseases, acute respiratory infection, neonatal causes, and malaria. Peter Salama et al, _Lessons learned from complex emergencies over past decade_ ??? /// --- # Dirty Wars .pic80[![The Troubles](img/r3/troubles.png)] .pull-left[ Much of the violence in "dirty wars" is hard to quantify - Low reporting rates of sexual violence - Disappearances - Torture ] .pull-right[ Consider the error rates in the conflicts we've mentioned in this course - N.I. is an outlier because numbers of deaths known to high degree of precision/accuracy ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .question[Why might the search for accurate casualty counts in war/political repression prove controversial in a post-conflict society?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 3: The Duty to Know in Armed Conflict ??? --- # The Apparent Precision Paradox .pull-left[ > In the conduct of military operations, constant care shall be taken to spare the civilian population, civilians and civilian objects. Additional Protocol 1, Article 57(1) > If you are a military leader whose lieutenants recommend bombing a compound that might house enemy soldiers, you have an obligation to investigate — before bombing it — whether the compound really does house enemy soldiers,and whether it houses innocent civilians as well. Holly M. Smith, _The Subjective Moral Duty to Inform Oneself Prior to Acting_ ] .pull-right[ As precision of intelligence and weapon systems in use increases, social expectations of precision increase Is there a causal link? Despite the increased ability to observe direct casualties of conflict, NGO observers and the Coalition in Iraq disagree significantly about the levels of casualties caused by Coalition forces What explains this difference? ] ??? --- # Precision, False Positives, and Weapons .pull-left[ ![False positive 2x2](img/2020/falsepositive.jpg) ![Precision accuracy diagram](img/2020/accuracy.jpg) ] .pull-right[ ![Weapon effect in Mosul](img/2020/weaponeffects.jpg) > In decision theory _ignorance_ is a technical term with a very precise meaning. It refers to cases in which the decision maker (i) knows what her alternatives are and what outcomes they may result in, but (ii) is unable to assign any probabilities to the states corresponding to the outcomes Martin Peterson, _An Introduction to Decision Theory_ ] ??? --- # Different Ways of Seeing War .pull-left[ ![Killbox diagram](img/r3/killbox.png) ] .pull-right[ Possible causal explanations - Fundamental differences between military/NGO reasons to perceive environment - "Intelligence truth" != "Judicial truth" != "Journalism truth" - Ability of militaries to detect CIVCAS depends upon force structure ] ??? --- # Three Relevant Perspectives on Knowledge > There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. Michel Foucault, _Discipline and Punish_ > We can know more than we can tell Michael Polanyi, _The Tacit Dimension_ > information is a flow of messages, while knowledge is created and organized by the very flow of information, anchored on the commitment and beliefs of its holder. This understanding emphasizes an essential aspect of knowledge that relates to human action. Ikujiro Nonaka, _Dynamic Theory of Organizational Knowledge Creation_ ??? --- # Organizational Knowledge Creation Theory .pull-left[ ![Organizational KCT](img/r3/okcmodes.png) ] .pull-right[ ![Organizational KCT](img/r3/okcspiral.png) ] ??? --- # Ignorance Studies > Within the horizon of the unknown, we may come to seek a learned ignorance, to understand our search for knowledge not as a quest for certainty, but as an attempt to refine, improve, and moralize our ignorance > My general term for intentional ignorance is _nescience_. Different from what we do not yet know, different from what we can never know, nescience designates what we or others have _determined_ we are not to know. > it is also possible to construct ignorance unintentionally, or with dim awareness, or with awareness only after the fact. That can happen when the ignorance is produced as an unintended by-product of an intentional activity. Daniel R. DeNicola, _Understanding Ignorance_ .pull-left[| - | Good | Bad | | --- | --- | --- | | __Known__ | Differing Standards | Lying, Strategic Release | | __Not Known__ | Rational Nescience | Strategic Ignorance | ] .pull-right[ - Rational nescience - Strategic ignorance - Willful ignorance - Privacy and secrecy - Forbidden knowledge ] ??? --- # The Option of Ignorance in Armed Conflict? .pull-left[ A. _S_ has the _option_ to know _X_. B. _S_ has the _desire_ to know _X_. C. _S_ has the _need_ to know _X_. D. _S_ has the _right_ to know _X_. E. _S_ has the _obligation_ to know _X_. ] .pull-right[ A_n_. _S_ has the _option not_ to know _X_. B_n_. _S_ has the _desire not_ to know _X_. C_n_. _S_ has the _need not_ to know _X_. D_n_. _S_ has the _right not_ to know _X_. E_n_. _S_ has the _obligation not_ to know _X_. ] From DeNicola, _Understanding Ignorance_ ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .question[What kinds of positive and negative duties do you think exist for military commanders, if any?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 4: Recognition Systems and Armed Conflict ??? --- # Intangible Weapons .pic80[![Ukrainian D-30](img/r5/d30.jpg)] > Eyewitness accounts from individuals within the impacted units reported seeing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used in the area prior to one attack, underscoring the need for precise locational data for these particular strikes and introducing the possibility that the Android malware served to support the reconnaissance role of traditional battlefield assets. Crowdstrike Global Intelligence Team, _Use of Fancy Bear Android Malware in Tracking of Ukrainian Field Artillery Units_ ??? Ukrainian D-30 artillery piece Mention AI and LAWS here --- # Recognition Systems and Conventional War .pull-left[ ![FLIR afghanistan](img/r5/flir.jpg) ![Ford Class Carrier](img/r5/ford.jpg) ] .pull-right[ > The idea of automatic target recognition often conjures up visions of a completely general system that is able to classify all manner of different vehicle types in the most difficult of clutter environments. > It is important to recognise that an ATR system does not have to address the most difficult scenarios to provide valuable military capability. Indeed, operational radar ATR systems already exist that have solved some of the problems lying on this continuum of ATR difficulty. David Blacknell and Hugh Griffiths, _Future Challenges_ ] ??? --- # Recognition Systems and Irregular Warfare .pull-left[ > State agents have no interest - nor should they - in describing an entire social reality, and more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, and untill the nineteenth century the most prominent of these were typically taxation, political control, and conscription. James C. Scott, _Seeing Like a State_ ] .pull-right[ ![Stasi Archives](img/r5/archives.jpg) ![Taliban night letter](img/r5/letter.png) ] ??? --- # Biometric Recognition Systems .left-40[ ![Fingerprints](img/r5/fingerprint.png) ![Enforced identification practices](img/r5/badges.jpeg) ] .right-40[ > What distinguishes all of the biometric projects of the post-colonial world is their explicit goal to provide bureaucratic and financial services to an illiterate population... Whatever the similarities and connections between biometrics and documentary bureaucracy, it is important to notice that biometric technologies are fundamentally-indeed ontologically-antithetical to writing. Keith Breckenridge, _Biometric State_ ] ??? --- class: inverse # Reflection Question .question[What biometric recognition systems do you use in your day to day life? How comfortable are you with using them?] ??? --- class: inverse # Part 5: Conclusions and Connections ??? --- # Key Issues .large[ These issues are only going to increase in importance over time Understanding an organisation's internal working processes is key to explaining how, and why, it generates knowledge about a given conflict The production of ignorance, or "non-knowledge" is an important explanatory factor in disagreements about civilian casualties ] ??? --- # Key Questions .large[ Do you think that militaries should do more to prevent civilian casualties? What kind of trade-offs do you think this involves? If balancing lives in war is difficult, how should military commanders balance the allocation of ISR assets in terms of understanding future operations vs understanding the consequences of prior operations? Should militaries be obliged to delete data that they collect on civilian populations? ]