Targeting from a Distance: Formatting Social Relations in Data-Driven Warfare

Abstract

In this paper we analyze enactments of a social scientific methodology, namely social network analysis (SNA) as described and depicted in contemporary US military discourses. We follow the progressive digital grounding of military organization and knowledge through the lens of SNA. Framing SNA in this context, as a social technology that is co-constituting the worlds it studies, we see that it is embedded deeply in the logics of data-driven warfare, as well as the massive industrial and governmental efforts to map the social graph. By navigating through military applications and realizations of the network metaphor, we find SNA at the core of a rhetoric of precision that underlines the potential to deliver “high value” targets, and is outlined as computational counterterrorism and counterinsurgency from a distance.