Hristova S. Proto-Algorithmic War - How the Iraq War became a laboratory for algorithmic logics

Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2022. — 180 p. — ISBN: 978-3-031-04219-5.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 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 nascent algorithmic war culture in the context of the Iraq War (2003-2010) about the data-driven early 20th century British Mandate for Iraq. Through a series of five inquiries into how 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 automation 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) to explicate the parallels and complicated diversions between the numerical logics that have driven both military state-building enterprises.Stefka Hristova’s research examines algorithmic and digital media cultures. She studies the intersection of technology and culture in relation to the context of photography, surveillance, and social movements.True PDF