Proto-Algorithmic War

How the Iraq War became a laboratory for algorithmic logics

By: Stefka Hristova

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eText | 16 July 2022

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During the Iraq War, American soldiers were sent to both fight an enemy and to recover a "failed state" in pixelated camouflage uniforms, accompanied by robots, and armed with satellite maps and biometric hand-held scanners. The Iraq War, however, was no digital game: massive-scale physical death and destruction counter the vision of a clean replayable war. The military policy of the United States, and not the actual experience of war, has been rooted in the logic of digital, and nascent algorithmic technology. This logic attempted to reduce culture, society, as well as the physical body and environment into visual data that lacks cultural and historical context.

This book details the emergence of a nascent algorithmic war culture in the context of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in relation to the data-driven early 20th century British Mandate for Iraq. Through a series of five inquiries into the ways in which the Iraq War attempted to and often failed to see population and territory as digital and further proto-algorithmic entities, it offers an insight into the digitization and further unmanned automaton of war. It does so through a comparative historical framework reaching back to the quantification techniques harnessed during the British Mandate for Iraq (1918-1932) in order to explicate the parallels and complicated the diversions between the numerical logics that have driven both military state-building enterprises.