Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard
| Author | Dan Öberg,Astrid H.M. Nordin |
| Published date | 01 January 2015 |
| Date | 01 January 2015 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829814552435 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2015, Vol. 43(2) 392 –410
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829814552435
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MILLENNIUM
Journal of International Studies
1. Such recent literatures include Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, ‘Powers of War: Fighting
Knowledge, and Critique’, International Political Sociology 5, no. 2 (2011): 126–43; Shane
Brighton, ‘War/Truth: Foucault, Heraclitus and the Hoplite Homer’, Cambridge Review of
Targeting the Ontology of
War: From Clausewitz to
Baudrillard
Astrid H.M. Nordin
Lancaster University, UK
Dan Öberg
Swedish Defence College, Sweden
Abstract
Against a surprising level of agreement between Clausewitz, contemporary military doctrines and
critical war studies on an ontology of war as fighting, we suggest that the study of contemporary
warfare needs to focus more on war as processing. Through Jean Baudrillard we argue that at
least some of what is referred to as ‘war’ is no longer characterised by encounters through
fighting. We exemplify our argument by how the repetitive battle-rhythm of military targeting
strives for perfect war. What remains is not war as an object in itself, but a reified ‘war’ that
obscures the disappearance of that very object. The debate on war contributes to the reification
of such a war, as an imperative telling us: ‘we have a concept, you must learn to think through it’.
Keywords
ontology of war, critical war studies, Baudrillard, disappearance, targeting, warfare, Clausewitz
Introduction
Recent debates emanating from critical war studies have prompted renewed academic
attention to the question of what war is – the ontology of war.1 Understanding ontology
Corresponding author:
Astrid H.M. Nordin, Lancaster University, County South, Lancaster, LA1 4YL, UK.
Email: a.nordin@lancaster.ac.uk
552435MIL0010.1177/0305829814552435Millennium: Journal of International StudiesNordin and Öberg
research-article2014
Article
Nordin and Öberg 393
International Affairs, 26, no. 4 (2013): 651–68; Caroline Holmqvist, ‘Undoing War: War
Ontologies and the Materiality of Drone Warfare’, Millennium Journal of International
Studies 41, no. 3 (2013): 535–52; Caroline Holmqvist, ‘War, “Strategic Communication” and
the Violence of Non-recognition’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2, no. 4 (2013):
631–50; Swati Parashar, ‘What Wars and “War Bodies” Know about International Relations’,
Cambridge Review of International Affairs 2, no. 4 (2013): 615–30; Christine Sylvester,
War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (New
York: Routledge, 2013). These and other literatures now cluster under the label ‘Critical War
Studies’. However, the ontology under scrutiny in this paper is not, as we will show, confined
to this fairly limited grouping.
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1989), 189.
3. We employ a distinction between war as ontological and warfare as ontic in order to make a
strategic separation between the ‘nature’ of war and warfare as a practice. For an example of
how this distinction has been employed in relation to politics and the political, see Chantal
Mouffe, On The Political (New York: Routledge, 2005), 8–9. We also refer to the specific
ontology that we question in this article as ‘war-as-fighting’, which, we will argue, assumes a
reciprocal and a generative aspect.
4. The targeting process discussed here is based on US and NATO documents. As such it is
representative of most western regular militaries. We focus our discussion on the outline of
targeting in Allied Joint Publication 3.3 ‘Joint Air & Space Operations Doctrine’ (NATO
PfP Unclassified, 2002), Air Force Doctrine Document 2-1.9 (US Air Force, 2006) and Joint
Publication 3-60 Joint Doctrine for Targeting (2002) as they are the leading military manuals
regarding targeting. However, as argued elsewhere, the Clausewitzian ontology has strik-
ing similarities to ontologies of war developed in other traditions, see Astrid H.M. Nordin,
‘Radical Exoticism: Baudrillard and Others’ Wars’, International Journal of Baudrillard
Studies 11, no. 2 (2014).
to be ‘not a foundation, but a normative injunction that operates insidiously by installing
itself into … discourse’2 on war, we argue that these debates have involved a perhaps
surprising level of agreement – between Clausewitz, contemporary military doctrines
and large parts of critical war studies – on an ontology of war as fighting. When we
observe something we call ‘war’ based on the assumption that we will see a particular
kind of ‘fighting’ there, this risks making us blind to the way in which warfare has
become a reiterative process which strictly speaking lacks antagonistic engagement with
‘an enemy’. We suggest that military targeting exemplifies one such obscured ontic real-
ity, and that reading it through Jean Baudrillard’s notion of disappearance may shed new
light on this and on the disconnect between the notion of war and warfare more broadly.3
In the first part of this article, we outline the apparent agreement between Clausewitz,
contemporary military doctrines and critical war studies on war as antagonistic fighting,
with recent emphasis on its generative aspect (a discussion particularly indebted to Michel
Foucault and the notion of ‘excess’). The second part draws on Jean Baudrillard to pro-
pose one alternative to the Clausewitzean account, where we see instead that the military
effort to reach a ‘perfect war’ makes the underlying principles of war-as-fighting fade and
disappear. In the third part we exemplify our argument by way of military targeting, which
works according to a repetitive battle-rhythm that symbolically dissolves subjects and
targets.4 We argue that at least this one important process of warfare – military targeting
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