The RAND Corporation, always a great source of ethical thought in the world, has proudly finished another one of its blockbusters. This position paper, for the US Joint Forces Command, describes how the US military can borrow techniques from the compliance industries to help it “sell” war to the lucky consumers of its counterinsurgency operations. Finally, a three hundred page document arguing that you can put lipstick on a pig.

Here’s a thought: Why don’t those serving in the military actively question and contradict their commander in chief? That was the point of Nuremberg, wasn’t it? I salute the retired generals who have spoken out against the war, and those few active service members as well, but it’s time for massive action from within.

As a teenager, I remember being struck by a statistic from those “brighter tomorrow” 80’s when it was reported that under Reagan’s defense increases the budget for military bands dramatically exceeded that of the National Endowment for the Arts. It seemed preposterous at the time. In retrospect, we didn’t know from preposterous.

Foreign Policy passport reports that the D.OD has more musicians than the State Department has diplomats. Normally I’d say that more music was a recipe for success, but those martial tunes (with a few exceptions) don’t win friends or influence people. Too much syncopation, corny standards, blaring orchestration with little dynamic subtlety. In fact, the more I think of it, the more I realize how the military can save money that can instead go toward diplomacy. The solution even has an appropriately martial name: General Midi.

I have a brief article in Bidoun, journal of Middle Eastern of arts and culture, on the ways that new American weapons systems use images. These remotely piloted vehicles relay video back to operators, who then make decisions based on what they see. The process is pretty complicated, and none of the contingency of the meaning of images — these guys aren’t reading Mulvey, Sekula, or Sondheim — makes it into the official training documents.

We have little reference for understanding images of this nature; they are like documentary, in that they offer a view, with implicit and explicit perspective, on a non-fiction event. But they are like computer games in that the viewer is supposed to interfere in that event. Drone-generated video is unlike documentary or video games — or indeed any other visual media — in that the decisions made based upon them are both immediate and possibly fatal.

One cockpit video that swept the Web in 2004 showed the obliteration of a large group of men in Fallujah, based on no apparent information other than that they were men, and walking out of a mosque. Do the millions of dollars of imaging equipment used to make this film present a neutral image? Is the suspicion with which these images are taken not transmitted through the apparatus to the viewer? My guess is that these technologies, while deadly and effective, are increasingly isolating Americans to the point that they are unable to gauge their own telemediated actions… After seeing the real-time video of the Falluja bomb obliterating a score of anonymous pedestrians, the overwhelmed pilot simply sighed, “Oh, dude.” He was flying blind.

Check out Bidoun…