Guha, Manabrata (2008) Intensive War : Not the Beginning, Not the Middle, Not the End. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
With the emergence of the theories and doctrines of the mode of combat commonly referred to as network-centric warfare, it is becoming increasingly obvious that global militaries, and particularly the US military and defence establishment, have begun to perceive a shift in the emerging 'strategic' environment. The hitherto rationally predictable security calculus - like the now fading Cold War strategic paradigm - is fast becoming redundant. Among other things, this shift is being increasingly understood as a movement from nation-state threats to decentralised network threats. What is significant about this is that perhaps for the first time in the history of the modem military, the military machine - a state-owned and run apparatus - is thinking of and, in some cases, even operating outside the orbit of the State. This would suggest that either the connection between war and the political is becoming increasingly tenuous, or perhaps war, considered in its originary terms, was and is not really an instrument of any kind, least of all a political one. Thus, this thesis asks: what if war in its most extravagant, uninhibited and originary sense does not serve the State? Pursuant to this, the thesis traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Taking its investigative analysis further, it demonstrates that, when considered in philosophical terms, though the emergence of the net-centric theories and practices of war potentially carry with them the possibility to render our imagination of war into a state of 'suspended animation', they also carry with/in them a profound 'performative contradiction' that necessarily fractures the state-centric concept of war. This thesis' investigations reveal that such a fracturing far from paralyzing the project of re-problematizating war, affords us an opportunity to rethink war in inhuman, that is to say, in machinic terms.