politics of survivability how military technology …
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POLITICS OF SURVIVABILITY HOW MILITARY TECHNOLOGY SCRIPTS URBAN RELATIONS
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Faculty of Humanities
2021
FADI SHAYYA
SCHOOL OF ENVIRONMENT, EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
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Table of Contents
1.0 New Problems, Old Questions ................................................................... 21
1.1 Jenin Is Not Paris ........................................................................................ 22
1.2 Breakdown in Iraq and Afghanistan ........................................................... 24
1.3 Research Aims & Objectives ..................................................................... 25
1.4 Audience and Contributions ....................................................................... 27
1.5 Thesis Structure .......................................................................................... 28
2.0 Introduction ................................................................................................ 35
2.1 Military Urbanisms and Architectures ....................................................... 37
2.1.1 Spatialising Urban Warfare .................................................................... 38
2.1.2 Militarised Notions of the Urban ........................................................... 40
2.1.3 Cross-sectional Views ............................................................................ 44
2.1.4 Asymmetries .......................................................................................... 48
2.1.5 Conclusion.............................................................................................. 51
2.2 Sociotechnical Approaches to Militarised Objects..................................... 51
2.2.1 Matters of Concern ................................................................................. 53
2.2.2 Mediation and Associations ................................................................... 55
2.2.3 Individuation and Associations .............................................................. 56
2.2.4 Conclusion.............................................................................................. 61
2.3 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 62
3.0 Introduction ................................................................................................ 65
3.1 Constructing the Sites to Study Military Technical Objects ...................... 66
3.2 Mobilising the Sources ............................................................................... 69
3.3 Plan of the Analysis .................................................................................... 75
3.4 Method of Analysis .................................................................................... 77
3.5 A Note on the Visual Strategy of the Research .......................................... 81
4.0 Introduction ................................................................................................ 87
4.1 Primitive Envelopes ................................................................................... 88
4.2 Enclosing Bodies ........................................................................................ 98
4.3 Active Exteriors ........................................................................................ 107
4.4 Dynamic Interiors ..................................................................................... 115
4.5 Hybrid Scripts ........................................................................................... 122
4.6 Conclusion: Extreme Architectures .......................................................... 126
5.0 Introduction .............................................................................................. 131
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5.1 Collecting the Urban Landscape .............................................................. 133
5.2 Urbanising the Technical Object.............................................................. 141
5.3 Moving with Infrastructure ...................................................................... 146
5.4 Urban Scripts for the Warzone ................................................................. 155
5.5 Urban Metascripts for the Home Front .................................................... 159
5.6 Conclusion: Urban as Relational Object .................................................. 167
6.0 Introduction .............................................................................................. 171
6.1 Collecting the Rural Landscape ............................................................... 172
6.2 Mobility as Parameters............................................................................. 179
6.3 Environmental Translations ..................................................................... 185
6.4 Recruiting Humans .................................................................................. 190
6.5 Testing Atmospheric Limits ..................................................................... 195
6.6 Technology Transfers .............................................................................. 202
6.7 Terraining Moves ..................................................................................... 209
6.8 Conclusion: Pre-injured Bodies and Technics ......................................... 215
7.0 Introduction .............................................................................................. 219
7.1 First Contribution: Survivability as Concern ........................................... 219
7.2 Second Contribution: The Urban and Architectural ................................ 221
7.3 Third Contribution: A Method for Tracing Associations ........................ 228
7.4 Addressing the Gap in the Literature ....................................................... 232
7.5 Relations of Equality and Difference ....................................................... 234
7.6 Prospects for Future Architectural and Urban Research .......................... 235
7.7 Conclusion ............................................................................................... 236
Final word count (excluding references and front matter): 71, 314.
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List of Acronyms CONUS Contiguous (or Conterminous) United States CREW Counter RCIED Electronic Warfare DoD U.S. Department of Defense DoT U.S. Department of Transportation DTIC Defense Technical Information Center EFP Explosively Formed Penetrator HEAT HMMWV Egress Assistant Trainer HMMWV High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, also known as Humvee IED Improvised Explosive Device JLTV Joint Light Tactical Vehicle M-ATV MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle MET MRAP Egress Trainer MRAP Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected Vehicle OCONUS Outside CONUS OWM Kit Overhead Wire Mitigation Kit RPG Rocket Propelled Grenade U.S. United States of America USPTO United State Patent and Trademark Office
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List of Figures Figure 1 Example of how patents are analysed in Chapter 4; excerpt from Patent Application 20120261039A1 (Cho, 2012). ......................................................................... 79
Figure 2 Drawing shows sub-ensemble and humans (Asaf et al., 2015, p. Sheet 9 of 11) . 83
Figure 3 Drawing shows technical object and milieu (Tillotson, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 7) .... 83
Figure 4 Drawing shows possibilities of increased technicity (Cho, 2012, p. Sheet 3 of 3)83
Figure 5 Process diagram shows assisted door operation (McKee, Scholtes and Hayden, 2015, p. Sheet 6 of 12) ......................................................................................................... 83
Figure 6 Diagram of urban elements, from Field Manual (U.S. Army, 2006b, p. B3) ....... 84
Figure 7 Photo shows testing vehicle in mud, from Test Operations Procedure (ATC Automotive Directorate, 2012, p. 101) ................................................................................ 84
Figure 8 Photo shows welding in the field, from Army news article (Roles, 2009) ........... 84
Figure 9 Landscapes/Terrains informing the concretisation of different military light tactical vehicle types since WWII (by author) .................................................................... 89
Figure 10 Excerpt from U.S. military townhall meeting in Kuwait (PBS, 2004). .............. 90
Figure 11 Excerpt from Patent 8707848 (Mills and Stevens, 2008, secs 0002, 0004). ....... 93
Figure 12 Excerpt from Patent Application 20080066613 A1 (Allor, Husak and Skiotys, 2014, col. 1). ........................................................................................................................ 94
Figure 13 Reproduced mobility terrain diagram from the Bastion APC vehicle brochure (AM General, 2018) ............................................................................................................. 96
Figure 14 Reproduced vehicle underbody geometry diagram from patent art of U.S. Patent 10,323,909 B2 (Carton and Roebroeks, 2019, p. Sheet 4 of 6) ........................................... 96
Figure 15 The four key types of severe bodily injuries causes by IED detonations (Ramasamy et al., 2011, p. 163) .......................................................................................... 97
Figure 16 Comparison between IED-caused fatalities (dark grey graph) and other fatalities (light grey graph); notice the increase during the 2003-2005 insurgency, and after 2007 when the U.S. attempted to reduce risk by transferring security responsibilities to Iraq (Lamb, Schmidt and Fitzsimmons, 2009, p. 2).................................................................... 97
Figure 17 Excerpt from the Urgent UNS (McGriff and Dewet, 2005, pp. 1–3) ................. 98
Figure 18 Excerpt from Patent 6892621 B2 (Grosch, 2005, col. 2). ................................. 100
Figure 19 Patent art showing vehicle as modular parts (Hass and Runow, 2007, p. Sheet 2 of 3). ................................................................................................................................... 105
Figure 20 Patent art showing Oshkosh’s TAK-4 independent suspension system; notice how there is no horizontal axle that connects both wheels, rather each wheel independently responds to the terrain (Schreiner, Roehl and Pelko, 2011, p. Sheet 19 of 21) ................. 105
Figure 21 Patent art showing a schematic of a cab; notice how the cab is an independent entity from the rest of the vehicle including the tunnel form that isolates its drive shaft components (R. D. Johnson et al., 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3) ................................................. 106
Figure 22 Patent art showing a schematic section of a human and an energy vent coexisting in the extreme event of a detonation (Tunis and Kendall, 2011). ...................................... 106
Figure 23 Excerpt from Patent Application 20120261039 A1 (Cho, 2012, sec. 0003) .... 108
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Figure 24 Patent art showing severe bending angles of a single, jointless, thick sheet of AA2139 (Cho, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3) ................................................................................ 113
Figure 25 Patent art showing sectional schematics of layering metals with plastics to absorb the kinetics of projectiles (St. Claire and Imholt, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3). .............. 113
Figure 26 Patent art showing schematic of Humvee with the sensing mechanism and how it heats the medium where the projectile travels (Tillotson, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 7) .............. 114
Figure 27 Reproduced cinematic sections from patent art that capture the explosion event and dynamic terrain as a space-time continuum (Asaf et al., 2015) .................................. 114
Figure 28 Excerpt from FM 3.06-11: Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain (U.S. Army, 2002, p. 1.24) .......................................................................................................... 118
Figure 29 Patent art showing blast attenuation seats; notice the fixing brackets that mount the seat to the ceiling and floor of the vehicle, and the telescopic oscillation mechanism in the back of the seat (Grant and Almstedt, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 15) .................................... 120
Figure 30 Patent art showing robotic arm operated through computer interface inside the vehicle (Summer, Bosscher and Rust, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 6) ............................................ 120
Figure 31 Patent art showing door assist mechanism separating inside the vehicle from the outside environment (McKee, Scholtes and Hayden, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 12)................... 121
Figure 32 Patent art showing layers of protective and peelable film overlaying a vehicle’s glass panel (Cockman, Jennings and Martin, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 11) ............................... 121
Figure 33 Converging concerns for better mobility and better survivability into an integrated technical object (by author) ............................................................................... 124
Figure 34 Excerpt on “considerations for urban operations” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 34) .............................................................. 135
Figure 35 Excerpt from officer Amble’s account (Amble, 2014) ...................................... 137
Figure 36 Diagram of “relativity of key urban environment elements” from FM 3-06: Urban Operations; notice how the right side of the diagram emphasises “society” over “terrain” in stability operations and unconventional warfare, i.e. counterinsurgency; infrastructure remains the domain of intersection between the social and the physical on both sides of the diagram (Appendix B in U.S. Army, 2006b, p. B3) ............................... 139
Figure 37 Sketch of possible quasi-typologies, as in urban design guides, that translates the military’s reduction of the urban landscape to a set of frictions for the MRAP vehicles; the first row shows sections and the second shows plans (by author) ..................................... 139
Figure 38 An urban morphology map illustrating differences in density and structure between what officer Amble described as an affluent Karada (left) and a chaotic Baghdad al-Jadida (right) districts in Baghdad (original map source: Google Maps, 2019) ............ 140
Figure 39 Armoured vehicles driving on paved roads in urban settings amidst traffic and civilians: (left, DoD Observe archive) U.S. Marines LAVs driving past a checkpoint in Koretin, Kosovo, 1999 and (right, DVIDS archive) a U.S. Army Stryker driving on a busy street in Mosul, Iraq, 2008; photo credits to Sgt. Craig J. Shell, U.S. Marines (Shell, 1999) and Staff Sgt. Gretel Weiskopf, 139th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment (Weiskopf, 2004) ............................................................................................................................................ 140
Figure 40 Excerpt from “Appendix B-2 Surviving Contact with High-Voltage Power Lines” in the MRAP Handbook (2008, p. 133) ................................................................. 141
Figure 41 Low-hanging wires in a Baghdad; original photo captioned “Electrical wires on a typical street corner in Baghdad, 2008” as found in officer Amble’s account (Amble,
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2014); photo credit to U.S. Army Sgt. Mark B. Matthews, 27th Public Affairs Detachment ........................................................................................................................................... 144
Figure 42 Low-hanging wires in a Baghdad suburb; original photo captioned “Capt. Marty Kulinski, a soldier with the 769th Engineer Battalion, motions for a woman to continue her normal routine Saturday in Sadr City, Iraq, as he pulls security for fellow soldiers who are interviewing an insurgent suspect…” (James Warden, 2008) ........................................... 144
Figure 43 RG33 6x6 MRAPs encountering low-hanging wires – notice how close to the wires the gunner’s position on the roof and the vertical antennas are; original photo (Alamy stock photos) captioned “MRAP … vehicles manned by soldiers of Charly Battery, 2nd Battalion 12th Field Artillery Regiment as part of 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division patrol the streets of Bohriz in Diyala province, Iraq” (Kli, 2008) ............................................... 145
Figure 44 Illustration of electrocution from “Power Line Antenna Strike” as found in the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 42) ................................ 145
Figure 45 Excerpt from the OWM Kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 5) .......................... 148
Figure 46 Excerpt from This Truck Saved my Life (Friedman, 2013, p. 232) ................... 150
Figure 47 Downsizing in transportation engineering; excerpt from DoT’s report Optimizing Large Vehicles for Urban Environments (Chiarenza et al., 2018, p. 10) .......................... 150
Figure 48 Improvising technical improvements in the field/warzone in Baghdad; original photo (U.S. Army website) captioned “Spc. Richard Pfleegor of Jersey Shore, Pa., a Soldier with Company B, 328th Brigade Support Battalion, 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, welds outriggers onto a bolt-on metal frame April 16…” (Roles, 2009) ............... 153
Figure 49 Developing technical improvements in the industrial base/home front in the U.S.; photo from OWM kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 3) ............................................ 153
Figure 50 Assembling manually operated MRAP devices at the Tobyhanna Army Depot; original photo (U.S. Army website) captioned “Jerry Pursel, sheet metal mechanic helper, tests the pull-down kit assembly attached to a CREW antenna system flex-mount device…” (Boucher, 2009) ................................................................................................ 154
Figure 51 A convoy of Caiman MRAPs equipped with the hulking OWM Kit frames that protect the CREW antennas (the thick vertical casings in the photo), the gunner, and other electronic warfare devices against electrocution on top of the vehicles. Original photo (Getty Images) captioned “Soldiers watch as the last American military convoy to depart Iraq from the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division drives through Camp Virginia after crossing over the border into Kuwait on December 18, 2011 in Camp Virginia, Kuwait…” (Tama, 2011) .................................................................................................................................. 154
Figure 52 Excerpt from FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency (U.S. Army, 2006a, p. A-5) ........ 156
Figure 53 Excerpt from the monograph Hearts-and-Minds: A Strategy of Conciliation, Coercion, or Commitment? (Nell, 2012, p. 33 original italics) ......................................... 156
Figure 54 Excerpt from the OWM Kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 5) .......................... 156
Figure 55 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 2) ........................................................................................................................................... 160
Figure 56 Excerpt from the pamphlet Counterinsurgency Guidance (U.S. Army, 2014, p. 1) ........................................................................................................................................... 161
Figure 57 Excerpt from AR 385-10: The Army Safety Program (U.S. Army, 2017, p. 17,83) ........................................................................................................................................... 161
Figure 58 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 3) ........................................................................................................................................... 163
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Figure 59 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 6) ............................................................................................................................................ 164
Figure 60 Bridge Formula from DoT’s guidance pamphlet (Federal Highway Administration, 2015, p. 1) ................................................................................................ 166
Figure 61 Bridge Formula, as in Figure 60, applied to Navistar’s “more” urban version of the MaxxPro Dash MRAP, as measured in Table 3 of sub-section 5.3.3 (by author) ....... 167
Figure 62 Comparison of urban design considerations in MRAP (photo from USAASC, 2018) and commercial truck (photo and diagram from Chiarenza et al., 2018, pp. 13, 23): the first has small-high windows that protect during war (outside inward); the second has large-low windows that expand the field of vision to nearby traffic (inside outward) ............................................................................................................................................ 168
Figure 63 Sketch of U.S. military territorial extension via state metascripts, from the home front’s geography to the warzone’s territorialisations of bases and vehicles (by author) .. 168
Figure 64 Excerpt from Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics (Gillespie, 1992, p. 309) .... 173
Figure 65 Excerpt from This Truck Saved My Life (Friedman, 2013, pp. 231–232) ......... 174
Figure 66 Excerpt from General Petraeus’s talk at Harvard (Miles, 2009) ....................... 175
Figure 67 Concepts, metanarratives, and techno-material realities (by author) ................ 176
Figure 68 MRAP stuck in soft, muddy ground in Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan; original photo captioned “U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Kyle McGann, 466th Air Expeditionary Squadron, Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, digs mud from under [MRAP] vehicle during demolition day, March 16, 2014” (Young Jr., 2014) ............................................. 178
Figure 69 Excerpt from the Test Activity Report (1979, pp. 7–8) ..................................... 179
Figure 70 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Parsons, 2015)............................................... 181
Figure 71 Technical representation of rollover on flat, paved roads as a function of a vehicle’s speed and its body angle relative to the horizontal ground (Varigas Research, Inc., 1979, p. 76) ................................................................................................................ 184
Figure 72 A typical vehicle rollover on flat, paved surface; original photo in Baghdad captioned “A Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle rests on its turret and hood after a rollover…” (Burke, 2009) .................................................................................................. 184
Figure 73 Excerpt on “Capabilities and Limitations” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, pp. 25–26) ................................................................... 185
Figure 74 Excerpt on “Vehicle Safety” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, pp. 39–41) ................................................................................... 187
Figure 75 Sketch of possible road sections and surface types, as in urban design guides, that translates the military’s reduction of the rural landscape to a set of obstacles for the MRAP vehicles; both rows show cross-sections (by author) ............................................ 189
Figure 76 Instructions to keep an organised and stowed layout of an MRAP’s interior, to protect soldiers from random flying objects in the event of an accident; from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 67) ............................................. 189
Figure 77 Excerpt from the Union-Tribune newspaper (Liewer, 2009) ............................ 192
Figure 78 Excerpt from Tip of the Spear magazine (USASFC Public Affairs, 2008, p. 22) ............................................................................................................................................ 192
Figure 79 Excerpt from the Army AL&T magazine (Myers, 2007, p. 52) ......................... 196
Figure 80 Excerpt from the ARL’s medical study (Pakulski et al., 2013, p. 10)............... 197
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Figure 81 MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle testing at the Laguna Mud Course, Yuma Test Center (YTC), Yuma, U.S.; this facility tests for the military vehicles’ traction in mud (ATC Automotive Directorate, 2012, p. 101) .................................................................... 201
Figure 82 MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) stuck in a muddy rural road in Afghanistan, despite all the testing it went through at the YTC (Image source: U.S. Army) ........................................................................................................................................... 201
Figure 83 Excerpt from the NAM website (2013) ............................................................. 202
Figure 84 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Miller, 2008) ................................................. 205
Figure 85 Excerpt from the Army AL&T magazine (Myers, 2007, p. 53 original emphasis) ........................................................................................................................................... 205
Figure 86 MRAP Egress Trainer (MET) prepared for simulation-training at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S.; the device setup is straightforward: an MRAP cab (without the engine, chassis, and wheels) rotating around a horizontal axis (Stagner, 2013; Rogoway, 2017) ....................................................................................................... 207
Figure 87 Airmen flipped upside-down during an MRAP Egress Training (MET) rollover simulation at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S. (Stagner, 2013) ..... 207
Figure 88 Patent art showing the cab part of an MRAP vehicle used in the MRAP egress training simulator (Henriksson, 2014, p. Sheet 12 of 16) .................................................. 208
Figure 89 Preparatory training to spatially familiarise soldiers with the team’s seating positions in an MRAP (seated driver, seated soldiers, standing gunner) prior to initiating the MET egress training – device seen in the background (Prince, 2019) ........................ 208
Figure 90 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Miller, 2008) ................................................. 209
Figure 91 Transcript from MET egress training video (Simon, 2009) .............................. 210
Figure 92 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (3rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, 2009) .................................................................................................................................. 211
Figure 93 Excerpt from U.S. Marine Corps website (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018b) ........... 212
Figure 94 Excerpt from U.S. Marine Corps website (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018a) ............ 212
Figure 95 The transportable MET training devices delivered by trailers at Camp Buehring, Kuwait (U.S. Army, 2009) ................................................................................................ 214
Figure 96 Standardised Army Risk Matrix from the Risk Management Pamphlet (U.S. Army, 2014, p. 8) ............................................................................................................... 214
Figure 97 Changing relation from a passive body (closed brackets) within a technical object (closed brackets) to active human and nonhuman associations (open brackets) (by author) ................................................................................................................................ 215
Figure 98 The body-vehicle associations of an architectural character present in the MRAP capsule part merge with the MRAP vehicle part to produce the body-vehicle-terrain associations of an urban character (by author) .................................................................. 222
Figure 99 The associated milieu of the MRAP’s survivability-mobility hybrid script (by author) ................................................................................................................................ 223
Figure 100 The individuation of survivability’s technical individuals (by author) ........... 224
Figure 101 The MRAP is a hybrid of two sets of associations: one with an architectural character (capsule) and another with an urban character (capsule + truck). The former could exist on its own, but the latter is a hybrid of both. Otherwise, the mobile MRAP vehicle becomes the stationary MRAP Egress Trainer device (by author). ...................... 227
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List of Tables Table 1 A list of the primary (P) and secondary (S) sources used in the empirical analysis; sources are listed by document type, count, and source of retrieval (compiled by author). 71
Table 2 Reproduced excerpt from “Appendix A: U.S. Military or Contractor Personnel Electrocuted in Iraq March 2003 through March 2009” (PL for power line, A for Army, M for Marines) in DoD Inspector General’s report (Inspector General, 2009, p. 29) ............ 143
Table 3 Reproduced MaxxPro vehicle model comparison from the Navistar Defense website; smallest dimension shaded in grey and urban MRAP model dimensions emphasised in bold (illustration by author); all data is from the website, and all dimensions are in meters and weights in metric tons (Navistar Defense, 2019)................................... 151
Table 4 Comparison of total paved mileage with respect to overall country area among Afghanistan, Iraq, and Texas; areas are in square miles and road lengths in miles, sources of retrieval listed in the table (data compiled by author) ................................................... 178
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Abstract The University of Manchester Fadi Shayya Doctor of Philosophy 28 December 2020
Politics of Survivability: How Military Technology Scripts Urban Relations
This thesis scrutinises the spatialisation of contemporary urban warfare by embracing a symmetric perspective to the study of military technologies and its potential to script urban relations. While urban and architectural studies are at the forefront of engaging with such pressing issues, the predominant Critical approach remains largely social constructivist and anthropocentric. Technologies are treated as passive projections of Power; they neither break down nor evolve, and they lack agency relating users and environments. Rather than embracing the grand narratives that explain established power structures and social systems, we emphasise the need to study the spatialisation of urban warfare as a process that can be better unpacked at the level of the daily functioning of military technology. At that level, what becomes a vital matter of concern, a disputed issue is survivability. Exploring survivability allows us to examine the mundane relational politics connecting soldiers’ bodies to technical objects and urban landscapes, configuring new relations between humans and nonhumans. The thesis offers an analysis of military armoured vehicles as dynamic and evolving technical objects, and it traces through their functioning and breakdowns a relational politics of survivability that is instigated at that mundane level of urban warfare. Notably, we trace such associations to the MRAP-type vehicles sought after by the U.S. military to restore survivability and negotiate the deadly threat of detonations during the aughts wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The analysis shows how survivability becomes a disputed issue, a matter of concern, that underpins the military’s technical and doctrinal development. We demonstrate how power cannot be projected without considerations for the survivability of soldiers, equipment, and missions/systems. Such survivability is the outcome of two crucial and interdependent processes: the technical development of concrete armour concepts, materials, and technologies; and the sociotechnical associations between the soldiers and the armoured vehicles. We analyse the former in utility patents that document resolving the armour’s antagonisms in a series of heterogenous inventions, and the latter in military publications, governmental policy documents, and secondary sources that connect the work of humans and nonhumans. While utility patents help us explain technical improvements and lineages in the lab, the military publications and other sources help us explain the deployment of the vehicles in the field and the challenges and breakdowns they encounter, be they combat or non-combat related. Moreover, we analyse the associations of architectural and urban characters related to the armoured vehicles, examined here as mobile fortified enclosures, connecting soldiers’ bodies to different environments in a versatile relational way. The thesis thus makes three contributions to debates in urban studies, architectural humanities, and STS: 1) It advances the epistemological position that survivability is intrinsically connected to the functioning of military technical objects; 2) it expands on the relational theory of the architectural and the urban as a way of connecting, where armoured vehicles extend the scope of architectural and urban research beyond the figure of the static building; 3) it answers a methodological question about employing technical objects to study the spatialisation of urban warfare and the reduction of the landscape into terrain. All three contributions advance a pragmatist perspective on a relational politics of survivability through human-nonhuman interdependency.
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Declaration No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
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Acknowledgments This PhD project would not have been possible without the support of many individuals and organisations. As a first-generation university graduate and a practitioner-turned-academic, I would like to extend my acknowledgements as follows. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Albena Yaneva, for guiding me in developing my research project and academic persona. We first met in New York. At the Manchester Architecture Research Group, she provided a highly stimulating intellectual environment through periodic meetings, detailed feedback, and engaging seminars. Her PhD seminar renewed my understanding of social and urban theory, cultivated my writing style, and connected me to an exceptional network of academics. I participated in a masterclass with Professor Bruno Latour. I presented my research in her seminar and received feedback from guest Professors Mattias Kärrholm and Gunnar Sandin (Lund University), Dana Cuff (UCLA), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University), Keith Murphy (UC Irvine), Ole B. Jensen (Aalborg University), Paul Jones (University of Liverpool), Alessandro Armando and Giovanni Durbiano (Politecnico di Torino), and Arlene Oak (University of Alberta). I am also profoundly grateful to my second supervisor, Dr Leandro Minuchin, for his committed reading and active engagement in orienting my research design and focusing its ambitious scope. I thank my viva examiners, Professors Mattias Kärrholm and Stephen Walker, for a stimulating intellectual discussion, Dr Łukasz Stanek for acting as annual review examiner, and Dr Kim Förster for acting as viva chair. Embarking on my PhD course has been generously facilitated by the University of Manchester. I am greatly appreciative for receiving: The School of Environment, Education and Development (SEED) Studentship Award, which funded three years of tuition and stipend (2016-2019); the Faculty of Humanities grant for Internationalisation PGR Mobility Scheme to visit Lund University (2019), where I received feedback from Professor Mattias Kärrholm, Dr Gunnar Sandin, Dr Emma Nilsson, and Dr Sandra Koplajr, among others; funding to attend several academic conferences, training workshops, and writing retreats; and an award from the Living Costs Support Fund during the COVID-19 lockdown. I extend my thanks and appreciation to the IJURR Foundation for awarding me a 2020 Writing-Up Grant, which helped me get through my submission pending year. The PhD journey would not have been the same without the kind and professional support of SEED’s PGR Office staff, SEED’s research and teaching colleagues, Humanities’ colleagues, and teaching assistants’ solidarity. Engaging with the academic community at the university helped me understand my audience and streamline my ideas. The strain of doing doctoral research would not have been as bearable and enjoyable without the light touch of many friends and colleagues, whom I shall name a few here. I appreciate co-organising reading groups with Brett Mommersteeg and Stelios Zavos; co-chairing the 2019 AHRA PhD Student Symposium with Demetra Kourri; participating in department and school academic events; supporting teaching and dissertation supervision (as Teaching Assistant) at the Manchester School of Architecture; organising Arts Methods workshops for PGRs; and becoming Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (2020). Besides, producing this research could not have been possible without the help of my trusted laptop Lenovo X1 Carbon (Gen 2), OnePlus 6 Android smartphone, MS Office 365, Zotero, Adobe Suite, Google Services, Grammarly, Mozilla Firefox, and the university’s library resources. Finally, my partner, friends, and family’s kindness made this arduous journey bearable. I am profoundly grateful for that. To my mom, aunt, late dad, and sisters: this achievement is dedicated to you.
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Chapter 1
Introduction: Unrevised Modernisms
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…it might after all be better to be at war, and thus to be forced to think about the diplomatic work to be done, than to imagine that there is no war at all and keep talking endlessly about progress, modernity, development – without realizing the price that must be paid in reaching such lofty goals…we have first to fathom that a war of the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the so-called “modern age”…what is needed is a new recognition of the old war we have been fighting all along – in order to bring about new kinds of negotiation, and a new kind of peace. (Latour, 2002, p. 3)
…military experts constantly revise their strategic doctrines, their contingency plans, the size, direction, and technology of their projectiles, their smart bombs, their missiles; I wonder why we, we alone, would be saved from those sorts of revisions. It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets. (Latour, 2004b, p. 225)
1.0 New Problems, Old Questions
One common thread among the Critical studies on contemporary urban warfare is
the urban character of the new battlefield. It is a physically dense, stacked, and
labyrinthian space; it is packed with civilians and formal/informal systems of governance
and communication; and it accommodates flows within varying qualities of infrastructural
networks. We observe such description in scholarly works of critical urban and
architectural studies (e.g., Graham, 2011; Weizman, 2017b) across fields like Human
Geography, Architecture, Planning, and Sociology (Chapter 2). The same thread runs a
critique of how the military studies contemporary urban and architectural theory and the
philosophy of space (e.g., Graham, 2004c; Weizman, 2006a). It also follows an
explanatory metanarrative of how Capitalism circulates surplus capital through the built
environment, best explained through the notion of “the urbanization of capital” (Harvey,
1985) and ultimately exemplified through the spatial reorganisation project of mid-19th
century Paris, i.e., Haussmannisation (Chapter 2).
Not only does the military study the same spatial theories as in the academic
literature – for, after all, it acts “in this world” (Yaneva, 2021 forthcoming), but it often
comes to the same conclusions and findings only to employ it for its military objectives1.
The military, as a state institution and technological organisation, also engages in
international development, peacekeeping, homeland security, civil defence, and logistics,
1 For example, see Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare (e.g., Glenn, 1996), Megacities and the United States Army: Preparing for a Complex and Uncertain Future (Harris et al., 2014), and Mad Scientist: Megacities and Dense Urban Areas in 2025 and Beyond (Lawton and Shields, 2016)
22
among other involvements. It has come a long way from examining mid-19th century Paris
to analysing 20th-century wars, especially more recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Chechnya, Iraq, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Northern Ireland, former
Rhodesia, Palestine, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
So, why do Critical urban and architectural studies continue to insist on creating
this divide with the military as an outsider to studying the urban, developing technology,
and instigating violence? Why do these studies continue to reference 19th century “French”
Haussmannisation as the all-encompassing explanatory model of systemic and structural
power differentials between those strong, imperial, and high-tech, and those weak,
common, and low-tech? Our questions intend to provoke the unrevised task and purpose of
studying contemporary urban warfare in urban and architectural studies based on outdated
epistemological modes of analysis, which fall behind on tackling the daily functioning of
military technologies and the relational politics that it instigates.
1.1 Jenin Is Not Paris
An exemplary account for invoking Haussmannisation is the critical literature’s
analysis of Israeli military operations during the Second Palestinian Intifada (2000-2005),
particularly the use of the air force and armoured bulldozers to clear ways in the dense
urban fabric and the barricades during the 2002 battles of Jenin and Nablus. Such military
strategies that target the built environment and infrastructure are even dubbed
“demodernization” (Graham, 2004b, 2006b, 2011), referring to a kind of absolute power
for setting a society backwards by stripping it from its infrastructure. As appalling as these
military operations were and as appealing the idea of demodernisation is, what happened in
21st century Jenin is not what and how it happened in 19th century Paris. The French capital
was not bombarded by the air force, nor it was demodernised by bulldozers. Conversely,
Jenin and Nablus were not spatially reorganised to equip them with boulevards and parks.
In the spirit of Latour, we pose two philosophical problematics here: How to study
situations as they happen through the actions of the actors and “in this world” not the one
that ought to be? And how to escape the binaries of modernise/demodernise,
military/civilian, east/west, and moral/immoral to keep pace with the contemporariness of
urban warfare through the functioning of the technical objects, the spatialisation generated,
and the technical thought, i.e., “technics” (Simondon, 2017), guiding it?
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The existing Critical studies depart from the proposition that the urban is
asymmetrical. Urban and architectural studies have demonstrated this repeatedly,
highlighting in the process all sorts of inequalities, injustices, and distribution differentials.
So, why repeat this task when studying militarisation and warfare? Instead of replicating
the outcomes of military thought through larger and external explanatory frameworks, our
ambition is rather to unpack how military technologies operate on a daily basis and thus
contribute to the spatialisation of military action and its inherently relational political
agency. By so doing, we will embark on a symmetrical study of the spatialisation of
warfare. This will imply examining the military’s technical objects as mediators that act,
evolve, or breakdown, not as artefacts projecting and symbolising absolute power (Chapter
3). They do not act only to transport power unchanged but to withstand and endure a
displacement, or “transformation” (Latour, 1996c; Yaneva, 2021 forthcoming), that makes
the realisation of power possible. This ability to withstand a displacement is what the
military calls “survivability.” This is not the mere notion of human interdependence
(Butler, 2016) or biological survival, but the ability of humans and nonhumans (i.e.,
soldiers, equipment, and systems) to remain “mission capable” (U.S. Army, 2005, pp. 1, 7–
8) upon encountering an antagonism or a breakdown. The mediating role of military
technologies in warfare can be explored through studies of military inventions and analysis
of breakdown situations, in addition to military practices of making terrain.
This notion of survivability is not sufficiently explored in the literature. The
literature on military urbanisms and architectures studies the urban as a medium for
warfare and militarisation where constituted and known subjects and objects are in conflict:
the strong military; the weak civilians; the technical objects that neither evolve nor
breakdown; and the urban landscape that is shaped by forces outside it. In turn, a larger gap
becomes visible where technological change is simplified to a binary of spillover from
military to civilian domains and Politics is reduced to a structural asymmetry concerned
with disproportionality. Therefore, we will unpack survivability as a complex phenomenon
(easily attributed to humans only) of the networked agency of entities with different
ontologies – human (be they military, civilian, in government, or in science and
engineering) and nonhuman (technologies, landscapes, procedures, urban artefacts), all
mobilised in situations of urban warfare.
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1.2 Breakdown in Iraq and Afghanistan
technical activity belongs neither to the pure social domain nor the pure psychic domain. Technical activity is the model of the collective relationship, which cannot be confused with one of the two preceding ones; it is not the only mode and the only content of the collective, but it is of the collective, and, in certain cases, it is around technical activity that the collective group can arise. (Simondon, 2017, p. 250)
The military has tested, both at testing centers and in the field, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, also called an MRAP. The MRAP provides dramatically improved protection against IEDs. The military has said that it is four to five times as good as an up-armored HMMWV. More important, military commanders tell us that it will reduce deaths and casualties from IEDs by 67 to 80 percent. The Brookings Institution found that 1,400 Americans died in Iraq due to IEDs from March of 2003 through June of 2007. If we had had MRAPs in the field from the start--and we could and should have--938 to 1,120 Americans would be alive today. (Senator Biden (DE), 2007)
Nowhere was such a breakdown more evident than in the aughts protracted
occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Wars claimed in the name of the modern yet suffering
huge losses and becoming an even larger fiasco. However, these wars will not be analysed
from the outside as actions within dualisms of East and West, modern and nonmodern,
good and evil, democracy and dictatorship, to name a few (see ‘Rethinking the Modern
Constitution’ in Yaneva, 2021 forthcoming). Unlike Critical studies that tackle the urban as
asymmetrical, as passive projections of Big Politics (with a big “P”), we will explore the
mediating role of military technologies and how they act by “making the social hold”
(Latour, 2005) through a relational politics of survivability between humans and
nonhumans.
Our study follows the development of the MRAP as the means of a mediation so
desperately sought after by the U.S. military to restore survivability and negotiate the
deadly threat of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. Described
as “one of the largest material acquisition programs since World War II” (Howitz, 2008),
developing the MRAP stirred up major debates within the U.S. political institutions and
public sphere. The new armoured vehicle was the improved technical mediation – besides
changes to doctrine and training – to restore survivability where the once prominent
Humvee2 failed. A failure that led to the defence secretary stepping down3 (PBS
2 This is the popular name for the HMMWV, short for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, which was the U.S. military’s main mobility and light tactical vehicle during the 1990s Gulf War and other military operations. It also became famous in its civilian version, the Hummer. 3 Amidst many controversial matters, including torturing and abusing prisoners in Iraq and the initial unfounded claims about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, Donald Rumsfeld stepped down, and
25
NewsHour, 2006; Stolberg and Rutenberg, 2006) after ineffective attempts at improving
the military’s armour, in what became to be known as “the lost two years” (Lamb, Schmidt
and Fitzsimmons, 2009). The MRAP reassembled inventions from technical developments
in metallurgy, electronics, and advanced materials. Eventually, the cost for restoring
survivability through the MRAP program amounted to a near $50 billion in U.S. dollars
and produced more than 27,000 vehicles from an initial plan for 500 (Singer, 2012; Sisk,
2012).
The MRAP vehicles became the figure of a mobile fortification that spatialised
asymmetric warfare by attempting to establish symmetry with the IEDs. Their fortified
enclosures emphasised the separation of a safe inside and a dangerous outside, yet their
occupants (i.e., the soldiers) still had to negotiate this separation and establish sociability
with the local citizens (Chapter 5) or complement the work of mediation through training
for extreme situations (Chapter 6). Thus, we venture into the military’s world of
technology as “a most active site of progress” (Simondon, 2017, p. 31) to explore how the
MRAP as a figure of extreme human-technology relations push the cognitive, corporeal,
and material performance amidst bodies, vehicles, and terrain. We follow the technical
development of the MRAP and how it incorporates a script – a programme of actions, a
vision for survivability – that fails as much as it succeeds. The MRAP emerges as a most
suitable research object to study asymmetry through architectural and urban lenses. The
former looks at the MRAP as a fortification that protects its occupants and draws its
principles from military experience, while the latter looks at the MRAP as a vehicle that
must realise movement/mobility by terraining its environment no matter its character.
1.3 Research Aims & Objectives
Our thesis aims to study the relational politics of military technical objects,
demonstrating how urban and architectural scholars can trace the urban as a type of
associations. Its ambitious premise is situated in pragmatist studies of urban and
architectural associations among humans, their technical objects, and their environments
(Kärrholm, 2007; Yaneva, 2009b, 2010; Kärrholm, 2013, 2016; Yaneva, 2017; Mubi
Robert Gates got appointed as Secretary of Defence. The latter aggressively pushed for the rapid acquisition of the MRAP vehicles.
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Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2019; Yaneva, 2020; Mubi Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2020;
Yaneva, 2021). We plan to achieve this aim through the following research objectives:
1. Review the relevant literature on the spatialisation of warfare and militarisation,
surveying a body of research on military urbanisms and architectures from the
Architectural Humanities and Human Geography but also from the Social Sciences. To
identify the gaps, the literature is situated against a pragmatist theoretical framework of
sociotechnical associations inspired by Actor-Network Theory and Gilbert Simondon’s
philosophy of technical evolution.
2. Collect data on sociotechnical associations and technical inventions from a range of
original primary sources that have never been analysed before as such in urban and
architectural studies, complemented by secondary sources where we trace situations of
breakdown in the field.
3. Analyse the data in four moves:
a. Analyse situations of breakdown of military technologies that instigate an
improvement to the mediation of the technical object (i.e., the vehicle), be it
upon the deadly impact of IED detonations (Chapter 4) or frictions in Iraq’s
urban landscape (Chapter 5) and Afghanistan’s rural landscape (Chapter 6).
b. Unpack the realisation of the survivability script by scrutinising the
sociotechnical associations among a network of inventions in the lab, the
military institution’s work, and the soldiers and vehicles’ actions in the field.
c. Trace the concretisation (Simondon, 2017) of the vehicles as objects of
survivability and relational to their terrain, not as dialectical moves between
problems and solutions but as a continuous evolution that adapts,
oversaturates, and eventually becomes a new technical object.
d. Follow processes of terraining where the landscape (people, environment,
infrastructure) is encountered, experienced, and re-discovered through the
feedback loops of the vehicles and their success/failure to mediate
survivability.
To show how survivability becomes a disputed issue, a matter of concern, that
underpins the military’s daily functioning in war, our methods include: 1) analysing the
technical development of concrete armour concepts, materials, and technologies in utility
patents, which document resolving the armour’s antagonisms in a series of inventions; and,
2) analysing the sociotechnical associations between the soldiers and the armoured
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vehicles in military publications, governmental policy documents, and secondary sources,
which document the vehicles’ deployment in the field and the breakdowns they encounter.
1.4 Audience and Contributions
Accordingly, we argue throughout the thesis for the need to trace associations of
architectural and urban characters in the figure of the MRAP as a mobile armoured
enclosure/envelope. Our architectural training and skills to analyse and design spatial
figurations give us the ability to engage with the engineering of the MRAP and its
spatialisation of asymmetric warfare. However, and more importantly, we argue (Chapter
7) that analysing the MRAP through this method furnishes new possibilities for architects
and urbanists to address the architectural and the urban as associations, as a very specific
way of connecting people and things, and technologies and landscapes. Particularly, one
that frees our thinking from the preconceived figures – or “hylomorphisms” to stay in the
style of Simondon – of building and city, only to trace them in new figures like that of the
vehicle. By no means is this method a refutation or abandonment of the common figures;
rather, the claim recognises the extension of such associations via a lineage of technical
schemas to new figures of human practice and inhabitation. Also, this does not make a
vehicle an architectural or urban object, but it allows us to examine the architectural and
the urban as associations established in a technological era of advanced mobility. This, in
turn, allows us to explore extreme situations and their impact on building/construction and
the human body4 in the changing landscape around us, and not only in distant frontiers5.
The thesis aims to make three contributions to debates in urban studies, the
architectural humanities, and STS (Chapter 7). First, it advances the epistemological
position that survivability would not be the same without the agency of the technical
object. Second, it expands on the relational theory of the architectural and the urban as
associations crafted through armoured vehicles, extending the scope and domain of
architectural and urban studies beyond the figure of the static building. And third, it
4 An example of changing conceptions of the human body, and to stay with MRAPs and IEDs, would be the U.S. Army’s new high-tech crash test dummy WIAMan, short for Warrior Injury Assessment Manikin (Boss, 2017). It is described as “a ground-breaking anthropomorphic test device” designed specifically to test the impact of extreme detonations, like those of IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan. It measures potential skeletal, spinal, and extremity injuries via sensors embedded in 3D printed parts that simulate the human body. 5 An example of distant frontiers would be the series of events entitled Architecture in the Extreme, convened at the Architectural Association to discuss challenges for building in extreme polar environments (AA, 2019).
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answers a methodological question about how to employ technical objects to study the
spatialisation of urban warfare and terrains. All three contributions contribute to a better
understanding of a relational politics of survivability.
1.5 Thesis Structure
The thesis is structured into seven chapters: Introduction, Literature Review,
Methodology, three Empirical Chapters, and Discussion. The Introduction Chapter sets the
scene and states the aims and objectives. We begin with reviewing a body of relevant
scholarly literature against the theoretical framework of the thesis. We frame the reviewed
literature as military urbanisms and architectures, mainly drawing on “the architecture of
occupation” and other works from urbanist/architect Eyal Weizman (2002, 2003, 2006b,
2006a, 2017b) and “the new military urbanism” and other works from urbanist/geographer
Stephen Graham (2003, 2004b, 2007b, 2009, 2011, 2016). The accounts of this literature
examine the physical and socioeconomic impact of war on humans and their buildings,
cities, and infrastructure to show how militarisation organises flows across the landscape
by deploying networks of obstacles (walls, barriers, checkpoints) and surveillance
(biometric cards, electronic detection, GPS) among others. However, the accounts start
from constituted technical objects that fit into known social/power structures. This body of
work does not take into account the daily functioning of the technical objects, their
operational dynamics and breakdowns. As military technology remains static, it is often
used as a projection of social, economic, and political factors. We review the literature
against a theoretical framework that draws on STS, Actor-Network Theory, and the
philosophy of technology.
Then we outline the method for tracing the associations of survivability. Informed
by STS and ANT, the method presents a twofold strategy. A first strand to analyse how the
MRAP assembles survivability as a “script” (Akrich, 1992; Latour, 2005), or program of
actions, that regulates the impact of detonations on the vehicle and its occupants. It is
deployed to discuss how mediating the extreme terrain of detonations is sociotechnical,
i.e., scripted into the engineering of the armoured vehicle as well as the training of its
drivers and occupants. It helps conceptualise the MRAP as a highly protected and enclosed
atmospheric capsule that privileges the survivability of specific bodies and not others. A
second strand to examine how the genesis of the MRAP and its becoming a reliable
technical object for survivability is a process of “concretization” (Simondon, 2017), i.e.,
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balancing the technical functioning with its geographic environment. It helps conceptualise
the MRAP as an urban object that develops and operates relational to its urban terrain, the
urban being intensities of the built, the paved, and the infrastructural. This method allows
us to trace changes or “de-scription” (Akrich, 1992) in the first strand and processes of
increasing the “technicity” (Simondon, 2017) of the technical object in the second strand,
which is its technical capacity that relates humans to nonhumans.
Unable to be in the field of warfare, our twofold tracing method constitutes a
quasi-ethnographic approach that relies on analysing primary and secondary sources
whose combination has not been yet explored in architectural and urban studies. It is quasi-
ethnographic because it follows the actor-networks and collects observation in the publicly
accessible sources that were (and continue to be) active in shaping and informing of
military strategy and practice during the occupation of Iraq (2003-2011/present) and
Afghanistan (2001-2014/present). The primary sources include utility patents, military
references and studies, governmental regulations, and video material, while the secondary
ones include second-hand accounts of events or primary sources, such as news articles,
reports, commercial brochures, and websites. We equally trace technological change across
all sources, be they military or commercial, taking into consideration how the specialised
lens of each domain and source type frames the matter at hand. The approach grants us a
way of “being there” and grasping the field.
This brings us to the three empirical chapters that we structure by the types of
breakdowns and the sources to trace them in. The first (Chapter 4) analyses the assembling
of the MRAP vehicle as a survivability script against combat-related breakdowns (i.e.,
detonations) through a series of inventions and as documented in utility patents. The
second (Chapter 5) and third (Chapter 6) analyse the adaptation of the MRAP vehicle
against non-combat related breakdowns upon deployment to urban and rural terrains and as
found in military publications, governmental documents, and secondary sources.
In Chapter 4, entitled “Engineering the Military Script,” we explore the complex
technical and geographic relations that inform “scripting” the MRAP for survivability. We
trace the “concretization” (Simondon, 2017) of the MRAP, which is the resolving of
tensions between its technical and geographic milieus/environments as it develops from an
inert protective enclosure centred around a passive human body to an active body-vehicle-
terrain machine. Instead of a conventional cross-patent analysis to trace innovation
patterns, we analyse “major and minor improvements” (Simondon, 2017), the former being
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fully integrated primary changes that discontinue/mutate the technical object and the latter
being non-integrated secondary changes that maintain the technical object. These
improvements constitute the military’s feedback loops of experiencing an extreme
environment of detonations during mobility in their endeavour to maintain survivability.
We analyse different aspects of the MRAP script and its dynamic engineering in seventeen
utility patents and four patent applications, published between 2005 (the initial request date
for MRAP vehicles) and 2017 (the most recent technical development).
The patents allow us to identify how the associations between the soldiers’ bodies
and the MRAP, and those between the MRAP and its terrain, evolve and transform. They
evolve from topographic notions of Euclidean space and inside-outside separation to
topological ones of feedback loops, flows, and distributed agencies between humans and
nonhumans. With the evolving associations, the bodies of the soldiers transform from
passive receivers of the impact of terrain to active mediators of its impact, complementing
the mediation of the vehicles. We introduce the active process of terraining, which is the
making of terrain, and argue that this is a useful translation between military and academic
communities of practice: 1) to understand how the urban, as a theoretical category, is
performed as intensities of terraining through the mediation of technical objects; and 2) to
trace how versions of terrain script and stabilise the technical object.
In Chapter 5, entitled “Electric Streets, Fortress Highways,” we examine how the
military’s MRAP script gets “de-scripted” upon breakdowns in Iraq. The military
encounters the urban landscape as infrastructural intensities of narrow streets, low-hanging
power lines, overhead clearances, and relations with civilians. The chapter analyses how
the MRAP stacks technical devices and compresses the space of survivability to a bounded
interior, asking the following questions: How does the MRAP encounter the urban? How
does it relate to the locals/civilians? How does the military figure survivability relational to
urban infrastructural intensities? And how does the MRAP relate to different versions of
the urban landscape as it circulates between the warzone in Iraq and the home front in the
U.S.? We follow the MRAPs upon their fielding in Iraq (since 2007) and later upon their
return to the U.S. (after 2012) through tracing breakdown situations of electrical shocks,
signal jamming, and road safety upon frictions with various infrastructural networks. Our
sources are military publications (briefings, field manuals, guidance, handbooks, strategy,
techniques), Department of Defense reports, Department of Transportation pamphlets,
Army news articles and professional bulletins, and commercial defence brochures. We
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argue that the military reassembles various dimensions of warfare through the MRAP and
relational to survivability in non-combat related urban situations.
Examining the specificity of the MRAP script and the deployment of the vehicles
in Iraq (and later in Afghanistan) leads us to find what happens upon the end of military
operations. As the MRAPs return to the U.S., we follow how the military subscribes to a
different set of concerns about public safety and defence readiness that submit the MRAP
to new mobility restrictions. We introduce this lens to show how the technical object stops
mediating survivability against IEDs and electrical shocks to realise a different version of
an urban landscape. In the U.S., the military’s MRAP becomes a truck6 that must abide by
the federal transportation regulations, including becoming a heavy artefact that must be
transported by other trucks.
In Chapter 6, entitled “Breathing in an Upside-down World,” we examine how the
MRAP script gets “de-scripted” upon breakdowns in Afghanistan, and we follow the
military as it adapts regional/rural variants of the vehicles to non-urban intensities. The
military encounters the rural as the lack of infrastructure, paved roads, and flat surfaces.
Instead, the rural to the MRAP is defined by its irregular surfaces, soft soil, and risk of
falling into bodies of water. The chapter analyses how the survivability script cuts across
bodily, architectural/vehicular, and urban/landscape scales as it expands the testing,
simulation, and training requirements for the MRAP, asking the following questions: How
does the MRAP encounter the rural? How does a land vehicle operate relational to water?
And how does the MRAP recruit the human body to become an active part of the technical
object? We follow the MRAPs upon fielding their Iraq-versions to Afghanistan (since
2008) then upon adaptations for an Afghanistan-version (since 2010), tracing breakdown
situations of rollover, drowning, and bodily traumas during encounters with rugged terrain.
Besides the sources used in Chapter 5, additional sources for this chapter include military
publications (risk assessment, medical reports, test operation procedures), Congressional
reports, and military training videos. We argue that the military reassembles further
dimensions of asymmetric warfare through the MRAP, this time by differentiating the rural
from the urban as intensities of the lack of infrastructure and relational to a terraining
process that enrols human bodies to co-mediate with the MRAP.
6 The analysis of this aspect does not cover the transfer of the MRAP to Law Enforcement Agencies like the Police, which is the scope for another study.
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Unlike the breakdowns in Iraq, examining Afghanistan’s terrain uncovers a more
intense form of sociotechnical relations between the MRAP and its users. The direct
impact on the MRAP’s occupants (i.e., drowning) expands the analysis from the MRAP
vehicle as the only technical object of survivability into another technical object, the
MRAP Egress Trainer. This lens shows the emergence of a new technical individual, what
Simondon theorises as “individuation” (2017).
Finally, the Discussion Chapter brings the research findings together and
discusses three research contributions to STS, urban studies, and the architectural
humanities: 1) how survivability becomes a concern for the spatialisation of urban warfare;
2) how the armoured vehicles craft associations of an architectural character with their
occupants and associations of an urban character with their environment; and, 3) how our
method for tracing these associations explains a relational politics of survivability through
human-nonhuman interdependency. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the politics of
survivability through Simondon’s philosophy of equality between human beings and
technical beings (2017) and its implications to our thinking method as urban and
architectural researchers. To avoid static notions of space as a container of constituted
technical objects (i.e., artefacts), and to escape situating military thought within larger
explanatory frameworks imposed from the outside, we ought to give more attention to the
way military technologies operate and how by so doing they instigate new spatial
compositions between humans and nonhumans, and technical and geographic realities.
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Chapter 2
Literature Review: Military Urbanisms
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2.0 Introduction
In the introduction, we raised three empirical problems with armoured military
vehicles, which increasingly shape our understanding of how military technologies reduce
the urban, primarily to something to be survived. First, the vehicles as inventions produced
by the military and their engineering, and documented in utility patents, are different
objects from those that operate in the urban landscape. This is evident in the combat-
related and non-combat related breakdowns that the MRAPs sustain, despite their superior
engineering (Chapter 4), once deployed for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (Chapters 5
and 6). Second, the vehicles as mobile envelopes enclose the bodies of soldiers to protect
them through a relation of symmetry. This is evident in the MRAPs’ fortified design
against the disproportionate threat of IEDs to soldiers’ bodies and vehicles (Chapter 4),
which gives urban/irregular warfare its asymmetric character. Third, the vehicles as
technical objects evolve through a process of reducing the urban landscape (as an external
environment) to functional synergies (within the technical object) whose aim is to realise
survivability. This is evident in the military’s focus on the MRAPs relations with paved
roads and infrastructure in Iraq (Chapter 5) and with unpaved roads and irregular terrain in
Afghanistan (Chapter 6). Thus, the feedback loops that circulate between the processes of
invention (in the patents and the workshops) and the landscapes7 of operations (in Iraq and
Afghanistan) are not absolute flows of exchange between known military objects and
bounded landscapes. The technical object, i.e., the MRAP, raises the question of how the
military and their engineering spatialise survivability and mobility through human-
nonhuman associations and coordinate the MRAP vehicle as multiple versions of an object
and different reductions of a landscape8.
To address the research aims and answer the research questions, we review the
literature on military urbanisms and architectures in Human Geography, Urbanism, and
Architectural Studies in the first part of the chapter (2.1). This literature from what could
be called interdisciplinary urban studies examines military urbanisms and architectures as
structures of control over space and territory (Graham, 2011, 2016; Weizman, 2017b). We
begin with reviewing recent literature that posit the urban as a medium and study technical
7 We borrow the “military landscapes” approach from geographer Rachel Woodward (2014) to refer to the extended geographies shaped by militarisation and viewed through military visions across Iraq, Afghanistan, the U.S., and the world. This landscape includes urban, rural, and other figurations. 8 Another notion of the landscape that we employ is the entirety of place (natural, built, inhabited), similar to philosopher of science Peter Galison’s notion of “technical lands/landscapes” and landscape architect/urbanist Pierre Belanger’s “landscape as infrastructure” (2017).
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objects as parts of networks/systems designed to intervene on/in that medium. While their
networks are lively and dynamic, the politics of such military urbanisms and architectures
is socially constructed and objects black-boxed, through conceptual lenses like
Haussmannisation and verticality. Their premise of the military as an established power
misses what underpins such discourse, particularly survivability.
Accordingly, we recognise a gap in studying the politics of militarisation at the
scale of objects as socially constructed artefacts and technological black boxes9 rather than
in relation to their landscapes not as context but as a ground of technical relations. Through
its stable objects that do not evolve or breakdown except through and according to the
social structures that produce them, militarisation’s relation to and impact on the built
environment – as conveyed in the literature – dismisses the complexity of technological
change as a human-nature relation in favour for grand social narratives and explanations.
Thus, the survivability lens flattens the epistemological plane to research humans (military
and civilians) and nonhumans (technical objects and landscapes). It allows us to bridge the
gap in two ways: first, by studying a military practice of spatialising survivability through
the reduction of the landscape (what we call terraining in Chapters 4-6); and second, by
uncovering a politics and knowledge based in technics (after Simondon, 2017), among the
technical objects, the terrain/landscape, engineering and the military.
To address the gap, we draw our theoretical framework from the philosophy of
technology of Gilbert Simondon (Combes, 2012; De Boever et al., 2012; Simondon, 2017)
and the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) inspired Science and Technology Studies (STS),
particularly the sociology of innovation (Callon, 1986b; Law, 1987; MacKenzie, 1989;
Akrich, 1992; Latour, 1992, 1996a; de Laet and Mol, 2000; Law, 2002; Akrich et al.,
2002a, 2002b; Latour, 2004b, 2005; MacKenzie, 2012) in the second part of the chapter
(2.2). While our urbanist-architectural inquiry into technical objects and the built
environment has a sociological character, we employ philosophy to help us probe an
“empirical metaphysics” (see Latour, 2005, pp. 50–51) of beings and agencies in accounts
of making, displacing, and mutating. The theories and concepts of this literature look at
objects, users, and inventions as processes of assembling networks of dynamic human and
nonhuman actors, through associations among the actors and their milieu (spatial,
9 Our use of the term “black box” follows Latour’s pragmatist-realist notion of the invisibility of technical and scientific work upon its success in an apparatus (see Glossary in Latour, 1999b, p. 304), thus focusing on its input/output unless it breaks down. Compare this to a hybrid materialist-phenomenological notion of a symbol/signifier “black box of the world… that can never be opened” (Galloway, 2010, 2018).
37
temporal, geographic). Unlike urban STS which is focused on infrastructural materialities
(Graham and Marvin, 2001), Simondon’s philosophy develops a theory of coming-into-
being and the ANT-STS advances theories of sociotechnical relations and flat ontologies.
2.1 Military Urbanisms and Architectures
The crossover between the military and the civilian applications of advanced technology – between the surveillance and control of everyday life in Western cities and the prosecution of aggressive colonial and resource wars – is at the heart of a much broader set of trends that characterize the new military urbanism. (Graham, 2011, p. xiii)
The various inhabitants of this frontier do not operate within the fixed envelopes of space – space is not the background for their actions, an abstract grid on which events take place – but rather the medium that each of their actions seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate. (Weizman, 2017b, p. 7)
Today, militarisation is ubiquitous. It is in discourse, politics, security, war,
technology, health, education, and everyday life. The term10 is generally used as a
descriptor to imply military or military-style discursive and practical influences. It has
become synonymous with different strategies, policies, and practices spilling over from
military to non-military domains. This includes11: the expansion of military authority and
dominion (Lutz, 2002b, 2009b; Woodward, 2005, 2014), the transfer and adaptation of
military technologies (Gregory, 2004; Graham, 2011; Cowen, 2014), and the diffusion of
military strategies and tactics (Graham, 2011; Weizman, 2017b; Khalili, 2020). To escape
modern binaries, the spill over process is problematised as an intensified blurriness and/or
looseness between the boundaries of military and civilian institutions and technologies.
The key theoretical and operational terms in this crucial matter still encompass
stabilised definitions of old and new processes: militarism is the ideology for prioritising
armed violence (e.g., post-911 war strategy); militarisation is the process of
operationalising militarism (e.g., funding university research to advance military
technology); military describes the formal/professional armed forces (e.g., the U.S. Army
and Marine Corps); and, militarised describes anything that has been controlled by a
militaristic ideology and practice (e.g., U.S. ports/borders and the invaded territories of
10 Originating from the Latin mīles which denotes traversing distance (Kent, 1910), an understanding rooted in mobility and terrain. 11 The current field is much more expansive into gender (Cowen and Gilbert, 2008), care (Wool, 2015), costs (Crawford, 2013), testing (Martini, 2017) and more, but beyond the scope of this research.
38
Iraq and Afghanistan). This renders militarisation what Latour calls a “matter of fact”
(2005): a universal phenomenon whose nature is readily recognised and stabilised to
explain social relations, economic policies, and war strategies, which in turn makes it
difficult to imagine or experience any way out of this overwhelming social construction.
But how does this “matter of fact” persist or become a “matter of concern,” to use Latour’s
terms (2005), in the literature on militarisation of the built environment?
2.1.1 Spatialising Urban Warfare
This study is situated within the early aughts wars on Iraq and Afghanistan when
military doctrine – spearheaded by the U.S. and embraced by NATO12 – witnessed a major
shift from strategies of air superiority in the 1990s to combat in urban areas in the 2000s
(Chapter 1). The shift in the scale of warfare from air dominance13 during the First Gulf
War, the Bosnian War, and the Kosovo War to urban, asymmetric, and irregular warfare in
Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan, among others14, has been a gradual one in the making.
After WWII, the military’s revived interest in urban areas as the next battlefield started
taking shape in the 1970s upon the end of the Vietnam War and fears of urban wars with
the Warsaw Pact in Europe. It was designated MOBA in the U.S. Army’s report Military
Operations in Built-Up Areas (MOBA) (Renier et al., 1979), and later redesignated MOUT
in the U.S. Army’s field manual FM 90-10 Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain
(MOUT) (U.S. Army, 1979).
But it was not until the early 1990s and in the aftermath of a post-Soviet world
that urban warfare in its current version15 became a real probability to the military. Upon
the U.S. military’s unforeseen losses in the Battle of Mogadishu (Somalia) and the Russian
military’s in the Battle of Grozny (Chechnya), the RAND Corporation released its
formative study Combat in Hell: A Consideration of Constrained Urban Warfare,
declaring that “FM 90-10 … the U.S. Army’s keystone urban warfare manual, relies on
World War II tactics generally ill-suited to situations requiring minimisation of non-
combatant and infrastructure losses” (Glenn, 1996, p. vii). It emphasised the primacy of the
urban as a “terrain [that] confronts military commanders with a synergism of difficulties
rarely found in other environments” (Glenn, 1996, p. viii). Accordingly, it underscored the
12 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization 13 See Graham on the doctrine of Revolution in Military Affairs (2007b) 14 What geographer Derek Gregory theorises as “the everywhere war” (2011b) 15 As an individual type of warfare not a subset of total war or larger military operations
39
value of increasing military survivability and reducing civilian and infrastructural losses
against this “synergism of difficulties” which we will examine in the empirical analysis as
antagonisms (Chapters 4-6).
This focus prevails in the succeeding military publications, and their updates,
confirming not only a new type of warfare and technologies of control but more
importantly a practice of reduction that reproduces reductionist versions of a landscape –
be it urban, rural, or other16, which facilitates the military’s control and survivability. As
we argue and demonstrate in the empirical analysis (Chapters 4-6), this is better understood
as a dynamic and relational process of terraining, i.e., the making of terrain17, where the
landscape gets reduced to antagonisms to be negotiated, mitigated, and/or survived. Rather
than a static, known terrain, terraining becomes a process for making “what was once an
obstacle … become the means of realization” (Simondon, 2017, pp. 32–33). We employ it
as an analytical tool (see Nilsson, 2019, p. 145) to trace this realisation between the
materiality of the antagonisms and the humans/nonhumans’ work to negotiate it, as we
shall see in the analysis.
This is evident in publications that we shall examine later in the analysis
(Chapters 4-6) like the Marine Corps’ 1998 doctrine Military Operations on Urbanized
Terrain (MOUT) and the 1999 intelligence report Marine Corps Urban Warfare Study:
City Case Studies Compilation. The latter featured three sections collecting case studies in
modern urban warfare from the 1990s “Russian experience in Chechnya,” the 1980s
“Israel’s intervention into Lebanon,” and the 1970s “British experience in Northern
Ireland.” And publications like the Army’s field manuals of 2002 Combined Arms
Operations in Urban Terrain (updated from 1993 version), 2006 Urban Operations
(updated from 2003 version), and 2006 Counterinsurgency (updated from 2004 and 1980
versions). This brief contextual overview, which merits its own separate study, sets the
ground for understanding how the urban re-enters the military’s concerns and spatialises
16 The U.S. military’s understanding of the urbanised landscape is varied. To name the key ones: MOUT is concerned with the urban as a general type of densely built and populated human areas; the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual (Office of General Council, 2015) addresses types like cities, towns, and villages; the Chief of Staff’s Megacities and the United State Army (Harris et al., 2014) addresses the megacity as type; and, the doctrine The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028 addresses the urban as part of a multi-layered land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace hybrid (Training and Doctrine Command, 2018). 17 We ground our idea in a similar line of thought from Latour’s “spacing” (1996c), i.e., the making of space, and Yaneva’s “architecture in the making,” which draws on “science in the making” from STS studies (for a literature review, see Yaneva, 2009b).
40
their understanding of an urban terrain through a practice of reduction and as found18 in
military publications on urban/asymmetric/irregular warfare.
2.1.2 Militarised Notions of the Urban
The renewed military interest in the urban and their reorganised spatialisation19,
or “spacing” as Latour styles it (1996c), of warfare extended the platform for an academic
literature critical of these military doctrines and strategies and focused on its socio-spatial,
political economic, and geopolitical dimensions. The 2000s and 2010s witnessed a growth
of critical accounts, particularly20 is human geography (Graham, 2003, 2004b, 2004c;
Gregory, 2004; Graham, 2005, 2006a, 2007b, 2008; Cowen and Gilbert, 2008; Graham,
2009, 2011; Gregory, 2011b, 2011a; Graham, 2012; Cowen, 2014), urbanism (Easterling,
1999, 2016; Sorkin, 2005, 2008; Brenner, 2014; Bélanger and Arroyo, 2016), and
architecture (Weizman, 2002, 2003; Misselwitz and Weizman, 2003; Weizman, 2006b,
2006a, 2011, 2017b), which exposed the atrocities of war and expanded our understanding
of the workings of our contemporary urbanities. The accounts formed a body of literature
on current military urbanisms and architectures, differentiating – but not distancing – itself
from historical studies of the 20th century’s World Wars and wars of independence.
The concern with the urban featured in this literature through the analysis of
technologies, objects, strategies, and networks of militarisation, and how they influence the
urban environment itself. Two key empirical and theoretical strands characterised this body
of literature. A first is the extension and application of the concept of Haussmannisation
(almost a recurring motif in critical urban theory21) drawing on the political economy and
socio-spatial strategies of 19th century public works in Paris. A second is the influence of
the socio-spatial theories of philosopher and historian Michel Foucault on technologies of
18 Similar to architect Alison Smithson’s as found method of collecting for her scrap book (see Boyer, 2017) 19 We use this formulation to show spatialisation as a process rather than the managerial/logistical formulations “organization … of space” and “reorganization of the geography,” used by Weizman (2017b, p. 7) and Graham (2011, pp. 87–88) respectively. 20 Although it is not the main focus for our study of urbanism, we also mention here literature that informs our thinking process from anthropology (Lutz, 2002a, 2002b, 2004, 2009a, 2009b) and international politics/relations (Bousquet, Grove and Shah, 2017; Khalili, 2020). 21 The available critical theoretical perspective on “the urban” mainly expands on its Lefebvrian notion as the reality of post-industrial society, which changed its modes of production, consumption, and habitation. Thus, critical urban studies have been concerned with debunking the workings of capitalist processes, even if their epistemologies changed (Farías and Bender, 2011; Brenner and Schmid, 2015). This was evident in the City journal’s debate between advocates of critical urban theory (Brenner, 2009; Brenner, Madden and Wachsmuth, 2011) and those of assemblage urbanism (Farías, 2011; McFarlane, 2011). The debate fell into quasi-ideological arguments between different epistemologies (structural vs. assemblage) fighting under similar anti-capitalist political philosophies.
41
control and biopolitics. The two strands crosscut this body of literature, sometimes one
strand more dominant than the other.
The concept of Haussmannisation in the geographical and architectural literature
is a recurrent22 theme and a paradigm that establishes the urban as a medium. Referencing
Baron Haussmann’s public works of spatial and infrastructural rearrangement of 19th
century Paris, hence the name, urban studies employ this concept to explain modern
military and military-style interventions on the urban environment (Gregory, 1994;
Benjamin, 1999; Graham and Marvin, 2001; Lefebvre, 2003; Harvey, 2006; Graham,
2011; Cowen, 2014; Weizman, 2017b). The concept is employed to instrumentally explain
how the urban landscape23 becomes a space for top-down, state-industry-military,
infrastructure-resource master planning that cuts through the dense urban fabric to create
corridors of mobility, visibility, and real-estate exchange values. It is rarely addressed as a
plan that has changed, persisted, or been contested (cf. Jordan, 2004). It is presented as a
meta-strategy of a capitalist political economy and territorial imaginary that renders the
urban landscape physically porous and penetrable24, which achieves a dual objective: 1)
facilitate military mobility to control insurrection and 2) circulate/reproduce capital
through the destruction/reconstruction25 of the built environment, what Harvey coins “the
urbanization of capital” (Harvey, 1985). This renders the landscape a medium where the
state, the military, the industrialists, and the elite re/figure social, economic, and cultural
relations through direct interventions on the landscape.
Haussmannisation in the literature usually goes hand in hand with another
paradigmatic account of the urban, which endows the latter with militaristic character.
Baron Haussmann’s spatial modernisation strategies in Paris were inspired by Marshal
Thomas Robert Bugeaud’s colonial military strategies26 in 19th century Algeria (Misselwitz
and Weizman, 2003; Graham, 2004a, p. 36; Cowen, 2014, p. 190). This historical and
22 “Urbicide” is another paradigmatic theme and theoretical framework in urbanism (Graham, 2003; Misselwitz and Weizman, 2003; Andrew, 2007) and political theory (see special issue edited by Coole et al., 2007; Coward, 2009), although its theories are more grounded in international law, politics, and relations. 23 The literature applies this concept all the way from industrial to contemporary urbanities and cities 24 Michel Foucault’s genealogy of economic liberalism provides another explanation of why cities physically opened-up and abandoned their medieval walls to realise the extension of their networks and connectivity beyond the limitations of physical and juridical limits (see Foucault et al., 2009). 25 The conceptual framework of Haussmannisation later extends in the literature to describe modern planning, reconstruction, and regeneration projects of cities and city centres (Schubert and Sutcliffe, 1996; Rodgers, 2012; Merrifield, 2014). 26 Described as “the first” manual on urban warfare, Bugeaud’s treatise La Guerre des Rues et des Maisons (The War of Streets and Houses) was published in 1847, Paris, upon Bugeaud’s return from his post as Governor-General of French Colonial Algeria where he applied his tactics to control local insurrection.
42
theoretical connection between Bugeaud and Haussmann lays the ground for the
contemporary literature on military urbanisms and architectures to read Haussmannisation
as both an economic-military project and a ricochet of colonial practices from the
periphery to the centre (i.e., from the colonies to the West). Despite the theoretical and
methodological nuances of the literature, the first reading subscribes to a structural
analysis, through an economic focus on space making, and grounds its theory in
epistemologies of capitalist production and ordering (Castells, 1979; Lefebvre, 2003;
Graham, 2011; Brenner, 2014; Merrifield, 2014). The second reading aligns with the socio-
spatial theory of philosopher and historian Michel Foucault on “the boomerang effect” 27
(2003, p. 103) that has shown how technologies of control in colonisation
policies/strategies have been bouncing from the colonies back to the West since the 16th
century.
These readings establish the urban as a medium for actions to take place in or
through it. They put too much emphasis on the economic lens and on systems of power as
socially constructed and absolute hierarchies, predetermining what the social and the
spatial are. Such approach is evident in human geography when Graham asserts28 that the
urban as an infrastructural reality is “the very nature of the modern city … [that creates]
the possibility of violence against it, and through it” (2011, p. xxiv original emphasis), as
in the case of switching off the power supply in Iraq in 1991/2003 and Kosovo in 1999
(2005). It is also evident in architectural research when Weizman notes how the political
actions of the military and militarised civilians (i.e., Israeli settlers) become “fully
absorbed in the organization, transformation, erasure and subversion of space” (2017b, p.
7) where “urbanity [provides] not the theatre of war but its very weapons and ammunition”
(2003). The notion became most notable in Weizman’s work on the military “walking
through walls” (Weizman, 2006b) as they tunnel through the built fabric (thus, inverting
the solid-void diagram (see Weizman, 2006a)) to get to the combatants and supress them.
27 The notion of “boomerang effect” is derived from Michel Foucault’s observation that colonisation practices bounce, like a boomerang, from the colonies to their Western colonial seats (2003, p. 103). 28 In his attempt to describe how strategic and geopolitical concerns informed city/urban planning of the Cold War, Graham parallels “white flight to the suburbs” with the military decentralisation of people, urbanisation, and industries, and he references philosopher of science Peter Galison’s “through the bombardier’s eye” expression (2011, p. 14). In fact, Galison’s analysis (2001) assertively starts from bombs and how their impact informs not only decentralisation but distributed networks, which is more likely to be, we claim, the milieu that facilitated (not paralleled) sprawl and “white flight.” For another example on the complexity and failure of distributed protocols and processes, see Derek Gregory’s account of drone strikes in “From a View to a Kill” (2011a).
43
While Haussmannisation is concerned with refiguring the urban environment into
an effective and efficient space of flow, mobility, and control, the literature dismisses the
available/projected capabilities and limitations of the technical relations at the core of
realising these processes, and with them the many versions of the urban including its
military reductionist ones. To think through technics (see theoretical framework in 2.2.3)
with Simondon (2017), mid-19th century Paris was not a mere medium of buildings waiting
to be cut through; its public works corresponded to technical relations and objects of
“thermodynamics ensembles.” On the other hand, modern day urbanities are not mere
mediums of urban warfare waiting to be razed or walked through, but they correspond to
technical relations as landscapes of “electrotechnic ensembles” (this is what Chapters 4-6
will discuss about Iraq and Afghanistan). Without considering such energy exchanges,
Haussmannisation remains a flat planar theory contrary to what its proponents set out to
refute (see 2.1.3). Moreover, the literature predominantly conflates the military, the
civilian, and the economic as part of larger social structures that it later reproduces into, as
geographer Deborah Cowen argues, “the modern binary of military/civilian and
public/private violence, even as it is being questioned or contested” (2014, p. 187).
This takes us back full circle to what the methodologies of this body of literature
treat less favourably. The empirical sources of the academic literature on military
urbanisms and architectures seldom tap into architecture and urbanism (i.e., the
militarisation of the landscape) as found in military publications, and without “added”
social explanations (Latour, 2005, p. 100). Among such key publications are the field
manuals, introduced in the previous section (2.1.1), documenting versions of the landscape
that the military have already been iteratively dissecting, decoding, and reducing relative to
the developments of their technical objects’ capabilities, their soldiers’ training and
survivability, and the landscape’s increasing urban complexity. Take for example the
physical reductions (i.e., buildings, blocks, urban typologies, floor layouts, locations of
openings, construction materials, debris, confined spaces, lines of sight, dead space,
projectile paths) in Field Manual FM 3-06.11 Combined Arms Operations in Urban
Terrain (U.S. Army, 2002) and “the urban perspective” in Field Manual FM 3-06 Urban
Operations (U.S. Army, 2006b), which we shall examine later in the analysis (Chapters 4-
6). These and other military publications scarcely appear in the literature except for limited
instances (e.g., Graham, 2007a, 2012; Weizman, 2017b). In contrast, the field manual is
mobilised as key empirical source in anthropological literature on militarisation (see
González, 2007, 2010, 2012) to analyse how the ethnographic content of the manuals
44
aligns with recruiting civilian anthropologists into the military’s Human Terrain
counterinsurgency program.
These social constructivist explanations of militarisation and the spatialisation of
urban warfare are predominant in the literature; however, there are exceptions that
approach the landscape as the object of militarisation where politics is always in tension
and figured through a contestation of shaping flows and continuities. It is a tension built
into the process of urbanisation itself as a mode of territorialisation that weaponises the
urban of one group against that of another. This is particularly evident in architectural
research on militarisation whose compositional methods of architecture prioritise the
processes of territorialising (see Mubi Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2020), rather than study
territories as entities and outcomes. This politics of tension is emphasised in the works of
architect/urbanist Eyal Weizman and geographer/urbanist Stephen Graham who argue that
the urban is not a backdrop or theatre for war but its very own medium.
2.1.3 Cross-sectional Views
The literature on military urbanisms and architectures theorises the urban as
volumetric, three-dimensional physical environments against the flatness of orthogonal,
two-dimensional map projections and aerial photography. It implies a shift in vision (i.e.,
the way of seeing) and imaginary (i.e., the way of thinking) from a top, flat29, planar view
to an oblique, multi-dimensional, sectional view. It is a view of the urban – or the
landscape in general – and the territory as stacked layers of human physical interventions.
The literature presents two pivotal concepts: “the new military urbanism” (Graham, 2011)
in Human Geography, and “the architecture of occupation” (Weizman, 2017b) in
Architectural Studies. Both are mantras for scholars of critical urban and military studies
investigating the militarisation and securitisation of urban environments.
In the “politics of verticality” and the “geometry of occupation” (2002, 2003),
Weizman demonstrates how the military as a state institution devises strategic
“splintering” – to use Graham and Marvin’s concept (2001) – of territory through
landscape planning and urban/architectural design. This is the case of how the Israeli
military splinters the occupied Palestinian territories into an archipelago of settlements
29 This extends to criticisms of “flat mapping illustration” (Graham, 2016, p. 8) of contemporary urban theories like planetary urbanization at Harvard’s Urban Theory Lab.
45
dis/connected by another splintering of the three-dimensional infrastructural landscape of
roads, tunnels, and flyovers into a six-dimensional one (i.e., three Palestinian and three
Israeli). Thus, the organisation of the landscape itself realises ethnonationalist
discriminatory policies that modulate flows, and it extends the domain to a volumetric and
deep architecture of occupation (i.e. land, sea, air), which Weizman skilfully terms “the
vertical apartheid” (2017b, pp. x–xiii).
The originality of this critical-materialist approach is twofold. First, it adeptly
uses architectural terminology, with influences from human geography, to decode – or as
Weizman styles it: “delaminate” – the spatialisation of violent militarised severing30 of
landscape and territory. It frames militarisation and its organisation of the landscape as
“the architecture of occupation” (Weizman, 2017b), where architecture means: built
physical structures and “political issues as constructed realities” (2017b, p. 6). The depth of
this “architectural project” (2017b, p. xvi) is analysed in cross-section as four functions: 1)
dividing the territory into three “political floors:” surface, subsoil, and airspace; 2)
“territorial stratification” with a legal apparatus for land grab; 3) a “three-dimensional
complexity: a mesh of separated roadways that connect islands to islands and enclaves to
enclaves;” and, 4) extending the section down all the way to geology (see Preface and
Introduction in Weizman, 2017b, pp. x–16). The landscape is read as walls, optics,
frontiers, checkpoints, hilltops, stone cladding, concrete31, and construction methods.
Second, it examines practices of militarisation relationally and in flux. Networks of
humans and nonhumans, soldiers and militants/civilians, Israelis and Palestinians
assemble, disassemble, and reassemble over constantly negotiated physical borders and
boundaries, which form a “political plastic” (Weizman, 2017b, pp. 5, 87–109, 161–182).
Such expanded perspective of the landscape conveys an urbanist lens grounded in
architectural thinking, where the landscape – regardless of its type: urban, rural, suburban,
or frontier – becomes a built stack (i.e., underground, ground, overground) relating the
three terrestrial mediums (i.e., land, water, air).
Weizman’s architectural-urbanist lens expands the field of architectural research
not only into militarisation but to a theoretical strand on using the analytical and empirical
units of fields that study the built environment (i.e., architecture, urban design, landscape
30 See also “territoriological approach” and “sites of walling” in “Introduction: The life of walls – in urban, spatial and political theory” (Mubi Brighenti and Kärrholm, 2019, pp. 1–16) 31 For a study of materialities of cement and concrete in occupied Palestine, see Samir Harb’s doctoral thesis Imaginary and Autonomy: Urbanisation, Construction, and Cement Production in Palestine (2020)
46
architecture, and planning) to study the impact of the military and militarisation on the
landscape (see Forensic Architecture, 2014; Weizman, 2015; Weizman and Sheikh, 2015;
Bélanger and Arroyo, 2016; Weizman, 2017a; Carver, 2018; Kripa and Mueller, 2020).
However, we depart from this approach of reading of the landscapes of military operations
in our empirical analysis as it largely remains a Critical urbanistic approach, which
attributes power to the military institution and engage less with the paradigms and
practices of fields that study the built environment (cf. Bélanger, 2009) and produce these
landscapes. It describes the apparatus of occupation after the fact but not how its technical
thought and objects evolve (cf. Ashworth, 2003; Langins, 2004) relationally, and its notion
of “political plastic” remains dialectical and centred around the intentions of the actors
(occupier/occupied) rather than evolving/becoming as “territorial stabilizations”
(Kärrholm, 2007, 2013, 2016) assembling around bodies (Nilsson, 2019).
Scholarship in human geography crosses paths with architectural studies on
militarisation, particularly in Graham’s conceptual framework of “the new military
urbanism” (2011). It is a framework to read the contemporary urban condition and the
spatialisation of urban warfare through “military dreams of high-tech omniscience” (2011,
p. xi) and “high-tech means of consumption and mobility” (2011, p. xiii), which – Graham
argues – protect and sustain global, neoliberal capitalism. The new32 qualifier in Graham’s
concept distinguishes33 the “contemporary militarization of urban life” from that of the 20th
century’s total wars, i.e., the World Wars, and global geopolitical tensions , i.e., the Cold
War (2011, p. 61). The circulation of people, ideas, and technical objects in this
contemporary urban landscape operate under the Global North’s colonial/imperial
hegemony over the Global South, where military typologies (e.g., green zones, bases, and
prisons) define the wider civilian urban landscape (e.g., financial districts, embassies,
consumption spaces, ports, and stadiums).
Similar to “the architecture of occupation,” the geographical lens into military
urbanisms critically examines “the radical reorganization of the geography and experience
of borders and boundaries” (2011, pp. 87–88). It advances an epistemology of the urban
landscape as a stack of architectures: systems, information, and infrastructure. It favours
the construction of a “ubiquitous border” (similar to the frontier concept in Weizman) that
32 One observation here is how Graham draws the connections between the schemas of the new military urbanism and 19th century Haussmannisation, but not with those of medieval military urbanisms. 33 This counts for an interesting distinction against what historian of technology Janis Langins notes on how engineering always meant military engineering and the civilian differentiation only became necessary, and historically separated the fields, with architecture (2004, p. 37).
47
connects “the infrastructural architectures of a global network of cities and economic
enclaves rather than the territorial limits demarcating nation-states” (2011, p. 77). And it
realises new state spaces of militant and urbicidal violence. It accounts for five key
features of urbanism (2011, pp. xi–xxx): 1) sites of everyday urban life become
battlespaces; 2) security operations circulate between home and warzone (“Foucault’s
Boomerang”); 3) surveillance figures a political economy; 4) the urban environment
becomes the medium of urban warfare; and, 5) popular culture and public life gets
militarised.
Developing from “splintering urbanism”(Graham and Marvin, 2001), “the new
military urbanism” evolves, in turn, and develops its lens on the politics of verticality
(Graham, 2016). It shares some explanations with the architectural research discussed
earlier, although its scope expands to include – and mix – militarisation with trade,
economy, industry, excavation, and technology. This is evident when Graham (2016)
follows suit with Weizman and argues for a critical vertical politics based on three-
dimensional, cross-sectional, and volumetric analytical views of the terrestrial domains
(i.e. land, water, and air), against planar imaginaries of flatness. Sites and technologies
gain a vertical epistemology: they are categorised to above (i.e., satellites, bombers,
drones, helicopters, sky trains, cable cars in favelas, elevators, and skyscrapers) and below
(i.e., basements, sewers, bunkers, mines, and landfills). Yet unlike “the architecture of
occupation” that is concerned with militarisation, Graham’s human geographical approach
claims to be an ambitious project to study the vertical as a modern phenomenon of stacking
and stratifying. Vertical politics is no more exclusive to a politics of violent separation; it
expands to the domains of “dense and stacked” human societies (2016, p. 4), “vertically
highly stratified” sites and structures (2016, p. 14), and objects that move vertically. In
other words, we understand it as a study34 of vertical sprawl.
Yet, this approach remains heavily social constructivist and anthropocentric where
technologies of control and resistance are pre-determined by opposed social groups,
explained through existing and binary social structures, and always relationally between
the opposed human groups (not the nonhumans). In both these architectural and
geographical readings of the vertical, space remains topographical and does not transform,
34 The reader cannot but be fully-engaged with and moved by the encyclopaedic work documenting these accounts, just like in Cities Under Siege (2011); however, the underlying political economic framework overwhelms the spatial, urbanistic, and architectural analysis by focusing on extraction and accumulation. In the afterword to the book, Graham even speaks of contesting the vertical as a moral evil.
48
despite the shift in vision from plan/flat to section/three dimensional. It is true that “the
map is not the territory” (Latour, 2005, p. 133), but the section is not the territory either.
Both architectural and geographical lenses still place the urban as form – a “hylomorphic
schema” in the words of Simondon (2017) – at the centre of the analysis where the social
and the technical are external relations to the making of the urban landscape in all its
vertical, horizontal, and oblique modes. Besides, the accounts speak of the vertical as a
symbol of elitism, corporatism, and power. We see neither “de-formation” (Lash, 2012),
which is decentring and destabilising form, nor “figuration” (Latour, 2005), which is
giving a figure that is not necessarily anthropo-morphic (could be ideo-, techno-, bio-, etc.)
for the actor/object “that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference” (Latour,
2005, p. 71). These accounts remain largely historical without taking into account the
functioning of military technologies: events, breakdowns, or transformations that will
establish symmetry between humans and nonhumans (see Latour’s notion of Historicity in
Yaneva, 2021 forthcoming). They extend power to the powerful.
2.1.4 Asymmetries
The objects of military urbanisms and architectures are abundant in the literature.
They convey the complexity of the built environment through the expansive networks they
collect across geographies and histories. In human geography, “the new military urbanism”
collects humans (citizens, generals, politicians), cities, checkpoints, borders, shopping
malls, airports/seaports, highways, electrical grids, weapons, robots, vehicles, Wi-Fi
networks, electronic toll collection, warfare, security systems (CCTV, biometric), and
policies (national security, surveillance) among others. In architectural studies, “the
architecture of occupation” collects humans (soldiers, generals, civilians, settlers,
militants), warfare, weapons, military strategies (siege, blockades, fortifications, defence
matrices), security systems (cameras, drones, biometric), cities, settlements, houses,
outposts, walls, tunnels, flyovers, reinforced concrete, stone works, and fences, among
others.
While there are apparent distinctions between urban and architectural objects
(cities/infrastructure vs. buildings/walls) or military and civilian objects (security/defence
vs. consumption/mobility) in the lists above, the literature addresses its objects through a
non-binary, seamless urban-architectural and military-civilian mesh. A clear example is
how architecture in “the architecture of occupation” claims to be a “layered structure
laminated together into a unified and effective apparatus” that is “composed of layers of
49
radically different kinds – natural and artificial, material and immaterial, low- and high-
tech” (Weizman, 2017b, p. xx). This approach frames the multiple connections that make
possible militarisation.
However, the literature does not show the agency of the objects in their networks,
where they not only realise what they are programmed to do but also break down, fail,
and/or mutate. The objects are stable, immutable, and monolithic, sometimes even iconic
(e.g., the separation wall and sports utility vehicles). They do not possess multiple
iterations or versions. Their functioning is asymmetrically external (i.e., explained with
social and political factors) relative to their internal technics. Their relations to the
reduction of the landscape to specific versions are not evident, as they re-produce their
existing social structures. They remain artefacts of the Politics that constructs, operates,
and maintains them, regardless of their urban/architectural/military/civilian type and
despite their networked and material ontologies. We shall illustrate this in four empirical
examples from the literature.
Two of the accounts are an archetype of “the architecture of occupation:” Antenna
Hill and the Separation Wall. The first describes Israeli settlers occupying a hilltop and
requesting that the military and communications company install a cellular tower to
enhance signal reception, thus realising an occupation through infrastructural
territorialisation (Weizman, 2017b, pp. 87–109). The second describes an intricate
physical-electronic wall system designed by the Israeli military to secure and separate
Israeli from Palestinian territory (Weizman, 2017b, pp. 161–182).
In the account of the outpost of Antenna Hill (or, Migron), the antenna – an
infrastructural object of cellular communication – is recruited into processes of land
occupation and national defence through the settlers’ complaints and the military’s
emergency powers. Thus, the objectivity of the antenna is multiple, and the antenna’s two
“programs of action” (Akrich, 1992) overlap: with its original program as an object of
infrastructure (antenna-cellular), it sends/receives signals; when it is employed as an object
of occupation (antenna-marker), it territorialises/marks settler colonial space. But how do
the two objectivities of the antenna meet (or not)? How is the adaptation realised, and at
what cost? Does anything change in the technicality of the antenna-cellular to become an
antenna-marker? Does the colonial location of the antenna-marker correspond to the pre-
planned location of the antenna-cellular in the cell tower grid? The only thing that breaks
down in this account is the act of occupying when the outpost of Antenna Hill is taken
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down upon acute political and legal contestations35, but only to move and occupy
somewhere else.
In the account of the Separation Wall, the wall is described as a layered structure
of reinforced concrete panels, deep wall-sections of obstacles, surveillance cameras and
outposts, and strategies of land inclusion/exclusion. The wall’s geography is “elastic”
(Weizman, 2017b, p. 6): Israeli planners change the planned course of construction to
include new Israeli settlements, and Palestinian militants dig underground tunnels to cross
from one side to the other. While all layers in the wall’s network are well described, they
are also assigned to a socially constructed apparatus of power that gives the wall its unique
objectivity. But the wall’s objectivity is multiple: the first is the physical wall and obstacles
located on a specific site (wall-local); the second is the complex electronic surveillance
system and its associated technical objects distributed across geography (wall-global).
How do these two objectivities meet (or not)? How do both objectivities respond to the
physical antagonisms of topography and subsoil? How is the wall-global coordinated with
the wall-local across so many networks and actors? How did the wall’s design evolve:
what succeeded or failed? How does it navigate the challenges of public funding, party
politics, and the contestations of the local/international and Palestinian/Jewish/other
communities against the wall?
Among the empirical cases of “the new military urbanism” is an intriguing
account of the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) under the heading “car wars” (Graham, 2011,
pp. 302–347). The SUV has become a topic in the literature on consumerism, resource
economy, biopolitics (Graham, 2004a; Campbell, 2005; Lutz, 2015), and “capsularization”
(De Cauter, 2001, 2004). The account describes the SUV as the emblematic example of a
militarisation “linking urban and popular culture” (2011, p. xxvi). Just like gated
communities, it is a capsular space – “SUV cocoon” (2011, p. 316) – that expresses “an
aggressive desire to insulate oneself against the risks and threats of the contemporary city”
(2011, p. 319). It is a passenger vehicle that has been converted from “US military vehicles
for urban warfare … into hyperaggressive civilian vehicles marketed as the patriotic
embodiment of the War on Terror” (2011, p. xxvi). SUVs become “armored ‘capsules’ or
‘exo-skeletons’” in an “urban battlefield” that isolate their occupants from the dangers of
35 While this should not come as a surprise if one follows the agencies of different actors and the continuous work put by Arab and Jewish citizens and activists to resist such settler colonial project, Weizman’s framing makes it difficult to imagine why this should be the case given his description of the absolute hegemony of the Israeli political, legal, and security system.
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the city (Graham, 2011, p. 315). However, and despite its careful political economic
analysis of SUVs as commodities, the account assumes what goes on inside the SUV
(without any ethnographic study); assumes that technology transfer is only from the
military to the civilian domain, and not vice versa; fails to examine the technical evolution
of the SUV as a hybrid of utility (from station wagons and minivans) and performance
(from pickup trucks); and assigns using the SUV to specific groups and not others.
2.1.5 Conclusion
In the first part of the chapter, we set out to review the literature on military
urbanisms and architectures, focusing on two pivotal conceptual frameworks: “the new
military urbanism” (Graham, 2011) in Human Geography and “the architecture of
occupation” (Weizman, 2017b) in Architectural Studies. These two frameworks, their
associated bodies of work, and their distinct approaches (i.e., building-compositional in
architecture and urban-spatial in geography) mapped and analysed the most recent modern
conflicts: the continuing Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the War on Terror in
Iraq/Afghanistan. They expanded the fields’ understanding of the spatialisation of warfare
and strategies of militarisation in an increasingly urban world, and they offered new
platforms for anti-war and anti-occupation politics and activism. However, their approach
remains largely social constructivist and anthropocentric. Accordingly, the objectivity of
technologies is in question; the objects are stable, asymmetric, and non-evolving in relation
to their users (both, occupier and occupied) and environments. In addition, the landscape’s
objectivity is in question too as its antagonisms, i.e., its terrain mode/phase, is not
relational to the technical development of the objects themselves. Next, we review a
different, a symmetric approach to studying technical objects and sociotechnical networks.
2.2 Sociotechnical Approaches to Militarised Objects
Complementary to the earlier contextual overview of how the filed manuals
reference reductionist versions of a landscape (see 2.1.1), we briefly introduce our
technical object, the MRAP. A key aspect of the discussion we shall witness here concerns
semantics: while the asymmetric notion in asymmetric warfare describes a power
differential among combatants, the military aims to establish a symmetric warfare even
though they continue to use the former name. This sets the ground for examining how
technical objects relationally mediate, break down, and/or evolve in the ANT-informed
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STS school of thought, particularly within the pragmatist sociology of innovation, and the
philosophy of technology of Gilbert Simondon, which inspires the former.
The breakdowns we introduced earlier (Chapter 1) are very specific to their
environments and not mere accounts of a general theory or overarching explanation of
urban warfare. The MRAP vehicles were engineered (Chapter 4) to withstand detonations
and ambushes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they broke down on the urban streets of Iraq
(Chapter 5) and rural roads of Afghanistan (Chapter 6). The vehicles first served with the
U.S. military as specialised route clearing vehicles called JERRV36. But with Improvised
explosive Devices (IEDs) and ambushes becoming the main and immediate deadly threat37
to the military in the field38, the MRAP39 program was born out of the JERRV program
with the key objective to re-establish symmetry by increasing combat survivability
(Chapter 4) for all military units in the field. This is how the MRAPs came to “translate”
(Callon, 1986a, 1986b) the military network in the specific, localised, and constrained
situations of detonations in the field (Chapters 4-6). Yet, the resultant MRAP vehicles were
too big to safely manoeuvre the urban streets of Iraq and rural roads of Afghanistan
without compromising local infrastructure (Chapter 5) or experiencing breakdowns
(Chapter 6).
There is nothing particularly urban about IEDs or ambushes in general, except
that in this situation these modes of warfare took place on the urban streets of Baghdad,
Al-Basra, Al-Fallujah, Al-Mosul, Al-Ramadi, and Samarra among others40 in Iraq, and
later the roads of Afghanistan. This is where the physical constraints of the built
environment intensified the impact of these threats on the military’s equipment and
soldiers – hence the asymmetric character of warfare, and they challenged and tested the
military’s moral and legal duty to reduce civilian and infrastructural collateral losses
without using excessive force (such as air power, see 2.1.1). This added to the “synergism
of difficulties” of an urban terrain that compromised combat survivability41 (as discussed
in 2.1.1), which the military defines as the ability of soldiers, materiel (i.e. equipment), and
36 Joint Explosive Ordnance Disposal Rapid Response Vehicle (JERRV) 37 What Deleuze and Guattari call a “nomadic war machine” (see 1987, pp. 352–423); for a history on improvisation, see also Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Davis, 2017). 38 For a landscape architectural and urbanist lens of IEDs, see Bélanger and Arroyo’s account of a “geopolitical archaeology” of IEDs that changes Afghanistan’s landscape configurations (2016) 39 Hence the name: Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle 40 As listed in the official MRAP history book (Friedman, 2013), see analysis in Chapters 4-6 41 Throughout the text, we use “survivability” as a short for “combat survivability”
53
systems to protect themselves and remain “mission capable” during combat (U.S. Army,
2005, pp. 1, 7–8).
2.2.1 Matters of Concern
The lens of survivability fragments the monolithic structures, i.e., the unified
social explanations (Latour, 2005), of militarisation, rendering the military vulnerable and
“precarious,” to use philosopher Judith Butler’s term (2006, 2016). It is a precariousness
against multiple realities from experiences of breakdowns to encounters of changing
terrains and efforts to improve mediation. Realities that cut across the many worlds of war,
violence, technology, terraining, mobility, and injury, among others. Rather than
representations of a powerful military in one factual and unified world, the lens of
survivability allows us to “feed off uncertainties” and examine it as a “matter of concern”
(Latour, 2004b, 2005, pp. 115–120). We follow the military technology in its process of
functioning; to function, it needs to travel outside the lab from where it was engineered to
where it will be operated; when it functions, it does not function on its own but through the
interactions with its users and environment; when it functions, it fails and becomes
disputed. It becomes a matter of concern – here, for survivability, not a given fact. Once it
is stabilised and saves lives, it gets constructed as a social fact: a highly survivable
armoured vehicle. The more the military attempts to reassemble their strategies and
technical mediation to achieve survivability, the more we can trace the issues they care
about (Yaneva, 2021, p. 103 forthcoming) – not through outside explanations. And the
more we can trace the social ties (Latour, 2005, p. 119), the relations between humans (i.e.,
soldiers, civilians, combatants) and nonhumans (i.e., technical objects and terrain, the latter
which expands to include infrastructure as we shall see in Chapter 5).
Survivability as a matter of concern also shows that in the asymmetrical, unequal,
and outrageous realities of war – which deploy efforts “to minimize precariousness for
some and to maximize it for others” (Butler, 2016, p. 54) – the social cannot hold without
the help of technical objects like the MRAP. Butler’s call for an ethics of survivability42 as
42 Butler is among the very few scholars who discusses the social dimensions of survivability and not the natural/biological abilities of survival: the first is the ability to co-exist while the second adds a biopolitical value to life and a temporal dimension to persist into the future (the latter usually influenced by philosopher Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism and found in discussions on post-humanity in scenarios of post-nuclear and post-ecological worlds). The U.S. military also makes this distinction between survivability and survival. Examples of the former include Field Manual FM 5-103 Survivability (U.S. Army, 1985) and Army Regulation AR 70-75 Survivability of Army Personnel and Materiel (U.S. Army, 2005); examples of the latter include the training course Survival, Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) (USASOC, 2018).
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a relational responsibility for “interdependence” among humans “bound up” with each
other is a powerful critique of war and a call for “sustaining social conditions of life—
especially when they fail” (2016, pp. 33–62). However, it is an asymmetric concept of
survivability whose failure is devoid of nonhumans and does not explain other than human
modes of being in a complex modern world where technical objects have fuzzier frontiers
(see Debaise, 2012, p. 6). As the analysis will show, the military constantly requires
technical extensions to protect them from both: combat and non-combat related
breakdowns (Chapter 4-6). Their socially constructed power cannot be understood outside
“the technical construction of society” (Latour, 1996a; Yaneva, 2021, p. 63 forthcoming).
Unlike the all-powerful militarisation in the literature of military urbanisms and
architectures, survivability is not given, but rather requires continuous collecting,
reassembling, and stabilising. It is achieved as a symmetric social relation among humans,
technical objects, and their environments.
Following the STS invitation to grasp the “full range of contingencies that shape
scientific and technological change” including through military involvement (see
MacKenzie, 1986, p. 363, 1989), we argue that survivability must be approached through,
what Latour styles as (2004b), a “stubbornly realist attitude” to observe, study, and
understand its sociotechnical networks (i.e., the social cum the technical). Unlike the
withering of the experimental Personal Rapid Transit system Aramis whose interest groups
failed to love it enough to endure (Latour, 1996a; Yaneva, 2021, pp. 60–64 forthcoming),
our analysis will show that institutions like the military cannot but remain highly and
dynamically engaged with survivability else their extensions would fail and their power
would disintegrate. Owing to, not despite, the ever-increasing complexities of warfare and
the complications43 of technical projects, survivability as a “matter of concern” flattens the
ontological plane of humans and nonhumans, or what Simondon calls living and technical
beings (see 2.2.3). Unlike Butler’s existentialist account of human precarity as ontology, a
sociotechnical understanding of survivability recognises humans as potentiality where they
participate in the potentiality of technical objects (Combes, 2012; Simondon, 2017). The
precarity, as we shall see, lies in thresholds of adaptation or alienation, following
Simondon (2017), between human soldiers and their technical objects (Chapters 5 and 6).
43 Complications of a technical project due to “engineers [wanting] to reinscribe in it what threatens to interrupt its course” (Latour, 1996a, p. 209; see also Kaldor, 1982)
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2.2.2 Mediation and Associations
In the ANT-informed STS literature, particularly within the sociology of
innovation, the presence/lack of breakdowns (or failures) in technical objects is theorised
through the solidity of the associations (and/or substitutions44) between humans and
nonhumans and relational to their environment (Law, 1987; Latour, 1991, 2005; Akrich,
1992; de Laet and Mol, 2000; Akrich et al., 2002a; Yaneva, 2012, 2017, 2021
forthcoming). When technologies work, they are invisible. It is through the breakdown of
technical objects (or systems) that actors and their relevance and influence in the structure
they mediate become visible and that analysts/researchers can trace. The social emerges as
a composition of a “trail of associations between heterogenous elements” and “a type of
connection between things that are not themselves social” (Latour, 2005, p. 5 original
emphasis). Thus, the social does not pre-exist45 its elements and associations. It is
relational and emergent through action that is not transported unchanged but “[mediated]
… dislocated … borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, [and]
translated” (Latour, 2005, pp. 45–46; see also Callon, 1986a, 1986b; Law, 1987).
Technical objects, in the STS literature, are the mediators that perform these actions, thus
generating sociotechnical associations.
Unlike the stable, immutable, and monolithic objects of military urbanisms and
architectures (see 2.1.4), the objects in the STS literature are dynamic, interdependent, and
distributed. Captured in the process of their functioning, they are dynamic in their
networks performing associations or substitutions to translate, displace, modify, or
transport interests; yet they breakdown or fail. Their competencies are distributed among
actors46 within the sociotechnical network where they mediate “our relationships with the
‘real world’” (Akrich, 1992, p. 214; also Latour, 1990, 1991, 1996a, 2005). Moreover,
these objects are diverse in scale, function, and user groups. They have a “script,” that is a
program of actions in their world, which gets “de-scripted” 47 by users and the new
environment when deployed to a new world (Akrich, 1992; Akrich and Latour, 1992).
They possess “fluidity” to accept modification and transformation (without the assistance
of the original script author) or “sturdiness” to resist change (de Laet and Mol, 2000). They
44 Translated in text as AND for association and OR for substitution (Akrich, 1992; Akrich and Latour, 1992) 45 In the words of Latour, “there is no society, no social realm, and no social ties, but there exist translations between mediators that may generate traceable associations” (2005, p. 108 original emphasis). 46 Oftentimes, STS reserves “actors” for humans and uses “actants” for nonhumans (see Latour, 1999b, p. 303) 47 There is a similar thread in Simondon on differentiating the “fabricational intention” (i.e., the script) from the “utilitarian intention” (i.e., the de-scription); he argues that to understand “the mode of existence of technical objects” we must grasp the coming-into-being of technical systems (2017, p. 58 original emphasis).
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are “decentered,” multiple and have “fractional coherence” (Law, 2002). And they must
build alliances, interest users, and resolve conflicts (“accusations”) within the innovation
process (Akrich et al., 2002a, 2002b). Thus, the MRAP has a script, that is a program of
actions in the world of war, and a vision of the world that works in this world only, and as
such it counters extreme detonations.
Among such objects are mundane artefacts like keys, doors, and seatbelts that
constrain or complement their users (Latour, 1991, 1992); French-designed photoelectric
lighting kits that get adapted when distributed as international aid in developing countries
(Akrich, 1992); the distributed work of hand water pumps that provision rural water and
sanitation (de Laet and Mol, 2000); vehicles that assemble interests like the VEL electric
car (Callon, 1986b) and the 1950s/60s British TSR2 reconnaissance aircraft (Law, 2002);
models, images, diagrams, experiences, that assemble buildings and cities (Yaneva, 2009a,
2009b, 2017; Novoselov and Yaneva, 2020); and, technological systems like 1970s/80s
Frances’ experimental Personal Rapid Transit (Latour, 1996a) and missile accuracy and
inertial guidance of the nuclear Cold War (MacKenzie, 1989, 2012). The STS literature
shows that the presence of breakdowns in such technical objects is not only inescapable,
but it is also a test for “the solidity of the sociotechnical network” (Akrich, 1992, p. 224)
realised by these objects, through how rapidly and efficiently the network responds to the
breakdowns. Informed by the STS tradition, we analyse breakdowns of military technical
objects in several situations: combat related (detonations in Chapter 4) and non-combat
related (electrocution in Chapter 5; downing in Chapter 6). Furthermore, we show how the
military network, and by association its larger state/society networks, holds through
resolving breakdowns and subscribing to “metascripts,” or the “ideological field of
operation” (Taylor, 2013, p. 358), of that state/society.
2.2.3 Individuation and Associations
The previous section discussed technical objects as mediators in the STS
literature, which explains how social ties are extended, regulated, held, or broken through
these mediators and within their sociotechnical networks. The literature’s focus is on
scripts/actions and their diffusion among users. However, pertinent to our theoretical
framework and less discussed48 in sociology/anthropology is understanding technical
48 The general focus of the sociology/anthropology ANT literature, discussed above, is on human-nonhuman associations and how objects “mediate” actions and interests. There is no lack of engaging highly technical
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objects as “a multitude of beings resulting from a range of technical operations”(Combes,
2012, p. 58) and along a “technical lineage” (Simondon, 2017, pp. 44–51). This is a crucial
step to defuse the prevalent military-civilian binary in the literature on militarisation (see
2.1.2) through studying technical thought, or “technics” (see Simondon, 2017, p. 237), and
technical objects rather than the capitalist political economy of consumption and
extraction.
These relations are addressed in the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon (Combes,
2012; De Boever et al., 2012; Simondon, 2017) where the “technicity”49, i.e., the evolved
technical functioning/knowledge that generates technical objects, comes-into-being (i.e., it
is ontogenetic), evolves as information (i.e., it is cybernetic), and gets conserved or passed
(i.e., it is transductive). It is “technicity” as “a mode of relation of man with the world”
(Combes, 2012, p. 60; Simondon, 2017, pp. 162, 169), among other modes (religious,
aesthetic), which informs a “consciousness [that] creates socio-political thought”
(Simondon, 2017, p. 237). When discussing our findings in Chapter 7, we shall see how
the MRAP embodies such “mode of relation” (i.e., associations) that informs a politics of
military survivability relational to civilians, terrain, and technological change.
Simondon’s technical objects are not limited and isolated artefacts or “constituted
technical objects” (2017, p. 176) that intervene on the landscape as their medium (like in
the literature of military urbanisms and architectures). They are figures (i.e., assemblages)
associated or “energetically coupled” (2017, p. 54) to a geographic ground50 which they
cannot function without51. The ground is not a context/setting but a milieu described as “a
certain regime of natural elements surrounding the technical being, linked to a certain
regime of elements that constitute the technical being” (2017, p. 59). Simondon calls this
situations; however, the concern remains the making of the social and less the genesis of technical objects as in the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. 49 Simondon reserves the term “technicity” to describe the concretisation (at the level of elements, not technical objects or ensembles) that has been transported from one historical period to another (2017, pp. 73–74). Similar yet nuanced explanations of the term are “technical mentality” (Boever, Murray and Roffe, 2012, p. 30) and “technical equality” or “equal technical participation” (see Afterword by Thomas LaMarre in Combes, 2012, p. 92). 50 Compare this to the Figure/Ground relation in architecture (or psychology), which is a perceptual technique realised not in the abstraction of buildings (solid) and open areas (void) but in the association that enables a black foreground to become visible on a white background, thus enabling perception. 51 A similar explanation of the potential born out from an association between the figure of the object and that of the ground can be read in philosopher François Jullien’s concept of the “disposition” (1999). It demonstrates the advantage/difference between two philosophies of strategy: the ancient Chinese one that relied on a “setup and its efficacy” approach to “manage reality” (1999, p. 25), in a world where human action is always connected to its environment/terrain; and, a Western one re-presented by the Greek model and enforced by the influential writings of 17th/18th century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz that advances a moral/psychological “means and ends” approach.
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the “associated milieu,”52 which “mediates the relation between technical … and natural
elements, at the heart of which the technical being functions” (2017, p. 59). Thus, technical
objects are “technical beings” that come-into-being through their association with their
milieu. Their “mode of existence” is ontologically equal to human/living beings (Combes,
2012, p. 59; Simondon, 2017), who also come-into-being through associations with their
milieu. This explains how the MRAP is specifically coupled with its terrain of extreme
detonations. The MRAP is not any armoured vehicle (which the U.S. military has no
shortage of), but a highly localised script53 for protecting soldiers and restoring symmetry
during what is called asymmetric military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The capacities of the technical being are not transcendental, readily available,
concealed, and thus awaiting a “presencing … [i.e.,] a bringing that brings what presences
into appearance” through “revealing” what is concealed (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 9–12). They
are synergies of groups of functions assembled into specialised structures that give a
technical object its coherence. For example, Heidegger’s airliner standing on the runway
does not conceal “the possibility of transportation ” as a “standing-reserve” ready for take-
off (1977, p. 17). It is not even between flying and taxiing where the synergistic technical
functions of an airliner lie. As a technical individual, i.e., a jet54 engine aircraft, it flies at
very high55 altitudes and speeds due to its technics of propulsion. The only significantly
relevant relation to the ground is that it requires “a very long landing strip [for landing at a
high speed]” (Simondon, 2017, p. 53). This relation of speed, landing56, and ground is the
“associated milieu” of the airliner. Similarly, the MRAP contains a military script, which is
a program of actions in the world of war, and a vision of the world that works in this world
only, and as such it counters extreme detonations. But it is not designed to move in an
urban context (on the streets of Iraq, under power lines, and on narrow turns). Thus, it
requires improvements and adjustments to further adapt to an urban milieu (Chapter 5).
52 A simpler but less accurate term is “favourable environment” (Akrich et al., 2002a) 53 Other versions of the MRAP script were adapted to fit other models of armoured vehicles that are not of the MRAP-type, such as the Double-V Hull for the Stryker Infantry Carrier Vehicle and the armoured cabs for rescue, recovery, and transport trucks 54 We assume Heidegger’s airliner was a jet aircraft as his original German essay was published in 1954 and 1962 according to the Preface in the English translation (1977, p. ix), while the first jet airliner flew in 1949 and entered service in 1952. 55 In contrast lower altitudes and speeds for propeller-powered aircraft 56 Another explanation of this associated milieu can be traced to the evolution of the landing strip onboard of a military aircraft carrier from one parallel to the ship’s hull to an oblique platform. The oblique design reduces landing crashes with other aircraft and ship components. Later, not only the strip but the take-off technology advanced from long to short take-off and from horizontal to vertical landing.
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To achieve a stable mode of existence, Simondon argues that technical objects
need to exist on their own (without a lab or a greenhouse), and in relation to other technical
objects (i.e., to form “ensembles”), with less regulation (by humans) of their milieu. This is
when they tend toward “concretization,” which is the distribution of synergies of
functioning – “synergy after synergy” – to replace or diminish antagonisms within the
objects’ internal coherence and their relations with the natural world (2017, p. 38).
Simondon calls the former the “technical milieu” and the latter the “geographic milieu.”
These two milieus are “two worlds that do not belong to the same system and are not
necessarily completely compatible” (2017, p. 55). The more concretised the technical
object becomes, the more the antagonisms become unperceived and closer to what ANT
calls a black box (see Footnote 9). Yet to come-into-being, technical objects integrate the
two milieus57 while they are “situated at the meeting point” between them (2017, p. 55);
put differently, the two milieus/worlds “act upon each other” via the technical object
(2017, p. 56). This process realises a “techno-geographic milieu” specific to a
concrete/concretised technical object that is “no longer in conflict with itself” (2017, p.
38). We witness a constructive evolution (2017, p. 58) of the technical object such as when
the MRAP script withstands the antagonisms of detonations and restores levels of
survivability that the military had lost. The MRAP’s process of concretisation, or dialogue
with the milieu, is at the core of the military’s spatialisation of a symmetric urban warfare
(Chapter 1) whether through mere survivability (Chapter 4), sociability with the civilians
(Chapter 5), or pushing the bodily limits of soldiers (Chapter 6).
Let us do a little thought experiment and revisit the accounts of Antenna Hill from
the literature on military urbanisms and architectures (see 2.1.4). Simondon explains how
pylons (cement and metal) and high voltage lines (metal and porcelain) are produced by
thermodynamic ensembles to facilitate the emergence of electrotechnic ensembles (2017,
pp. 69–70); they realise a decentralisation of energy transfer across the landscape through
“a synergistic alliance between technical schemas and natural power” that witness the
coinciding of “cement and rock, … the cable and the valley, the pylon and the hill” (2017,
p. 193). In the account of Antenna hill, the cellular tower has no relation to the potentiality
of its ensemble where it must be a node in the frequency grid of its cellular network, and it
57 Simondon’s notion of “milieu” is the varied, vast, and complex domain where humans and technicity progress. Compare this to a static notion of the milieu (i.e., air and sea) in historian Thomas Hippler’s account “Philosophy of the Bomb” (2017, pp. 118–139). Italian military officer Giulio Douhet is the central figure in forging an emerging doctrine of aerial warfare in the early 20th century, without any mention of the role played by technical objects be they airplanes, bombs, or communications. Cities are symbols of civilisation, and they become the target of strategic and tactical military operations.
60
must belong to a schema (a plan to expand the network). However, these associations are
relegated58 to the background, and even the location of the antenna on top of the hill is
explained not by the travel of signals but by its strategic location for building a defence
matrix on high ground. This approach does not allow us to witness the functioning of the
technical object and its constructive evolution. In our analysis, we will examine
militarisation and warfare as structured through the evolution and concretisation of the
MRAP technology.
More importantly, such tending toward concretisation, which is relational to
specific assemblages of elements/technicities and realised techno-geographic milieus,
makes technical beings not only ontologically different (to be on par with living beings)
but also ontogenetic59 (Combes, 2012; Simondon, 2017). Any new antagonisms in the
milieu and/or disturbances in the synergistic functioning prompts adaptations that tend
toward a new concretisation to keep the object “self-conditioned” (2017, p. 58). This
means that the existing synergisms of the object continue through “minor improvements”
60 or discontinue through “major improvements” that essentially modify the existing
distribution of functions (2017, p. 42). Thus, the technicities that make up an object contain
the potential61 to reassemble, among themselves or with new technicities, to produce
another object, making it a multiple technical being that stems from a series and a lineage
of technical operations.
This is what Simondon’s philosophy offer us to understand the coming-into-being
of technical objects as “a series of spurts of structurations of a system, or of successive
individuations of a system” (2017, p. 169). The technical object is then the figure of an
“individual” at a specific time and associated to a specific milieu. The “technical reality”
(2017, pp. 73–74) or “functioning schemas” (2017, p. 58) residing in this figure assemble
the technicities carried in various “elements” across time and ensembles of energy
58 What important accounts like Weizman’s Hollow Land (2017b) miss is examining the relation between humans as the associates – not the subject nor the objects – of technical objects. It is a lens that could explain the Zionist settler colonial project, not as one looped with the hundred-years old colonial projects, but as a highly specific and localised one in 20th century technics. 59 See also “emergence” and “affective” in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) 60 For Simondon, minor improvements risk becoming “corrective measures” if humans oversaturate the external regulation of the functioning (2017, p. 39). The technical object is less “concrete” and more “abstract,” i.e., a tool “transportable everywhere one goes” requiring no “associated milieu” (2017, p. 228). 61 For Simondon, potentials are a “power of coming-into-being without degradation,” a reality and “not the simple virtuality of future states” (2017, p. 168; Heidegger, 1977, p. 17).
61
levels/eras62. When the time/energy era and associated milieu63 change, the object
“individuates”64 into a new individual/being (a new figure) through a process of resolving
tensions, establishing communication, and structuring relations between different “orders
of magnitude” (see Bowden, 2012, p. 138; Combes, 2012, p. 4). When the orders mediated
by the technical object change, a “dephasing” occurs and prompts the coming of a new
phase of being. Thus, the technical object’s “unity of being” is “transductive,” i.e., exists
across multiple and diverse individuations and phases (see Combes, 2012, p. 6; De
Beistegui, 2012, pp. 172–173). Ultimately, the technical object is “never fully known”
(2017, p. 39) as much as nature neither is, and knowledge, i.e. technics, “is conceived as an
imperfect doubling of being” (2017, p. 240) where the individuated subject of knowledge
is never the true subject. Informed by this dynamic understanding of technicity, we will
trace the process of individuation from the figure of mobility in the Humvee to that of
survivability in the MRAP (Chapter 4). Moreover, the MRAP itself individuates into an
urban individual and a rural one: the former must negotiate the density of infrastructure
(Chapter 5) while the latter its lack thereof (Chapter 6).
2.2.4 Conclusion
In the second part of the chapter, we established our theoretical framework to
address the gap in the literature on military urbanisms and architectures. We brought
together concepts from the philosophy of technology, the sociology of innovation, and STS
to build a vigorous and pertinent understanding of technicity in the military domain, as part
of the larger technological change (to get beyond the military-civilian technology divide)
and in relation to the ground/milieu/terrain/landscape (to relate to urban and architectural
research) as we shall see in the empirical analysis (Chapters 4-6). The framework
addressed three themes: the objectivity of the technology; the general symmetry
established between the technical objects and their users; and the associations crafted in the
process of the technical functioning. The aim is to understand human-nonhuman relations,
62 According to Simondon, these are: artisanal in 18th century, thermodynamic in 19th century, electrotechnics in early-20th century, nuclear in mid-20th century, and electro-metallurgic in late-20th century (2017). 63 Simondon explains that the “associated milieu” is a “depositary of technicity” at the level of the individual (2017, p. 76), collecting technicities from the elements that make up the individual, which in turn make up the ensemble. This is Simondon’s structure or elements, individuals, ensembles. A simpler, yet reductionist, wording would be Carl Mitcham’s “elements (parts), individuals (wholes), and ensembles (systems)” (see Mitcham, 1994, p. 34). 64 Philosopher Didier Debaise explains how Simondon’s philosophy of “individuation” is a “technique” of transversal communication among diverse domains (technical, biological, physical) possessing a “relational ontology of being” that is “local, situated and linked to constraints” (2012, pp. 1–2). He calls for moving from “being-individual” to “individuation” (2012, p. 3), where the individual has fuzzy frontiers and possesses “fringes” that “extend it to a larger nature and … participate in its identity” (2012, p. 6).
62
their associations, and their breakdowns, rather than to explain military technology by
referring to the grand narratives of militarisation.
2.3 Conclusion
In this chapter, we reviewed the recent literature on military urbanisms and
architectures and identified a gap. We offer to study technical objects and sociotechnical
associations drawing theoretical inspiration from the philosophy of technology of Gilbert
Simondon and the ANT-inspired STS literature, particularly the sociology of innovation.
We address the research aims and key research questions by examining militarisation and
its impact on the landscape through human-nonhuman associations and technological
change, rather than by referring to social and political explanations. In the next chapter, we
set the methodology for studying the MRAP as a relational, evolving, and multiple
technical object of militarisation and by tracing technological change to examine its
sociotechnical relations with those who distribute the script and those who use it or change
it, and to understand its associations with the landscape/terrain.
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Chapter 3
Methodology: Tracing Associations
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3.0 Introduction
To answer the research questions and address the gap in the literature of military
urbanisms and architectures (Chapter 2), our research employs a twofold methodological
strategy. A first (after Akrich, 1992; Latour, 2005) analyses how the MRAP, as a series of
heterogenous inventions (by inventors/engineers in the lab), constitutes survivability as a
“script” or program of actions that regulates the impact of IED-related breakdowns on
soldiers and vehicles in the warzone (Chapter 4). The script allows us to study how actions
(or “responsibilities”) are delegated and assigned to technical objects to mediate, on behalf
of the humans. This script also gets “de-scripted” by the MRAP users/occupants (i.e.,
soldiers) in the field when they attempt to regulate combat and non-combat related
breakdowns (Chapters 4 and 5). A second (after Simondon, 2017) examines the genesis of
the MRAP as a “technical individual” that realises survivability through resolving
antagonisms within its incoherent technical functioning and in relation to its geographic
grounding (Chapters 4-6), what Simondon calls the regulation of a “margin of
indeterminacy in [the] functioning” (2017, p. 152). This lens provides scope to study two
aspects of technological change: how the technical object operates relational to specific
technical and geographic environments, what Simondon calls the “associated milieu;” and,
how this process of regulation lies within provisioning or increasing the “technicity” of the
technical object, that is its technical capacity that relates humans to nonhumans. The
process also shows a technical lineage from the aerospace industry and previous war
technologies (Chapter 4), from commercial trucks (Chapter 5), and across the land, air, and
maritime domains (Chapter 6).
The two parts of our strategy are not exclusively mutual, but overlapping and
complementary. For the ANT-STS school of thought is inspired by Simondon’s philosophy
of technology (see Chapter 2), and both scholarships belong to the same pragmatist
tradition. We can say that what ANT-STS calls networks and actor-networks are
equivalent to what Simondon calls ensembles and individuals. Latour explains (2005) that
the actor never exists on its own, but always relationally within a network (hence the
hyphen in actor-network) Similarly in Simondon (2017), the individual is always part of an
ensemble – and made from sub-ensembles – that corresponds to modes of energy
exchanges across space and time65. This shows the MRAPs as active actors in networks of
65 According to Simondon, these are: artisanal in 18th century, thermodynamic in 19th century, electrotechnics in early-20th century, nuclear in mid-20th century, and electro-metallurgic in late-20th century (2017).
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invention (Chapter 4), networks of U.S. state policies and military strategies (Chapter 5),
networks of reciprocal human-nonhuman co-work and distribution of competences, and
across mechanical, electric, and electronic ensembles (Chapters 4-6).
Moreover, both scholarships equally treat technical objects (i.e., nonhumans) and
humans as situated assemblages and localised relations, within their historical, innovation,
and physical environments. This posits the MRAP script as an invention primarily
associated with violent detonations of IEDs (Chapter 4), then as vehicles associated with
articulating non-combat related antagonisms while navigating the urban terrain of Iraq
(Chapter 5) and the rural terrain of Afghanistan (Chapter 6). Still, the methodology
distinguishes the sociotechnical relations between humans and nonhumans from the
technical evolution, what Simondon calls “concretization,” of technical individuals. In the
former, social relations are produced through the scripting and de-scripting of technical
objects as the mediators (of the same relations). In the latter, the concretisation is realised
the increased synergies of sub-ensembles, where “elements” are replaced or reassembled.
As discussed earlier (Chapter 2), the element is the bearer of technicity66 (i.e., evolved
technical functioning/knowledge) which has been transported from one historical period to
another, and it completes Simondon’s tripartite structure of ensemble-individual-element.
3.1 Constructing the Sites to Study Military Technical Objects
So, how can we study the associations of technical objects, especially extreme
military ones? How can we analyse technological change across domains and as a
technical lineage? And how do we negotiate the restrictions and limitations of “being
there”67 (in the field)? These key questions frame our methodological approach to study
the politics of survivability that “script” (Akrich, 1992) and “concretize” (Simondon, 2017)
the military’s MRAP vehicles in relation to their operational landscapes.
One difficult issue for sure in studying the technical objects and operations of the
military is being there (i.e., in the field). On the one hand, it is a high-risk situation to be in
the warzone or during military operations, not least as would be deemed by the academic
66 Simondon reserves the term “technicity” to describe the concretisation (at the level of elements, not technical objects or ensembles) that is transported from one historical period to another (2017, pp. 73–74). 67 Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s renowned phrase (1988)
67
research ethical approval68 requirements. On the other hand, it is a high-restriction
situation to access classified military, engineering, and manufacturing documentation,
especially current information that is not deemed historical or archival yet. Another
challenge to study technical objects as mediators and non-constituted beings – not as
artefacts – concerns examining the politics of survivability at the level of technical
development, which would be a mode of association between humans and nonhumans or
what Simondon calls “technicity” (2017). This necessitates understanding the progress of
technical thought (i.e., “technics”) through the invention processes, and how the associated
milieu is realised through reductions of the landscape into terrain. Moreover, to study
technological change necessitates examining the functioning of technical relations and
objects, rather than starting from a “constituted object” (after Simondon, 2017) or a binary
classification of technology types like military-civilian.
Unable to be on site across the geographies69 of war and industry, and unable to
follow discussions revolving around these military technologies in real time, like Bruno
Latour did following the failed project of Aramis (1996a), or to engage in ethnography70
and interviews with engineers, officers, and politicians, we adopt a quasi-ethnographic
approach that relies on analysing primary and secondary sources. Ours is not an
ethnographic research, but the quasi-ethnographic character of the approach “[devotes]
ethnographic attention” (after Yaneva, 2009a, pp. 25–26) and “[benefits] from an
anthropological search for meaning” (González, 2012, p. 25) through following the actor-
networks, collecting fragments of observations, and documenting the assembling
processes. We find our sources in publicly accessible yet highly specialised online
databases (see 3.2), and their rich content grants us “being there” in the field.
Moreover, we are aware of the covert character of military organisations and the
potential limited access to relevant factual data. However, we do not approach the military
as a secretive organisation that disconnects and isolates itself from the rest of the world
(even though it attempts to). Instead, we approach it as a highly interconnected network,
68 At the beginning, this research went through a “high risk” ethical assessment since it dealt with the risk of potentially dealing with security issues. We were already denied security clearance to attend the Defence and Security Equipment International 2017 in London, where a few MRAP models were exhibited. However, the ethical concern was resolved upon the decision to use publicly available and accessible online sources. 69 These sites are dispersed and difficult to access. They are dispersed across: geographies of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by association Palestine, Syria, and what Derek Gregory calls “the colonial present” (2004); geographies of the military-industrial complex in the U.S., and by association those of South Africa, Germany, and Israel; and, geographies of logistics between military bases, what Catherine Lutz calls the “less visible but … unprecedented … global omnipresence and unparalleled lethality of the U.S. military” (2009b). 70 See, for example, Everyday Engineering: An Ethnography of Design and Innovation (Vinck, 2009)
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where the documents we analyse are either marked as Unclassified or with the distribution
statement DISTRIBUTION A. Approved for public release: distribution unlimited. For the
inventions to be registered as intellectual property (regardless if they serve military or
other purposes), they must be documented in patents that are publicly available as
references, which in turn reference other patents. For small and large defence contractors
to engage with military procurement, many military publications must be publicly
accessible even if they were marked for limited use authorisations71 (for contractors,
government agencies, defence agencies). And for maintaining democratic governance,
many military publications are published and authenticated by the U.S. Department of
Defense under the Freedom of Information Act72 (FOIA) of 1967 (see 3.2.1). These
provisions allow us to study the military and their multi-sited operations “up, down, and
sideways” (Laura Nader, 1969, p. 307; quoted in González, 2012, p. 23) and to substitute
participant observation and interviews with analysing the documents in the publicly
accessible online databases.
3.1.1. The Unique Lens of the MRAP
The MRAP is a unique object of research to examine militarisation and the
spatialisation of asymmetric warfare (see Chapter 2). It was the principal and cardinal
technical object of survivability during the war years on Iraq (2003-2011/present) and
Afghanistan (2011-2014/present), to counter the deadly threat of Improvised Explosive
Devices (IEDs) and replace the Humvee73. Unlike super heavy tracked tanks and wheeled
fighting vehicles, the MRAP is a universal type of wheeled armoured vehicle entrusted
with safely transporting soldiers for various mission types. The MRAPs’ controversial
rapid acquisition program produced more than 27,000 vehicles at a total cost nearing $50
billion in U.S. dollars (Singer, 2012; Sisk, 2012). With approval and production starting in
2006, the first MRAPs were fielded during April 2007 in Iraq and during February 2008 in
Afghanistan before many of them were returned to the U.S. upon the end of operations.
As a script, the MRAP constitutes a relational diagram between the bodies of
human beings (i.e., soldiers) and those of the technical beings (i.e., vehicles), which is
71 For more on this, see “Distribution Statements & Their Corresponding Reasons for Use” (Defense Technical Information Center, 2018) 72 See more at www.foia.gov 73 This was the main transportation wheeled vehicle of the U.S. military whose official name is High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), but it was too vulnerable to the explosive power of IEDs.
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situated in their operational terrain. Thus, the MRAP allows us to investigate not only
sociotechnical associations between users and mediators but also spatial associations
between the soldiers and their protective enclosure and envelope. More accurately, these
are associations of an architectural character, since the MRAP is not an architectural
object. Following Yaneva’s notion on “the architectural as a type of connector” (Yaneva,
2010, also 2005, 2009b, 2017, 2021), the architectural lens allows us to frame the
survivability script as an envelope that encloses the soldiers’ bodies, separating between an
internal safe space and an external dangerous terrain. This realist reading of the MRAP as a
protective capsule is at odds with Graham’s symbolic notion of the SUV’s capsular space
as “an aggressive desire” (2011, p. 319) to insulate anxious, patriotic, right wing citizens
from the dangers of contemporary cities (see Chapter 2).
Thus, we examine the MRAP as a multiple technical object, i.e., a technical being
that “individuates” relationally and produces technical individuals (see Chapter 2), and its
fortification as a site for politics (Yaneva, 2017, p. 109). It is an object of survivability
(Chapter 4), an enclosure with an architectural character (Chapters 4-6), and an urban
object that moves in relation to the presence of infrastructure (Chapter 5) and its lack
thereof (Chapter 6). The MRAP allows us to analyse how militarisation and engineering
reduces the landscape to terrain, and how survivability gets distributed as competencies of
body-vehicle-terrain relations. It also makes possible tracing “major and minor
improvements,” i.e., dynamic processes of adaptation of the technical object as found74 in
the primary sources, and breakdowns as found in primary and secondary sources.
3.2 Mobilising the Sources
The empirical sources of this research are divided into primary and secondary.
The primary are two categories: one includes documents that have a clear methodology,
data, and findings, such as patents and studies; the other includes documents/media
produced as a reference or a first-hand source, such as military publications, governmental
policies, and video material. In comparison, the secondary sources are second-hand
accounts of events or primary sources, such as news articles, reports, commercial
brochures, and websites (for a full list of sources used in the empirical analysis see Table
1). Although we categorise both types of sources into sub-types by domain like military,
74 Similar to architect Alison Smithson’s as found method of collecting for her scrap book (see Boyer, 2017)
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governmental, or private sector to simplify communicating the analysis and findings, we
equally trace technological change across all sources, taking into consideration how the
specialised lens of each domain and source type frames the matter at hand. For example,
patents describe inventions to communities of engineers/inventors; field manuals document
military doctrine for the armed forces; and news articles report events to the public.
The general timeframe for locating and selecting the sources of this research spans
the war periods on Iraq (March 2003-June 2011/present) 75 and Afghanistan (October
2001-December 2014/present). More specifically, from the submission of the Marine
Corps Urgent Universal Needs Statement (Urgent UNS) for MRAP-type vehicles in May
2005 until the end of military operations76 (see “Enclosing Bodies” in Chapter 2). But
since we examine processes of technical evolution and lineage, the sources extend beyond
this period particularly to changes – or lack thereof – in vehicle and armour technologies in
relation to developments in the military’s warfare doctrines (after the Cold War and the
Gulf War) and their understanding of the evolving urban condition (paralleling discourses
of the United Nations; see “Collecting the Rural Landscape” in Chapter 5).
Moreover, the sources are selected following two general threads: a first follows
“major/discontinuous” and “minor/continuous” improvements that adapt the MRAP as a
script for survivability against IEDs (Chapter 4); and a second follows non-combat related
breakdowns when the MRAPs are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan (Chapters 5 and 6). It
is crucial to keep in mind that the analysed events in these threads are not representative of
the entirety of the wars or the landscapes; however, they are full of accounts of breakdown
and associations among humans, technical objects, and terrain, which allows us to collect
the actor-networks and to be there in the field. Next, we explain how we analyse the
different types of sources and connect the threads.
75 The dates in brackets are the official beginning of operations and withdrawal dates of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, code named Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, respectively. However, the U.S. military (and coalition forces) continued their presence and intervention in other military operations in these countries, mainly against ISIL and the resurgence of the Taliban. 76 December 2019 is the most recent data query follow-up date of this research.
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Table 1 A list of the primary (P) and secondary (S) sources used in the empirical analysis; sources are listed by document type, count, and source of retrieval (compiled by author).
Document/Media Type Definition (from Headquarters, 2002) Source P/S U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Utility Patent (17), Utility Patent Application (4)
USPTO Patent Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) and Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT)
P
U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) Army Regulation (2) “directive that sets forth missions, responsibilities,
policies, delegates authority, sets objectives”
Army Publishing Directorate (APD) P
Defense Transportation Regulation (1) United States Transportation Command P Doctrine/Strategy (2) “describe the fundamental principles that guide
military forces or their elements in support of national objectives”
Joint Chiefs of Staff P
Field Manual (5) “focusing on doctrine and training principles with supporting tactics, techniques, and/or procedures”
Army Publishing Directorate (APD); United States Marine Corps; Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS)
P
Guidance Pamphlet – Multi-National Corps-Iraq (1)
Small Wars Journal P
Marine Corps Intelligence Activity (1) Homeland Security Digital Library (HSDL) at the Naval Postgraduate School; P Marine Administrative Message (2) U.S. Marine Corps P Pamphlet (2) “permanent instructional or information publication” Army Publishing Directorate (APD) P Environmental Assessment (1) U.S. Army Tank-automotive & Armaments Command (TACOM) P Report (2) Inspector General; Defense Health Board P Study (2) United States Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory; Joint Chiefs of Staff P Test Activity Report (1) U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) P Test Method Standard (1) U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) P Test Operations Procedure (1) Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) P Urgent Universal Need Statement (1) Published in Wired Magazine (wired.com); not officially released P Video (5) Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (DVIDS) P Book (1) Defense Acquisition University (DAU) S Briefing (1) Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) S
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Document/Media Type Definition (from Headquarters, 2002) Source P/S Bulletin (1) “information, procedures, and techniques of a
technical or professional nature relating to equipment and general subjects”
U.S. Army Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command (SDDC) S
Handbooks Published on Global Security (globalsecurity.org); not officially released S Magazine Article (3) Department of the Army; United States Special Operations Command
(SOCOM); U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC) S
News Article (14) U.S. Army; Stars and Stripes S Report (7) Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC); U.S. Army War College S Training Circular (1) “used to distribute unit or individual soldier training
information that does not fit the standard requirements”
Army Publishing Directorate; S
Website (9) U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center (USAASC); Tobyhanna Army Depot; Red River Army Depot; U.S. Army Transportation Engineering Agency (TEA); Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; U.S. Army Fort Bragg; U.S. Marine Corps; U.S. Army Special Operations Command; U.S. Central Command
S
U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) Guidance Pamphlet (1) Federal Highway Administration P Report (1) National Transportation Library P Rule, Regulation (1) National Highway Traffic Safety Administration P Other U.S. Government Audit Report (1) Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) P Hearing, Report (5) U.S. Congress; U.S. House of Representatives; Library of Congress, The
Census Bureau S
Private Sector Commercial Brochure [from defence contractors] (9)
Navistar Defense; SRC, Inc.; Bendix; Crystal Group Inc.; Ford; OT Training Solutions; Pulau Corporation; Submersible Systems; American Iron and Steel Institute
S
News Media Article (14) The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; Los Angeles Times; Wired Magazine; The Independent; The San Diego Union-Tribune; War on the Rocks; The Air, Land & Sea Times; The Washington Post; Associated Press; PBS
S
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3.2.1. Primary Sources: Patents, Military Publications, and Government Policies
Our primary sources are utility patents, military publications, and governmental
policy documents. We find them in publicly accessible online databases run and managed
by various agencies of the U.S. Federal Government. One key difference among these
sources is how they address and represent an invention or a technical object. The patents
address a technical object as a set or sub-set of functionalities, among other functionalities
or as associated to humans (such as new developments to the suspension of a wheeled
vehicle). The other sources address a technical object as “constituted individual” and
always relational to other constituted human and nonhuman individuals within larger
frameworks of operation (such as soldiers and vehicles in traffic on highway networks).
Utility patents and patent applications (hereafter, we refer to all of them as
patents) are issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office77 (USPTO), an
agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. According to the USPTO, a patent is “the
grant of a property right to the inventor” and a utility-type patent is “granted to anyone
who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or
composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof” (2015). Our research
focuses on the technical dimension of patents, what Bowker calls the “internalist”78
account (1992). These documents79 target highly specialised communities of engineers and
innovators. We search the databases and analyse seventeen (17) patents from the Patent
Full-Text and Image Database (PatFT) and four (4) patent applications from the Patent
Application Full-Text and Image Database (AppFT). All twenty-one documents are issued
between May 2005 and January 2017.
Military publications are published and authenticated by the secretaries of military
departments (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Force) of the U.S. Department of Defense under the
Freedom of Information Act80 (FOIA) of 1967. Under the guidance of the U.S. Department
of Justice, FOIA ensures the public right to access records of federal agencies, except in
critical matters of national security and property rights. The key community of these
publications is the serving members of the armed forces. All81 military publications used in
77 See more at www.uspto.gov 78 The legal-public part being the “externalist” account (Bowker, 1992) 79 Unlike the inventors’ sketches, models, and technical drawings (cf. Vinck, 2009), patents are technically and legally streamlined to become part of a database/resource of inventions. 80 See more at www.foia.gov 81 All military publications used in this research have been obtained from official U.S. Government databases and websites to authenticate the sources and their contents. The only two exceptions that have been publicly
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this research are unclassified and cleared for a “Distribution Statement A: Approved for
public release. Distribution is unlimited.” The key selected and analysed publications
include five (5) Field Manuals, five (5) soldier training videos, three (3) equipment Test
documents, two (2) Army Regulations, two (2) risk Pamphlets, two (2) investigative
reports, and two (2) medical studies among others (see Table 1). Most of these publications
are available from the Defense Technical Information Center82 (DTIC), the Army
Publishing Directorate83 (APD), the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service84
(DVIDS), and other official defence and government websites.
Governmental policy documents are commissioned and published by the different
agencies of the U.S Government. We differentiate the non-military government documents
as such, although military publications are government issued too, to highlight the overlaps
and connections of technological change across all these domains. Particularly, we refer to
three (3) documents from the U.S. Department of Transportation for traffic safety and
highway usage regulations. In addition, we refer to occupational safety regulations from
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) at the U.S. Department of
Labor, but only as a reference used in the military publications we analyse. The target
community of these documents is U.S. government leaders and administrators (when the
MRAPs return to the U.S.), commercial companies that manufacture the MRAPs (part of
their compliance with federal rules), and the military at-large (whether based in the U.S. or
deployed abroad). All these publications are publicly accessible on the websites of their
respective agencies.
3.2.2. Secondary Sources: Military Websites, News Media, Commercial Brochures
Our secondary sources also include military publications, news media articles, and
commercial brochures. We also find them either in the same publicly accessible online
databases run and managed by the U.S. Federal Government or in publicly accessible
private sector websites of news media corporations or defence contractors/commercial
companies. Among the selected and analysed publications are (see Table 1): seven (7)
Reports, one (1) Briefing, one (1) Bulletin, one (1) Training Circular, mainly from the
published on non-U.S. Government websites are the MRAP Handbook (available from globalsecurity.org, a prominent database of defence and security documents) and the Urgent UNS (available from wired.com, a leading magazine on technology). 82 See more at discover.dtic.mil 83 See more at armypubs.army.mil 84 See more at www.dvidshub.net
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Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC); fourteen (14) news articles and three (3)
magazine articles targeting the military community, mainly from the U.S. Army website;
fourteen (14) news articles targeting the general public from national and local
newspapers; nine (9) technical brochures from the websites of big and small defence
contractors; nine (9) military websites, mainly Army related; and, one (1) Handbook from
an independent defence and security think tank.
Moreover, we immersed ourselves in relevant non-academic literature to better
grasp this highly specialised topic. We followed the latest military technological
developments (vehicles, weapons, uniforms, tactics), battle strategy, training for urban
warfare, and joint exercises. This includes watching over two thousand (2,000) hours of
videos, publicly available online at YouTube, from defence and intelligence analysis
channels like Jane’s (by HIS Markit), Defense Web TV, Defense News, and Defense
Update, and from defence contractors like Oshkosh, Navistar, and Rheinmetall. These
videos added to our general understanding of the scripting processes in the lab and the
breakdowns and de-scripting processes in the field. Furthermore, we read realist accounts
of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan from investigative journalists, politicians, and
explosive-specialist soldiers. These described the reality of combat (Junger, 2011;
Alexievich, 2017), the effects of the mountainous landscape on the soldiers (Matloff,
2018), the necessity of the MRAP program (Gates, 2014), and the hyper-tensed situations
of encountering IEDs (Hunter, 2011; Ivison, 2011; Rayment, 2011; Hughes, 2018). Each
of these actors brought forward a world with its relevant set of concerns.
3.3 Plan of the Analysis
The empirical part of the thesis consists of three chapters: Chapter 4 analyses the
assembling of the MRAP through inventions in the lab; and Chapter 5 and Chapter 6
analyse the adaptation of the MRAP upon breakdown in the urban and rural terrains of Iraq
and Afghanistan. Chapter 4 starts with an “autopsy of a failure” (Latour, 1996a, p. ix) by
following the failure of the Humvee to protect soldiers against IEDs and the consequent
development of the MRAP as the technical object of survivability. First, the analysis
identifies how the IED changes the associated milieu of the Humvee, thus forcing its
development till oversaturation and failure. We trace in the patents the figuring of a new
geometry (i.e., the V-shape underbody). Second, the analysis examines the shift in script
from mobility in the Humvee to survivability in the MRAP. We trace in the patents the
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figuring on an independent armoured capsule that separates the soldiers’ bodies from the
rest of the vehicle. Third, the analysis follows how the survivability script extends outward
and inward. We trace in the patents how new sub-ensembles expand protection beyond the
physical capsule of the MRAP and within its interior space. And last, the analysis shows,
through the patents, how all these inventions or sub-ensembles get assembled and their
functions coordinated. Although we generally follow the inventions chronologically85 as a
historical lineage, the analysis is more concerned with the adaptation of the MRAP towards
“concretization,” i.e., becoming self-regulating in relation to its associated milieu through
minor/continuous and major/discontinuous improvements.
Chapters 5 and 6 follow the MRAPs as they get deployed to the field in Iraq and
Afghanistan, respectively. First, the analysis identifies major breakdown events. These
include electrocution upon running into power lines on the urban streets of Iraq (Chapter 5)
and drowning upon rollover into water bodies on the rural roads of Afghanistan (Chapter
6). We trace the narratives of these events in the reporting of news accounts and in
investigative reports and medical studies reporting on the traumas faced by the soldiers in
these situations. Second, the analysis examines how the military addresses these
breakdowns either through a) major/minor improvements to the technical object (Chapter
5), b) creating additional technical objects (Chapter 6), or c) additional regulation of the
sociotechnical associations (Chapters 5 and 6). We trace the first two in military
publications on techniques and tactics (regulations, procedures, risk pamphlets, training
circulars), training videos, and brochures from defence contractors, while we trace the third
in military doctrinal publications on military principles (field manuals) and governmental
policy (rules, regulations). Third, we make connections, where due, in three threads that
cut diagonally across the empirical chapters: a) the analysis of the technical development
of the MRAP sub-ensembles from the patents in Chapter 4; b) the technical inventions in
the commercial truck and passenger car industries that the military draws from; and, c) the
larger U.S. federal policy frameworks that the military subscribes to (what we call
“metascripts” in Chapters 5 and 6).
Throughout the empirical chapters, we trace two levels of associations:
architectural and urban. The two levels do not correspond to the common differentiation of
spatial scales in the disciplines of the built environment between architecture-building and
85 The IED threat emerges in the early/mid 2000s, but counter-IED armour patents and applications substantially-emerge in the late 2000s and in the 2010s.
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urban-city. They correspond to scales of association between the soldiers’ bodies and the
MRAP (i.e., the technical object) on the one hand and the terrain/landscape/infrastructure
(i.e., the associated milieu) on the other hand. Accordingly, the analysis follows the
military and engineering’s technical focus on the terrain/landscape as an associated milieu
and less on the usual human geographical description of cities and landscapes as
constituted entities of people and things. While they remain relevant as a setting, it is the
reduction of these physical geographies through the technical functioning that becomes
pronounced and crucial in the sources such as when the City of Basra in Iraq (Chapter 5)
and the Hamlet of Khosrow Sofla in Afghanistan (Chapter 6) come to be situations of
breakdown in survivability.
Throughout the thesis, we use the plural soldiers to refer to able-bodied and
masculine86 combatant military personnel in the field and the singular military to refer to
the institution as an entity. All our primary and secondary sources use the plural
soldiers/officers, the neutral singular individual soldier/officer, or the generic he. In
addition, all bodies presented and discussed in the empirical sources are those of soldiers
not citizens87.
3.4 Method of Analysis
Patent Analysis is a method commonly used in business intelligence research to
scout the innovation landscape. It takes different forms from patent search, patent
landscape analysis, patent portfolio analysis, monetisation, freedom to operate, and
intellectual property management. The analysis itself employs techniques of data and text
mining, searching for key concepts, and counting repetitive words, among others. Less
often, the method is used to map spatial relations among cities and urban areas, mainly
depending on location metadata. In one such example, smart cities and technological
specialisation of cities is mapped through the “patent portfolio analysis” method to
determine the degree of innovation specialisation/clustering of an urban area88.
86 For the scope of this research, this category subsumes gender and race categories. On a related topic, see how the military opened up all combat and special operations jobs to women in 2016 and graduated the first in July 2020 (Gibbons-Neff, 2020). 87 For more on how the U.S. military prioritised non-military traumas in Iraq and Afghanistan, listen to Derek Gregory’s “Trauma Geographies: Broken Bodies and Lethal Landscapes” (2018). 88 For examples on this see “Patent Portfolio Analysis of Cities: Statistics and Maps of Technological Inventiveness” (Kogler, Heimeriks and Leydesdorff, 2016) and “Mapping Patent Classifications: Portfolio
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However, we analyse our primary sources, including patents, differently. As
stated in the beginning of this chapter, our method opts for identifying two sets of
associations: 1) sociotechnical associations between humans and nonhumans and 2)
techno-geographic associations that concretise the technical object. We analyse the
sociotechnical associations in the instructive language of some sources, which form
“scripts” that are later “de-scripted” by the users in the field. Although we call our research
object the MRAP, we do not start our analysis from a “constituted individual,” but rather
from an assembling that “individuates” into multiple individuals as it progresses. We do
that through analysing the techno-geographic associations that facilitate the coming-into-
being and concretisation of each of these individuals. Consider the following examples.
The first is an example of analysing patents in Chapter 4 (see “Active Exteriors”).
The excerpt (Figure 1) is from a patent titled Method for Manufacturing of Vehicle Armor
Components Requiring Severe Forming with Very High Bend Angles with Very Thick
Gauge Product of High Strength Heat Treatable Aluminum Alloys (Cho, 2012). The
analysis illustrates how we used the conceptual terms of Simondon and ANT (introduced
in Chapter 2) to extract the associations from highly technical sources like patents. The
original excerpt from the patent is represented in Arial sans-serif typeface, while the
explanatory concepts are added in bold Times New Roman serif typeface. The bold square
brackets [x] indicate a first level of explanation, while the bold braces {y} indicate a second
nested level. Ellipsis indicates the removal of redundant text.
and Statistical Analysis, and the Comparison of Strengths and Weaknesses” (Leydesdorff, Kogler and Yan, 2017).
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Historically the [V shaped hulls are made of welded steel plate sub-ensemble], [which is very heavy and added much more weight internal antagonism] to the armored vehicles [to slow down its {mobility external antagonism} … off main roads, in urban areas, and over bridges associated milieu]… 72 percent of the world’s bridges cannot hold the [MRAP individual] (2012, sec. 0003).
[Instead of steel plate armor discontinued improvement], [it would be more desirable to use aluminum alloy plate to make it lighter major improvement] … [traditional aluminum armor alloys such as {AA5083 and AA6061 old elements} are not strong enough technicity] … [a new aluminum alloy, {AA2139 new element} … provide much improved ballistic and mine blast protection increased technicity] (2012, sec. 0004).
… [strategically combining the metallurgical process of manufacturing high strength aluminum alloys and the forming process of V shaped hull could improve the formability of the very thick gauge high strength alloy product thermodynamic ensembles] … (2012, sec. 0008).
Figure 1 Example of how patents are analysed in Chapter 4; excerpt from Patent Application 20120261039A1 (Cho, 2012).
The second is an example of threading different sources from Chapter 5. In a
breakdown account of electrocution where the MRAPs encounter power lines on the streets
of Iraq, we connect a) a Department of Defense investigation into the cause of soldiers’
deaths, b) an Officer’s field account of people and infrastructure in Iraq, c) Army news
articles about improvised innovations in the field against electrical shocks, d) an Army
Briefing about developing and standardising the same innovation at the Army’s
labs/workshops, e) instructions from the MRAP Handbook on avoiding power lines, and f)
doctrinal principles on winning the trust of local citizens in the area of operation.
Throughout this account, we witness a range of sociotechnical associations among the
soldiers, the MRAPs, and the citizens, and a new MRAP that counters IEDs and electrical
shocks individuates. Chapter 5 analyses a similar account, only a new breakdown of
rollover takes place on the rural roads of Afghanistan and instigates a series of technology
transfers across the land, air, and maritime domains.
Following the examples above, we can almost say that the provision, increase, or
reduction of technicity could be traced and analysed through known/experienced
breakdowns documented as scripts in the primary sources, be it for the operation of a
technical object in the patents (Chapter 4) or an ensemble of military operations in the field
manuals (Chapter 5) and test procedures (Chapter 6). In contrast, new/unknown
breakdowns could be traced in the secondary sources and as part of a de-scription (of the
scripts) in the field in relation to tensions resulting from the “oversaturation of the system”
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(Simondon, 2017, p. 177). For instance, the larger and heavier the MRAP becomes to
ensure survivability, the more tension arises with stronger explosions (Chapter 4) and the
abundance (Chapter 5) or scarcity (Chapter 6) of infrastructure. In other words, the primary
sources attempt to resolve antagonisms only to be de-scripted again in the field, not
through a dialectical back-and-forth but rather a successive evolutionary process of
concretisation.
But tracing such associations is not a straightforward task. We have to examine
patents as “inscription devices” that transform technical inventions to text, figures, and
diagrams like Latour and Woolgar’s laboratory apparatuses (1986, p. 51). The body of a
patent document is full of highly specialised descriptions of technical functioning and
references to elements/technicities (like screws, glues, springs, alloys, etc.) and synergies
(like axles, drive trains, armour, etc.). It is in the “summary of claims” part at the end of a
patent document that sociotechnical associations become evident. For example, when a
new type of independent suspension replaces the standard axles, it is not only the technical
object that performs better but the entire ensemble of military mobility, survivability, fuel
consumption, etc. It is in this “written trace” (Latour, 1983, p. 161) that our work attempts
to simplify inscriptions. Therefore, any method that employs discourse analysis, text
mining89, metadata analysis, word counting, or the sort does not fulfil the required task.
89 Although we use such methods as text mining to search for our data in databases that offer this functionality. For example, we started with collecting related patents and applications through a Boolean search (on 5 December 2017) on four platforms to identify patents related to the MRAP technology. The following is a summary. On Scopus/LexisNexis, we searched using “mine AND resistant AND ambush AND protected” and found 165 patents and 114 documents. On Lens, we searched using “mine AND resistant AND ambush AND protected” and found 226 patents. On USPTO Full-Text and Image Database, we searched using “mine AND ambush” and “armor AND land mine,” and we found 88 and 70 patents, respectively. And on USPTO Patent Application Full-Text and Image Database, we searched using “mine AND ambush” and found 97 patent applications. The results from different platforms had a lot in common, which helped me select the relevant documents. Searching for the acronym “MRAP” and its associated words restricts any findings prior to the use of acronym, and thus any attempt at tracing a technical lineage of the MRAP as a “constituted individual” by name. Accordingly, we used various search keywords to attempt tracing back as much as possible, including the Rhodesian Bush War. The keywords included references to geography, technology, and vehicle model names such as “V-hull AND land mine,” “Rhodesia,” “Buffel AND mine,” “armor AND land mine,” “Cougar AND MRAP,” “Caiman AND MRAP,” “Maxxpro AND MRAP,” “RG-31/RG-33/Nayala AND MRAP,” and “Buffalo AND MRAP.” Then, we screened the initial results to narrow down to the most relevant documents. We saved the findings to the open-source reference management software Zotero, which allowed generating a bibliographic data report. With the refined results ready, we traced (by 26 February 2018) the classifications of patents and applications through their primary and secondary classes and subclasses. The outcome was a total of 21 documents: 17 patents and 4 patent applications. We arranged the documents in a spreadsheet; where multiple versions of the same patent existed, we selected the earliest date patent to trace the initial instance of a breakdown; where a patent application preceded a patent, we elected the patent to trace the approved invention.
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However, our method is not without limitations and challenges. The most evident
is decoding the highly specialised content of the patents and tracing the associated milieu.
On the one hand, it is a challenging task for scholars of urban and architectural studies to
decode the technical functioning and trace the associations with the milieus. On the other
hand, it is also challenging to make connections between the technical findings in the
patents and the situated breakdown events commonly described with the usual geographic
locations and names of urban and rural landscapes. Hence, the method is taxing in terms of
time (see 3.2.2) to familiarise the researcher with military practice, vehicles’ development,
and their related technological change. This would have been facilitated by conducting
interviews with the engineers/inventors behind the patents, military strategists/managers
involved in the MRAP program, or soldiers who experienced the breakdowns first-hand.
Moreover, all empirical sources in this research are composed and produced in
(American) English, as the MRAP is a technical object of the U.S. military. However, we
should note the following distinctions. All twenty-one utility patents and patent
applications sourced from the USPTO are published in English. A few were originally
published in other languages prior to registering their English versions90 with the USPTO,
such as Vehicle Protection Against the Effect of a Land Mine (Hass and Runow, 2007)
published in Germany/2004. Others referenced patents that were originally published in
other languages, such as Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (Joynt, 2008) referencing
documents published in Switzerland/1962, Germany/1969, and France/1978. All military
publications, corporate websites, news media articles, and visuals (maps, photo captions,
videos) we employ in this research are published in English too. While the empirical
chapters describe how the MRAP encounters infrastructure in Iraq and the landscape in
Afghanistan, our online search found no news articles about such encounters published in
Arabic (a language we are familiar with). This can be a lack in the available and accessible
online sources (such as only-print newspapers), or an indication of the lack of concern to
discuss these encounters in the language of the locals.
3.5 A Note on the Visual Strategy of the Research
Since our research is situated in urban and architectural studies and building on
our trained and practiced visualisation skills as architects/urbanists, our visual strategy
90 These patents have the metadata category mark “(30) Foreign Application Priority Data.”
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complements the textual analysis by extracting the urban and architectural associations
embedded in otherwise highly technical textual and visual descriptions in the sources. We
draw our visuals from patents, military publications, governmental policy documents, news
articles, and commercial brochures. In addition, we trace some photographs to their
original sources in online databases like the U.S. Department of Defense’s Observe Photo
Gallery and Defense Visual Information Distribution Service or private sector databases
like Getty Images and Alamy.
In Chapter 4, we examine drawings from the analysed patents to illustrate the
embodiments of the inventions. There is no map representing a terrain or landscape in
these drawings, and humans are invisible except for figure drawings that show
representations of bodily morphological relations (Figure 2) – as situated in the invention.
However, the drawings represent the elements (Figure 4) and technical individuals (Figure
3) mainly within sub-ensembles (Figure 2), and sometimes within their milieu (Figure 2
and Figure 3). And some patents illustrate the functioning not only in terms of drawing but
also as process diagrams (Figure 5) that represent the technical mediation as sequences of
flows, interruptions, and detours. We show how the associations of survivability that we
analyse are embedded in the patents as data and performances.
In Chapters 5 and 6, we examine diagrams (Figure 6) and photographic evidence
(Figure 7and Figure 8) to illustrate human and nonhuman associations of the survivability
script. Unlike Chapter 4, the soldiers and civilians are visible (Figure 8) in the photographs
rendering the associations of the armoured capsule explicitly entangled in a wider network
of infrastructure (Chapter 5) and additional technical objects (Chapter 6). The visuals help
us compare and connect between processes of scripting in the lab/workshop (Figure 7) and
those of de-scripting in the field (Figure 8). They also illustrate the realisation of
survivability as it expands to include sociability with citizens (Chapter 5) and to transgress
bodily, architectural, and urban scales during soldier training (Chapter 6). Moreover, we
represent a few instances of the textual scripts in the MRAP Handbook into visual sketches
that illustrate the spatialisation of the technical object through reducing a landscape to
terrain. The sketches borrow from representation techniques in architectural and urban
design studies to produce urban street sections and rural road sections.
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Figure 2 Drawing shows sub-ensemble and humans (Asaf et al., 2015, p. Sheet 9 of 11)
Figure 3 Drawing shows technical object and milieu (Tillotson, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 7)
Figure 4 Drawing shows possibilities of increased technicity (Cho, 2012, p. Sheet 3 of 3)
Figure 5 Process diagram shows assisted door operation (McKee, Scholtes and Hayden, 2015, p. Sheet 6 of 12)
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Figure 6 Diagram of urban elements, from Field Manual (U.S. Army, 2006b, p. B3)
Figure 7 Photo shows testing vehicle in mud, from Test Operations Procedure (ATC Automotive Directorate, 2012, p. 101)
Figure 8 Photo shows welding in the field, from Army news article (Roles, 2009)
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Chapter 4
Engineering the Military Script
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4.0 Introduction
In the first empirical chapter, we analyse processes of experiencing, modelling,
and anticipating survivability within a primary military mode of operation in the field:
mounted mobility91, the military’s term for moving in vehicles. This specific mode
demonstrates the modern militaries’ heavy reliance on vehicles and offers us the empirical
basis to explore the MRAP through an architectural lens as an isolating capsular space and
a protective envelope. We draw the reader’s focus to the architectural character of the
armoured enclosure’s major spatial improvements, although the enclosure is not itself
architectural. These connections become visible as the MRAP breaks down and receives
improvements to realise its “techno-geographic milieu” (Simondon, 2017, p. 58). There is
a parallel to be drawn with buildings as envelopes for resolving the relationship with a
specifically located milieu. What makes the MRAP an important and interesting artefact to
study though is its purpose to provide an architectural envelope prepared to move on
different milieus and to respond accordingly. The MRAP is an extreme case of the
architectural envelope on the move.
The chapter is organised in five sections: the first two explore the adaptation of
the envelope as a physical skin/wall; the third and fourth analyse how the envelope evolves
with the terrain and concretises to include actors inside and outside the vehicle; and the
fifth highlights how these relations of adaptation and concretisation come together in the
technical object. The analysis dives, in a truly Simondonian fashion, into the details of
technical ensembles and sub-ensembles to analyse adjustments (minor changes) and
mutations (major changes) to the technical object.
We examine the MRAP as it incorporates a “script” (Akrich, 1992; Akrich and
Latour, 1992) for survivability in the military landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan, denoting
the technical object’s program of actions to keep soldiers, equipment, and systems
“mission capable” 92 (U.S. Army, 2005, pp. 1, 7–8). What are these actions, and how are
they connected? How do they confer an architectural character on the connections? How
91 This is a mode of military operation through armoured vehicles, usually without the support of dismounted infantry (i.e., foot soldiers). While mounted mobility historically emerged as a function of speed and increased carrying capabilities, the function of protection became a major factor for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, contingent on any limitations to manoeuvre (see ‘Limited Mounted Maneuver Space’ U.S. Army, 2002, p. 1.14). 92 Or as popular science author Mary Roach simplifies it: “the art and science of keeping people safe in a vehicle that other people are trying to blow up” (2016, p. 26).
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do they bring together networks of humans and nonhumans? How does their coherence
realise a techno-geographic milieu? And when do they prevail or change? We attempt to
answer these questions to show how the MRAP embodies technics for survivable mounted
mobility and translates the military’s technological networks for survivability.
We journey to an unusual place for architects and urbanists to answer questions
about the script and its architectural connections, one that is thematically unusual and
empirically distinct from the design language of space, form, type, and program inscribed
in building drawings and city maps. We trace the survivability network in the form of text,
figures, and diagrams in the highly technical world of utility patents, to find traces93 of
registering innovations as technical improvements to change or adjust relations among
bodies and terrain through vehicles and technical inventions. They help us map
survivability both as technics and as a dynamic program of actions that is neither a fixed
construct of the human imagination nor a by-product of technological determination. But
rather, iterations of an “internal distribution of functions” (Simondon, 2017, p. 38) and
modelling human and nonhuman associations94. Each patent and patent application adds
something to the previous iterations to adjust and refine the script, and with it the envelope.
The visual strategy of this chapter complements the analysis in two ways. It
employs an analytical approach to visualise the architectural relations embedded in the
engineering vocabulary of the patents. And it explains through the patent art the complex
technical assemblies of body-terrain-vehicle relations discussed in the analysis. There is no
map representing a building or a landscape in the patent art; and the body is invisible,
except for figure drawings to illustrate morphological relations within interior spaces. Only
associations showing how survivability is continuously modelled and anticipated as a
script to separate the inside from the outside.
4.1 Primitive Envelopes
Survivability has been a longstanding military concern since before the MRAP.
However, it became the top priority of the U.S. military during the wars on Iraq and
93 What Latour and Woolgar call “inscription devices” to describe laboratory apparatuses (1986, p. 51) 94 Combes differentiates the former as a relation within individuation and the latter as a relationship among individuated terms (Combes, 2012, p. xvi).
89
Afghanistan. Their fielded personnel (soldiers and contractors) were increasingly targeted
by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Often,
they were ambushed with another attack in the aftermath of the first one95. In the early
years of the wars, the site of this lethal breakdown was nowhere but the widely used96
mobility platform, the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) dubbed
Humvee.
Beginning in Iraq, IEDs and RPGs disrupted the Humvee’s functioning by
changing its engineered relation between the technical and the geographic. The Humvee
was a mid-1980s vehicle program with two key actions: high mobility97 and serving in
support roles behind combat frontlines, which is what it did in the early-1990s Gulf War.
As a script, the Humvee’s mobility focused on negotiating land obstacles such as
depressions, elevations, slops, and waterbodies (see Figure 13). However, its logistics-
oriented program changed to a combat-oriented one since it began to serve in combat and
security operational roles in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Haiti throughout the
1990s (Figure 9). The military adapted the Humvee by adding various armour and
power/engine upgrades, the former to augment it with higher levels of survivability and the
latter to maintain its high mobility capability. Eventually, the Humvee’s adaptation reached
its limits, as we shall see in two patents and other ad hoc interventions. The improvements
attempted to adapt to the changing milieu by adjusting the technical object: the first set
followed a primordial adaptation of adding more of the same, while the second localised
the vulnerability and introduced a new geometric form.
… WILLYS MB (WWII) WILLYS M38 (KOREAN WAR) WILLYS M151 (VIETNAM
WAR) HMMWV + UAH (PANAMA, SOMALIA, BALKANS, GULF, IRAQ,
AFGHANISTAN) MRAP (IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN) M-ATV (AFGHANISTAN)
JLTV (THE UPCOMING WAR) …
Figure 9 Landscapes/Terrains informing the concretisation of different military light tactical vehicle types since WWII (by author)
95 This is an infamous tactic of guerrilla warfare; see the 1979 Warrenpoint Ambush against the British Army in Ireland and the 1967 Cima Vallona Ambush against the Italian security forces in South Italy. 96 The Humvee was and still is the military’s workhorse and widely used light tactical vehicle. 97 Hence the official acronym HMMWV – High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, pronounced Humvee.
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4.1.1. Primordial Enclosure
SPC. THOMAS WILSON: We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that has already been shot up, dropped, busted- picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles go into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us [to Iraq].
DONALD RUMSFELD: As you know, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. You can have all the armor in the world on a tank, and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee, and it can be blown up.
Figure 10 Excerpt from U.S. military townhall meeting in Kuwait (PBS, 2004).
Relocating the Humvee from its support role to the frontlines of combat solicited
an instant and learned response that understood survivability historically, that is, as a
function of the tested and proven mechanical properties of steel armour. The baseline
Humvee (model M998) had no armour, even worse some models had soft/canvas doors. It
was a body-on-frame vehicle type with a steel frame/chassis and an aluminium body.
Separating the chassis from the body/cab (hence, body-on-frame) was a predominant
technique of the commercial truck/car industries to develop chassis that serve various
vehicle bodies (a form of technical standardisation and economic efficiency). Aluminium
was employed for its light weight to serve the “high mobility” part in the Humvees’ script.
Thus, the military’s initial response was to add armoured steel doors and plates to the
vehicle (becoming model M1109) to resist firearms.
Ballistic steel had already become the most performatively optimal, widely
applicable, and highly affordable of all the ballistic protection materials during the warring
twentieth century. It is made from hot-rolled single steel sheets rather than cast or layered
ones. Its making alternates between different phases through processes of heating,
tempering, and quenching, before it becomes the high strength, dense resisting material
that it is. Heating allows steel to acquire a high plastic strain molecular structure
(resistance to piercing and fragmentation), thus individuating to a stabilised form, a unity.
The U.S. military adapted the Humvee with ballistic steel upon feedback loops from
operations in Somalia (Operation Gothic Serpent 1993), Bosnia and Herzegovina (since
1994), and Haiti (Operation Uphold Democracy 1994-1995) (see Gibson, 2013). Then,
IEDs and RPGs in Iraq rendered these minor improvements obsolete: the destructive
intensity of the new threats exceeded the existing levels of protection; and they localised
the lethal impact at the bottom and sides of the vehicles. What happened next did not
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displace the reliance on steel armour, but it did put its application into question given the
new parameters.
The ample evidence from official military documents, accounts from the field,
and reporting in defence and technology publications shows how the military attempted to
adapt steel armour for Iraq through experimenting with its form. Following Simondon, we
understand form as a force, along with matter (Combes, 2012, p. 5), rather than a pure
being (hylomorphism). It is the potential of ballistic steel to be deformed within the limits
of a mould responding to the new threat’s intensities and locations (after Combes, 2012, p.
5). Among these98, the kits are the best examples to explain how form and matter operate
in what became to be known as the Up-Armored Humvee (model M1114) since 2004. A
kit is a set of parts for an assembly. The assembly in question is a set of attachable
armoured steel parts (screwed/welded) to strengthen the Humvee’s vulnerable spots
(bottom, sides). The main material is rolled steel armour manufactured as single planar
parts (doors, bottom, roof). It also includes armoured glass for the transparent window
parts. The kit is modular: its parts are designed as modules to be systematically replicated,
installed, and maintained (doors, side windows, front window, roof panels, bottom panels).
However, all what makes this assembly a kit would not have been possible without the
“dephasing” (Simondon, 2017) of steel: its formability into rolled, planar parts upon
tempering and quenching, parts that are attachable and replicable.
The kit is the new form that armoured steel takes to overlay the vulnerable spots
of the Humvee, specifically the bottom and sides of the occupants’ cab. The localised
impact of IEDs and RPGs, on the bottom and the sides respectively, delineates and figures
the form. In turn, the new form operationalises an envelope around the occupants’ space
(the cab) that couples the technical with the biological. A scripting gesture that begins to
“inscribe” (Akrich and Latour, 1992) the cab as a highly contained enclosure to protect the
soldiers’ bodies inside the vehicle. It is the dephasing of armoured steel (the mechanical
properties that result from heating ballistic steel) that allowed for shaping the envelope-kit
form and gave survivability in Iraq its initial form: the armour kit.
98 The upgrades include the sprayed-on Explosive Resistant Coating (ERC), the Marine Armor Kit (MAK), the Fragmentation Kit series (FRAG1-7), the Armor Survivability Kit (ASK), and the A/B add-on armour kits among others.
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Such technical improvements rendered the Humvee what Simondon terms a
“primitive object.” Primitive, in this context, refers to an unsophisticated relation between
the technical and the geographic, one where the technical object is not in sync with its
geographic milieu thus requiring its constant regulation by the inventor (Simondon, 2017,
pp. 29–30). The Humvee’s armour had to be constantly upgraded throughout the 1990s and
2000s. Even the modular survivability kits remained minor improvements to adjust the
relation with the new explosive terrain, as they only adapted the Humvee and, in the
process, compromised its mobility script99. Military engineering continued scrambling to
model more effective technics survivability.
A worthy observation that merits further investigation in future research is the
relation between provisional responses to survivability in the field and disciplined design
and procurement processes at the institutional level. The former emerges as swift
makeshift adaptations, while the institutional response slowly takes shape through
bureaucratic process, political deliberation, and mass production. Examples include the
infamous Vietnam War era Gun Trucks adapted with sandbags and scrap steel in the field
from military transportation trucks; the same type of tucks re-emerged during the 2003 Iraq
War. Similarly, soldiers added “scrap metal” (see Figure 10) and “[piled] sandbags”
(Roach, 2016, p. 27) to adapt the Humvees during the early years of the Iraq war
continuing the makeshift practice known as Hillbilly Armor100. Besides its speculative
dependence on the mechanical properties of materials like steel, sand, Kevlar, and even
plywood, such in situ practice illustrates how the military scrambles to operationalise
survivability through trial and error: individuals mobilise their non-military training and
skills; groups engage in design and collaboration; and scrap materials get upcycled as
armour.
4.1.2. Ground Interface
... a vehicular mine blast typically subjects a [Tactical Wheeled Vehicle] to forces and accelerations that are, in turn, transferred to the TWV based crew members inside the vehicle. Such forces and accelerations are capable of causing extensive damage to a human body, and can thereby result in the death of TWV based crew members.
99 The military informally dubbed this version of the Humvee “Groaner” (Lenaers, 2007) 100 Hillbilly is a derogatory term referring to rural people in the United states, in this context used by soldiers as slang for unsophisticated makeshift armour.
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Figure 11 Excerpt from Patent 8707848 (Mills and Stevens, 2008, secs 0002, 0004).
A survey of our empirical military and media sources shows that the success of
the Humvee’s armour kits remained under question. Their limited performance failed, and
military casualties continued to rise. This is attributed to the asymmetric character of
warfare where IEDs evolved101 to become larger and deadlier while the military continued
its frenzied scramble to figure out an adequate level of survivability. Accounts of the U.S.
Marines’ operations in Al-Anbar Province in Iraq are testament to the new situation.
Bigger IEDs were buried in the ground along the movement paths of armoured vehicles;
their detonations were so powerful that they lifted Humvees up in the air before destroying
them and causing fatal injuries.
We come across a common thread in the analysed patents that explains how
military engineers framed this breakdown as a relation of flows and geometry (e.g., Figure
11). The ground-originating explosion gave way to two types of flows: the first, a
shockwave (expanding gases) that deformed any surfaces it interfaced with; the second, a
blast (expanding area of pressure) that travelled through the molecular structure of vehicle
parts and into that of the soldiers’ bodies inside the cab. The geometry of the Humvee’s
underbody multiplied the impact of these flows (e.g., Figure 12). It was flat by design like
the underbodies of most military and commercial vehicles; and it had low ground clearance
due to the extra weight of the armour kit it carried. The flat-low configuration trapped the
energy of the explosion between the ground and the underbody of the vehicle, thus
multiplying its impact due to extra resistance between the two interfaces.
It is this extra resistance that informed the new improvement to steel armour. Let
us analyse two patent documents that are revealing in this respect. The first is Lockheed
Martin’s102 patent application Perforated Hull for Vehicle Blast Shield (Mills and Stevens,
2008), filed in September 2007 and published in March 2008 parallel to fielding the first
MRAPs in Iraq (April 2007) and Afghanistan (February 2008). It proposes to attach a
perforated V-shaped shield to the underbody to deflect an explosion’s force away from the
vehicle and its occupants. The angled planes of the V-shape geometry deflect part of the
101 In Iraq, IEDs were assembled from stock shells or old ordnance (Wilkinson, Bevan and Biddle, 2008), leftover from the defeated Iraqi army’s arsenal. While in Afghanistan they were assembled from ammonium nitrates (C. M. Johnson et al., 2012). 102 The corporation is a global security and aerospace company that develops systems like the recent trillion-dollar flagship F35 Lightning II fighter jet.
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upward blast to the sides while the perforations “partially exhaust gases” thus reducing the
impact of the shockwave. The second is Ceradyne’s103 patent V-shaped Blast Shield for
Protection Against IEDs (Allor, Husak and Skiotys, 2014). The final version of two earlier
iterations in October 2012 and May 2013, it proposes a no-welding construction method to
attach a V-shaped shield efficiently and securely to a flat underbody using Methacylate
adhesive and steel bolts instead of welding.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that our military vehicles need a re-design to the bottom of the vehicle to protect against the new threat of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). One of the first “V” shaped blast hull designs was used by the South African military in the 1980’s … A large problem is attaching the V-shaped blast shield to vehicles that are already in service. One such vehicle is the Humvee … There are over 16,000 armored Humvees in Iraq today with over 100,000 Humvees worldwide. Their flat, low bottom surface makes them vulnerable to the IEDs.
Figure 12 Excerpt from Patent Application 20080066613 A1 (Allor, Husak and Skiotys, 2014, col. 1).
Once again, we observe the operationalisation of a new form, although still a
primitive one. The new underbody configuration constituted a “synergetic group of
functions” (Simondon, 2017, p. 38) among the V-shape geometry, the attaching method,
and the explosive flows. The upward acceleration and sideways deflection of the explosion
shaped the V-shape morphology of the planar rolled steel armour parts (Figure 14). The
force of the explosion informed a dynamic bolted connection to absorb the shear stress of
vibrations. The bolted V-shape shield adjusted the flat geometry to articulate the explosive
flow and reduce its lethal impact on vehicle and soldiers. However, and like the armour kit,
the V-shape configuration remained a single functional unit separate from the
“synergistically associated structures in the technical object” (Simondon, 2017, p. 38). The
intensity of IED explosions together with the low ground clearance of Humvees defeated
even the most advanced attaching methods, both kits and the V-shape.
4.1.3. Conclusion
The first section introduced how the changing character of warfare from air
superiority to urban and asymmetric spatial engagement in the 2000s manifested in the
103 The company is a subsidiary of the multinational conglomerate 3M, which specialises in advanced materials and ceramics.
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proliferation of the IED. The IED’s power lies in its stealthy ability to occupy the ground
and to become integrated within the terrain. Its explosion disrupts the “techno-geographic
milieu” of military mobility: the explosive force disrupts the Humvee’s horizontal
movement and creates a deadly vertical lift; the shockwave deforms the vehicle parts; and
the pressure travels through the vehicle and transforms into injury within the occupants’
bodies. The IED adds new intensities of obstructing flow to the terrain and shifts the
military’s concern from high mobility to a mobility-survivability hybrid in their light
wheeled vehicle fleets.
We witness the early stages of emerging associations between a physical domain
(mechanical metallurgical properties), an environmental domain (occupant-centred
enclosures), and a biological domain (militarised bodies). Survivability is redistributed as
synergies among these domains as the military attempts to adapt the Humvee to the terrain
of its changing role and context. The minor technical improvements aim to increase
survivability by articulating the acceleration of explosive flows in two forms104: a techno-
morphological change to integrate deflective geometry: the V-shape dubbed as “lifesaving
geometry” (Associated Press, 2008); and an architectural conception of the occupants’ cab
as an isolated enclosure: the armour kit. Yet, the military’s grasp of terrain stays largely
topographical as the improved Humvee continues to be a container space for the soldiers’
bodies.
104 In Simondon’s words, the first would be a minor improvement or a “detour” and the second would be a major improvement or an “mutations which are oriented” (2017, p. 43)
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Figure 13 Reproduced mobility terrain diagram from the Bastion APC vehicle brochure (AM General, 2018)
Figure 14 Reproduced vehicle underbody geometry diagram from patent art of U.S. Patent 10,323,909 B2 (Carton and Roebroeks, 2019, p. Sheet 4 of 6)
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Figure 15 The four key types of severe bodily injuries causes by IED detonations (Ramasamy et al., 2011, p. 163)
Figure 16 Comparison between IED-caused fatalities (dark grey graph) and other fatalities (light grey graph); notice the increase during the 2003-2005 insurgency, and after 2007 when the U.S. attempted to reduce risk by transferring security responsibilities to Iraq (Lamb, Schmidt and Fitzsimmons, 2009, p. 2)
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4.2 Enclosing Bodies
The military’s emerging concerns for surviving a terrain of deadly blasts and
shockwaves (Figure 16) ushered in an urgent need for a radical improvement to what they
conceived of as a “survivability baseline.” The Marines’ Urgent Universal Need
Statement105 (Urgent UNS) of May 2005 was the initial document to officially request “to
increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in hazardous fire areas against
known threats” (Inspector General, 2008, pp. 2–3). It described a severe situation where
the Up-Armored Humvee broke down in Al-Anbar Province, Iraq, thus establishing the
rationale for an MRAP capability, and eventually leading to its rapid acquisition. The
following is a telling excerpt from the Urgent UNS statement.
There is an immediate need for an MRAP vehicle capability to increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in a hazardous fire area against known threats…
[Joint Theater Trauma Registry Report] for [October 2004] indicates IEDs are number one Level Ill and Level IV mechanisms of injury. Motor Vehicle accidents [MVAs] are number two mechanism of injury requiring Level Ill treatment. Together IED and MVAs account for 68% or over 750 level Ill and IV grave and serious casualties.
The … fleet is constantly exposed to IED/RPG/SAF threat while conducting active combat, combat support and combat service support as well as the inherent dangers that accrue to vehicles conducting line and long haul missions over the open roads … MRAP capability will provide the operating forces a multi-role vehicle system capable of mitigating four of the greatest casualty-producing agents during [Operation Iraqi Freedom]: IEDs, RPGs, SAF and [MVA] casualties. The MRAP will mitigate or eliminate the three primary kill mechanisms of mines and IEDs - fragmentation, blast overpressure, and acceleration. It will also counter the secondary kill mechanisms of vehicle crashes following mines strikes and fire aboard vehicles. The MRAP vehicle capability will help establish a baseline survivability index that will increase protection and reduce the number of casualties requiring level Ill and IV medical treatment in a given theater of operations.
Figure 17 Excerpt from the Urgent UNS (McGriff and Dewet, 2005, pp. 1–3)
105 The Urgent UNS was one of a few military political and managerial tools to collect enormous power into a single situation. It mobilised the U.S. Department of Defense and its many organisations, the U.S. Congress and its different committees, the armed forces, and defence contractors from different industry sectors. It mobilised what was described as “one of the largest material acquisition programs since World War II” (Howitz, 2008). See also Urgent Needs Process (Commandant of the Marine Corps, 2006, 2009).
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The excerpt (Figure 17) describes the loss of survivability as a function of
incapacitating and disabling soldiers during an operation due to abortive types of injuries
that their bodies sustain. The intensity of the threat and the inadequacy of the protection
both cause severe bodily traumas, translated here in the military’s medical terms for “levels
of care.” Unlike Levels I and II which can receive initial battlefield care and mobile
surgical care respectively, explosions and their aftermath in Iraq inflicted Levels III and IV
traumas and injuries. These include head, neck, and spinal injuries and severe burn and
other traumas (see Figure 15), the types that might require blood transfusion, limb salvage,
and full medical and surgical care at a high volume trauma centre (such as an Air Force
Theatre Hospital106) or an overseas medical centre (such as the Landstuhl Regional
Medical Center107, Germany) (Defense Health Board, 2015, pp. 3–4). The Statement set up
these medical limitations and considerations of the human body as the index for a
survivability baseline that could be offered by the MRAP capability.
The early MRAP-type vehicles were developed by South African defence
contractors (like state-owned Denel) for the colonial Rhodesian Security Forces during the
Bush Wars of the 1960s-1970s. The modern version of the MRAPs travelled from South
Africa to serve with specialised units of the U.S. military, mainly the Explosive Ordnance
Disposal teams. However, the Urgent UNS statement listed fourteen specific requirements
to attain the anticipated survivability baseline, key among them are an integrated V-shaped
hull, armoured glass, anti-armour-piercing protection, four-point restraint harnesses, anti-
shock cushioned seats, cab fire suppression system, and rollover protection (McGriff and
Dewet, 2005, pp. 1–2). Our analysis of the patent documents in the following sections
shows how this anticipated baseline became the guiding road map for a program of actions
to restore survivability, an occupant-centric program concerned with technics of enclosing
bodies in advanced protective envelopes.
Let us start to examine a major improvement to the technical object where it
changes from a single entity to become an assemblage of interdependent modules working
to avoid severe bodily traumas. We analyse two modes of detaching – mechanical and
architectural, as documented in three patents and two patent applications. The first is a
106 Like Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq and the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan 107 This is the largest U.S. hospital outside of the U.S., and it is “a tertiary referral center for EUCOM, CENTCOM and AFRICOM supporting more than 530,000 beneficiaries” (Trunkey et al., 2010, p. 35).
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mechanical mode that transforms the explosive energy into mechanical work that detaches,
deforms, and crumbles the vehicle into parts. The second is an architectural mode that
detaches and differentiates the occupants’ space as a capsule: an autonomous, well-
isolated, well-protected atmospheric enclosure (see Sloterdijk, 2016) to separate a safe
interior from a hostile outside environment. The capsule becomes an architectural sub-
ensemble within the armoured vehicle’s ensemble.
4.2.1. Sacrificial Parts
A first mode of detaching suggested sacrificing part of the whole, or the
decoupling of a vehicle’s wheel-axle assembly upon encountering a detonation. The
military modelled this mediation of hostile terrain upon two principles: a blast energy is
countered by or transformed to another mode of energy (including the mechanical energy
of the detaching itself); accordingly, a blast’s damage is reduced to avoid an abortive
impairment such as a vehicle crash or immobilisation during combat. An illustrative
example from the early years of the war is the German-based Rheinmetall Landsysteme’s
patent Mine Protection Device, Particularly for Wheeled Vehicles (Grosch, 2005). Filed in
2003, this improvement preceded the design and production of the MRAPs. It describes a
mechanism to sacrifice part of the vehicle in lieu of the whole (Figure 18) by using a
counter-explosion. As one of the wheels drives over an IED or triggers a landmine, a
pressure-sensor signals a pyrotechnic-separator to detonate a wedge charge that detaches
the affected wheel from the vehicle.
It is an object of the present invention to prevent the transmission of a shock wave from an exploding mine into the drive work structure of a vehicle so as to prevent transmission of the shock wave throughout the entirety of the vehicle. Thus, the present invention endeavors [to minimize applied damage to the vehicle so that on-site repairs to the vehicle are still possible
Figure 18 Excerpt from Patent 6892621 B2 (Grosch, 2005, col. 2).
Another example of a similar improvement is Oshkosh Corporation’s patent
application Axle Assembly (Schreiner, Roehl and Pelko, 2011). Becoming a patent in 2013,
this improvement was applied to the second generation of MRAPs and became Oshkosh’s
signature independent suspension system (the TAK-4) that equipped thousands of military
wheeled vehicles (see 4.5). It is a mechanism to maintain functionality in the form of what
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the military calls “residual mobility,” which is a capability for vehicles to continue moving
despite the damages so as to avoid the total immobilisation of an on-site “mobility kill.”
The mechanism (Figure 20) collects a threefold improvement to the axle assembly108: add
shielding plates for some components (differential and steering arms); provide vents in the
proposed shields and existing block components (side and skid plates); and enhance the
suspension system to support shocks in case of lift-crash109. Such design allows the axles
to absorb and dissipate a blast’s energy thus reducing the impact on the occupants and
potentially sustaining the continuity of a vehicle’s mobility.
Yet, a different example of creating sacrificial parts proposes isolating the
occupants’ space from the rest of the vehicle. It divides the vehicle (technical ensemble)
into modules (sub-ensembles) to distribute the synergies of survivability. Let us consider
the invention in Rheinmetall Landsysteme’s patent110 Vehicle Protection Against the Effect
of a Land Mine (Hass and Runow, 2007). Updated to another patent in 2009, the document
depicts the vehicle as “building blocks” and differentiates the occupants’ space (also “crew
space” and “cabin” in the document). It describes a mechanism to localise the blast impact
away from the occupants’ space and into either the front or rear blocks that contain the
wheels and axles (Figure 19). In this situation, connecting fasteners release the main
middle crew block through exploding bolts, and spare electric motors continue to drive any
undamaged wheels and axles.
We witness a shift for mobility from moving-on to moving-with111 the terrain. The
inventions ascribe a better responsive mediation to the terrain, as an interface with the
ground. Wheels and axles are recruited in the protective ensemble, which was exclusively
assigned to armour in previous designs. The performance of protection is enhanced by
redistributing the impact of the blast to the subsystems that encounter the ground first
(wheels and axles), and through maintaining residual mobility and avoiding an abortive
impairment. These technical improvements constitute the initial thinking for separating and
protecting occupants within the vehicle.
108 A typical axle assembly includes wheel-end, steering, drive train, and suspension components. 109 Lift-crash is the event of a blast force lifting a vehicle in the air, causing its fall and crash on the ground. 110 An updated version of this patent is US Patent 7594561 Mine Protection Vehicle System (Hass, Runow and Krutzfeldt, 2009). 111 We draw on Latour’s concept of “spacing” or moving with space (in Literature Review, see Latour, 1996c)
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4.2.2. Capsules
A second mode for detaching suggested substantially isolating the occupants from
the mechanical components of the vehicle. This conception of terrain includes the vehicles’
accelerating mechanical parts upon an explosion, which threaten the occupants’ bodies
inside the cab module. Thus, there emerges the need to detach and differentiate the
occupants’ space as a well-isolated capsule, not just a cab whose function is to seat
humans. What we call capsule refers to the sub-ensemble with a pronounced architectural
character that is concerned with enclosing and protecting the occupants’ bodies from the
terrain, including the explosion’s shockwave and blast, the ground’s debris, and the
vehicle’s accelerating parts. This can be witnessed in a BAE Systems (Tactical Vehicle
Systems L.P.) patent112 entitled Armored Cab for Vehicles (R. D. Johnson et al., 2012).
Eventually evolving through four113 other patents, it documents an invention based on the
MRAP principles to produce capsules for future vehicles (such as the JLTV) or to upgrade
old ones (such as the Humvee). The patent describes a design for an armoured cab that
isolates all the vehicles mechanical parts away from the occupants. The cab is an
independent structural and architectural armoured enclosure (Figure 21); it has a V-shaped
or curved underbody geometry to deflect blasts; and it houses the transmission and power
train in a tunnel outside the enclosure. This improvement is best understood against one
that encloses the mechanical parts within the enclosure such as the 2008 patent Mine
Resistant Armored Vehicle (see 4.5).
We analyse one distinct experimental attempt to drastically modify the survivable
architecture through re-thinking the relation with the ground. The concern here is twofold:
increase survivability by displacing the localisation of the blast under the vehicle; and
maintain mobility by minimising the need to add extra heavy armour. An example of such
an experimental attempt is Hardwire, LLC’s patent application entitled Vehicle with
Structural Vent Channels for Blast Energy and Debris Dissipation (Tunis and Kendall,
2011). Hardwire is a defence contractor specialised in armour systems that have been
furnishing the military’s MRAPs with ballistic glass and anti-explosion solutions. Their
invention proposes a major improvement to the Humvee’s occupant space making it a
porous object (Figure 22). In the details, vertical vent channels run through the vehicle and
provide a mechanism to discharge the blast momentum originating underneath. The
112 Updated versions of this patent are US Patents 8387511 (Johnson et al., 2013), 8616617 (Sherbeck et al., 2013), 8733226 (Johnson et al., 2014), and 9766047B2 (Harmon et al., 2017). 113 Published in March 203, December 203, May 2014, and September 2017
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method counters the upward lift of a blast as the vents relieve and discharge most of the
energy, gas, and debris driven by an explosion under the vehicle. The channels also serve
as anti-deformation structural elements for the occupants’ compartment. Thrust
mechanisms (using combustible material such as solid rocket fuel) complement the work
of the vents by producing a reactive hold down force. The thrust force pushes downwards
to counter the counter-gravitational upward lift of the blast.
Despite its drastic approach that brings the soldiers and the blast so close together,
the military has been testing this invention. The New York Times even reported on how the
inventors borrow from fluid dynamics in aeronautical engineering “[likening] the chimney
to an exhaust vent on a rocket” (Drew, 2011) that disperses the supersonic acceleration of a
wave blast. The 2011 patent application became patent, with versions published in 2013
and 2015. The invention remains a stark example of engineering’s attempts to isolate the
occupants’ space, even though such extreme improvement did not concretise yet.
4.2.3. Conclusion
The second section showed how the Humvee adaptations failed to reduce IED
casualties and continued to inflict severe trauma114 and injury levels that required full
medical and surgical care at specialised hospitals in theatre or overseas. The collapse of
survivability is completely medicalised and measured in critical trauma levels (neck/spinal
injuries, severe burns) in turn intensifying the associations among the physical,
environmental, and biological domains of military mobility in Iraq. The U.S. Marines first
request to mobilise the MRAP capability beyond specialised units (clearing explosive
ordnance) and to all units operating in the field. Iraq has become a terrain of explosive
ordnance, and the concretisation of the MRAP as a counter-explosive protective enclosure
replaces the Humvee and its adaptations.
The patents demonstrate the engineers’ early responses to the traumatic reality of
Iraq’s explosive terrain. Their technical improvements focus on residual mobility and
pristine body enclosures. The mobility-survivability hybrid concertises further as a series of
114 Our analysis uses trauma-informed lens specific to typical physical traumas resulting from IED explosions, as described in military and medical publications. In no way this approach is specialised, based on aggregate or comprehensive data. Among the limitations to this lens is accounting for other types of physical injuries, mental health outcomes (PTSD), and the traumatising experience of being in such an extreme event.
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topological relations between the “figure” or “deformation” (after Lash, 2012) of the
vehicle and that of the terrain. On the one hand, the wheels and axles embody deformation
as a mechanism to deflect/absorb/dissipate the mutations of the explosive energy; on the
other hand, the vehicle is no more a unit, but a coordinated assembling of parts for mobility
(power train) and survivability (capsule). The architectural character of the occupants’
space stands out as a contained, protective capsule making survivability the effect of the
extreme architectural envelope developed as a response to the milieu. In the following
sections, we will see how the engineers’ advanced responses to the traumatic realities of
the war expand the technical ensemble of survivability (while responding to the need of
mobility) beyond the vehicle and recruit the mobility environment and the occupants’
bodies.
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Figure 19 Patent art showing vehicle as modular parts (Hass and Runow, 2007, p. Sheet 2 of 3).
Figure 20 Patent art showing Oshkosh’s TAK-4 independent suspension system; notice how there is no horizontal axle that connects both wheels, rather each wheel independently responds to the terrain (Schreiner, Roehl and Pelko, 2011, p. Sheet 19 of 21)
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Figure 21 Patent art showing a schematic of a cab; notice how the cab is an independent entity from the rest of the vehicle including the tunnel form that isolates its drive shaft components (R. D. Johnson et al., 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3)
Figure 22 Patent art showing a schematic section of a human and an energy vent coexisting in the extreme event of a detonation (Tunis and Kendall, 2011).
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4.3 Active Exteriors
The U.S. military increased their initial acquisition of MRAP vehicles from a few
hundred to more than 27,000 vehicles between 2006 and 2012, making the MRAP
capability the new standard for raised protection levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike the
Humvee’s cab that was complemented with ballistic steel kits, the MRAP’s envelop was
originally engineered using military grade steel. This is steel armour plate that is an alloy
of iron, carbon, and other elements combined in specific ratios using specific melting,
rolling, and treatment techniques. Its types include carbon steel and High-Strength Low-
Alloy steel115 (HSLA) produced in the U.S. at an industrial scale by major manufactures
ArcelorMittal USA and Evraz North America. However, applications of steel armour plate
reached two performance limitations: they increased weight thus reduced mobility; and
they still could not withstand the kinetic energy of EFP116 types and intensities of
explosives. For alternatives, land vehicles engineers resorted to aerospace, electronics, and
advanced materials engineering.
We now move to a phase where innovations in the capsular enclosure and its
envelope shifted from passive to active protection. We analyse how the steel envelope
progresses to alternative advanced materials and new assemblages. Similar to smart
climatic technologies for building envelopes, the new improvements employ advanced
materials, environmental sensors, energy computation, and reactive measures. Armoured
land vehicle design borrows material and electronic technologies from aerospace
engineering to mitigate the impact of external threats on the interior of the enclosure and
its occupants. We continue to analyse the construction of survivability in five patents and
one patent application. Two improvements augment the performance of the envelope, and
a third expands the technical ensemble of survivability.
4.3.1. Enhanced Envelopes
115 According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, carbon steel is the most produced steel worldwide “that has properties made up mostly of the element carbon and which relies on the carbon content for structure;” and, HSLA steel has “higher strength, and in some cases additional resistance to atmospheric corrosion or improved formability, […] obtained by moderate amounts of one or more alloying elements such as columbium, vanadium, titanium, used alone or in combination” (AISI, 2019). 116 The kinetics of the Munroe effect, characteristic to shape charges, compromise thick, solid steel and penetrate layers of steel plates. Explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) are an example of shape charges.
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A first improvement acts on the materiality of the armour, that is the performance
of its constitutive materials according to how their properties are forged or arranged. The
invention replaces conventional heavy steel plates with lighter materials having advanced
mechanical properties for higher ballistic protection (e.g., Figure 23). In its pursuit for such
materials, military engineering borrows applications from the aerospace industry and
develops them for protected land mobility.
Historically the V shaped hulls are made of welded steel plate, which is very heavy and added much more weight to the armored vehicles to slow down its mobility and limit the ammunition and personnel carrying capacity. The vehicle's weight and size severely [limit] its mobility off main roads, in urban areas, and over bridges (reference 1). 72 percent of the world's bridges cannot hold the MRAP. Its heft also restricts several of the vehicles from being transported by C-130 cargo aircraft or the amphibious ships that carry Marine equipment and supplies.
Figure 23 Excerpt from Patent Application 20120261039 A1 (Cho, 2012, sec. 0003)
We trace a key invention that produced the second generation of MRAP vehicles
to Cho’s patent application entitled Method for Manufacturing of Vehicle Armor
Components Requiring Severe Forming with Very High Bend Angles with Very Thick
Gauge Product of High Strength Heat Treatable Aluminum Alloys (Cho, 2012). Alex
Cho’s ATI Inc. company engineered advanced Aluminium Alloy applications for the U.S.
Army, U.S. Air Force, NASA, Airbus, Space-X, Bombardier, Alcoa, and BAE Systems.
The company’s web resumé recounts how its expertise facilitated “[manufacturing and
delivering] light weight AA2139 underbody armour for [the MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle
models] … which were expedited to Afghanistan in 2012” (ATI Inc., 2019). The patent
application describes a mechanism to manufacture a stronger V-shape underbody geometry
by reducing joints and employing lighter-but-stronger materials. The new steel alternative
is the high-strength-light-weight Aluminium Alloy AA2139 (also developed by Cho),
similar to applications of Aluminium alloys in the aerospace industries (such as AA2050
and AA2196 for Airbus planes and AA2098 and AA2195 for the F-16 and Typhoon fighter
aircraft). The reduction of joints is achieved through two special methods: a manufacturing
method for Aluminium alloy plates, and a forging method for forming severe-angled-V-
shaped-geometry from a single plate, without welding/jointing (Figure 24). The outcome is
a lightweight capsule with a jointless and seamless V-shape underbody.
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Let us look at another invention in Raytheon Company’s patent entitled Layering
Non-metallic Layers between Metallic Layers to Improve Armor Protection (St. Claire and
Imholt, 2012). One of the world’s top defence contractors specialised in aerospace and
electronics engineering, this is one of Raytheon’s few attempts at developing technologies
for land vehicles like the MRAPs. It describes a mechanism for increasing the plasticity of
armour whose deformation absorbs the energy of accelerating projectiles. This
improvement responds to the evolution of explosives, specifically EFPs and shape charges,
by inserting plastic sheets (such as polycarbonates) between metallic sheets of armour. The
plastic layers intercept projectiles in the skin of the vehicle (Figure 25). Compared to
brittle metal, plastic permanent deformation diffuses the projectiles’ velocity and pressure,
thus reducing penetration of the armoured envelope and setting off shrapnel fragmentation
inside the enclosure.
4.3.2. Smart Environments
A second improvement recruits the environment of the vehicle to multiply the
reactive protection of the envelope. It extends the physical envelope delineating the vehicle
to include its surrounding atmospheric environment. The invention taps into smart designs
for autonomous sensing and reacting protocols that counter the shockwaves of explosions.
It achieves extending the physical envelope by adding sensing and computing devices,
capturing the atmospheric variations, and deploying counter-explosives. Although the two
improvements discussed below have not yet been approved for application, they illustrate
how survivability is engineered from within the envelope outward to the terrain.
Here is one such invention, dubbed “force field” by The Washington Post
(Basulto, 2015), in Boeing Company’s patent Method and System for Shockwave
Attenuation via Electromagnetic Arc (Tillotson, 2015). Another global defence contractor
specialised in aerospace and electronics engineering; this is one of Boeing’s few attempts
to engineer systems for land vehicles. It describes a mechanism to recruit the “atmospheric
air” surrounding a vehicle as an “intermediate medium” that extends the protective
envelope (Figure 26). The improvement responds to shockwaves defined in the patent as
“traveling discontinuities in pressure, temperature, density, and other physical qualities
through a medium,” which – unlike shrapnel and debris –penetrate a thick physical armour
at the molecular level (2015, col. 1). In the details, a lightweight device on the vehicle
senses a projectile/explosion and heats the air through an electromagnetic arc, beam, or
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current (via electric, laser, microwave, or plasma means). The heat alters the air’s
molecular density generating a transient medium, between vehicle and explosion, that
intercepts the shockwave through reflection, refraction, absorption, and/or deflection.
Another relevant invention is documented in Plasan Sasa’s patent Vehicle
Underbelly System (Asaf et al., 2015). This Israeli-based company specialises in vehicle
survivability, and it has equipped MaxxPro and M-ATV MRAPs with advanced armour
solutions (Friedman, 2013, p. 26). The patent describes a smart mechanism to complement
passive with reactive protection, where the V-shaped underbody counter attacks a blast to
resist its deadly effects. The improvement adds an autonomous communication protocol,
deformable armour, and explosive charges to the underbody of the vehicle. First, the
protocol senses a detonation and converts the sensing into data that characterises the
shockwave’s parameters (location of a peak, direction of progression, duration, magnitude
distribution, and spatial geometry). Second, the protocol initiates a sequential counter-
detonation employing the charges. Third, the V-shape armour deflects the blast and
deforms, absorbing the blast energy in this mutation process.
The patent art of Plasan’s document offers another way to engineer the body-
environment relations. It depicts the explosion event and the reactive protection protocol as
frames of movement and change. Rather than a two-dimensional illustration of a section
that cuts through a moment in space-time, a cinematic-like sequence117 captures the flows
of terrain acting on the underbody of the vehicle (Figure 27). The representation of the
dynamic debris and underbody deformations renders visible the expanding gases of a
shockwave and the expanding area of pressure of a blast. The explosion event becomes a
spacing-timing (after Latour, 1996c) continuum of displacement, acceleration, and vibrant
matter. Unlike the expressionless figure drawings that do not represent the erratic
movements of the human body (neck, spinal cord, limbs) while it is harnessed to the seats
inside the capsule.
4.3.3. Energy Transfers
117 Similar to techniques of “flip book” in graphic design, “stop motion” in film, and “cinematic sections” or “serial sectioning” in architecture. For the latter, see the works of architects Enric Miralles, Foreign Office Architects, and Reiser +Umemoto (Carpo, 2013, p. 95; Hensel and Turko, 2015, p. 16).
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A third improvement recruits physical changes in states of matter, i.e., “dephasing
(Simondon, 2017), to multiply the reactive protective capacity of the envelope. A physical,
yet not chemical, change from solid-to-liquid and solid-to-gas states rearranges the
particles of a matter thus absorbing/dissipating a blast’s shockwave in materials such as
thermoplastic polymers and fluid retaining materials. It is a form of energy transfer that
reduces and redirects the blast momentum away from the enclosure. Both improvements
discussed below have not been put to application; yet they illustrate how survivability is
engineered from within the envelope outward to the terrain.
Let us analyse the invention in Foster-Miller, Inc.’s patent Blast/Impact
Mitigation Shield (Parida, Dana and Zaouk, 2015). This military robotics company was
acquired by QinetiQ North America in 2004, whose Q-NET protective net against RPGs
became a major addition to the MRAP protection. The patent describes a mechanism to
reduce a blast’s impact by transferring its energy to state changes in matter. A damping
matter is added to the underbody shield, which changes state from solid to fluid (thus
absorbing the energy) upon an explosion event. The state change is physical not chemical,
where “the phase change material has an extremely high heat of fusion (145-195 J/g), and
thus it requires a lot of energy to transition it from a solid to a liquid state” (2015, col. 4).
The suggested damping material is a thermoplastic polymer like high-density polyethylene
(HDPE) or ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMW-PE). A spacer, made of
spaced-blades (called plunger), allows for the expansion of the energy-absorbing material
upon transition.
Another invention is documented in the U.S. Navy’s patent118 Shock Transfer
Armor (Knies and Moser, 2017). Although we did not find an actual application for this
patent, the invention is one of a few that recruit the physical state change of matter to
protect MRAPs and Humvees. It describes a mechanism to absorb a shockwave when high
fluid retaining materials (HFRM) change state from solid to gas. The patent defines HFRM
as “a material that is able to absorb from 50% to up to 1000% of its weight in water”
(2017, col. 2). The improvement119 attaches an appliqué (add-on) armour-shield to the
underbody of a vehicle, with spherical beads or cylindrical pellets of HFRM layered
between metallic or plastic plates. The beads/pellets absorb the blast energy “through a
118 Submitted on behalf of the United States of America, represented by the Secretary of the Navy 119 More info in the earlier 2013 patent application Material and Process for Coupling Impulses and Shockwaves into Solids
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phase transformation, and … HFRM particle acceleration” (2017, col. 4), thus reducing
impact on the crew compartment. In the details, the spherical or cylindrical form of the
beads/pellets increases the surface area of the HFRM and the air volume in between. To
put things in perspective, the patent describes commercially-available beads/pellets
measuring 150 to 500 micrometres (μm) that can swell with water to about 3 millimetres
(mm) (2017, col. 3). A blast wave increases the kinetic energy of the HFRM in the
underbody shield leading to vaporisation of the absorbed fluid (such as water); the vapor is
released away from the vehicle through the sides of the shield. Thus, we witness the
realisation of survivability as a form of energy exchange through the dephasing processes
of high-density materials that absorb/dissipate the energy of a detonation.
4.3.4. Conclusion
The third section examined how engineers realised complex constructions of
terrain to achieve better improvements of survivability. They expanded the network of
actors making up terrain, which lead to expanded adjustments in the capsule and its
envelope. Besides ground, explosion, and accelerating vehicle parts (see 4.2.2), terrain
expanded to include the atmospheric environment and the envelope expanded to include
the critical work and high performance of advanced materials and smart technologies.
The proposed improvements in the patents expand the network of survivability to
metallurgy, thermodynamics, polymer chemistry, and electromagnetism. They advance the
work of survivability on three fronts: defensive mechanisms change from passive to
active120; armour outgrows steel into composite materials121; and protection extends
beyond the physical capsule into the surrounding atmosphere. The new technics
redistribute the competencies of protection beyond a conventional container of bodies, and
the technical object becomes more entangled with its ground, atmosphere, and materiality.
Levels of survivability increase as a function of better human and nonhuman adjustments.
120 This technical improvement resembles the explosive reactive armour120 (ERA) usually placed on M1 Abrams tanks, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stryker armoured vehicles. 121 Composite armour might become an application of the new JLTV vehicles, akin to the composite armour of the M1A1 and M1A2 models of the Abrams tank, made of steel, depleted uranium, and ceramics.
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Figure 24 Patent art showing severe bending angles of a single, jointless, thick sheet of AA2139 (Cho, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3)
Figure 25 Patent art showing sectional schematics of layering metals with plastics to absorb the kinetics of projectiles (St. Claire and Imholt, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 3).
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Figure 26 Patent art showing schematic of Humvee with the sensing mechanism and how it heats the medium where the projectile travels (Tillotson, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 7)
Figure 27 Reproduced cinematic sections from patent art that capture the explosion event and dynamic terrain as a space-time continuum (Asaf et al., 2015)
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4.4 Dynamic Interiors
Let us now look at innovations inside the capsule responding to the severe effects
of terrain that continue to travel through the envelope. We have already seen (4.3.2) how a
blast could travel as accelerating vibrations through the molecular structure of materials,
despite their thickness or advanced properties. To address such threats, engineers shift
focus from blocking flows of terrain (outside to inside) to attenuating their impact once
they reach the inside of the capsule. The interior space joins the technical ensemble as it
becomes the new frontier, the new line of defence, between occupants’ bodies in direct
tension with the effects of terrain. We unpack how survivability is constructed through two
improvements, which we analyse in five patents and one patent application. A first
improvement manages the localisation of occupants’ bodies inside the vehicle. A second
one manages the intensities of flow between the inside and the outside of the protected
enclosure, producing protocols of coordination between humans and nonhumans.
4.4.1. Machinic Bodies
A first improvement manages the localisation of occupants’ bodies inside the
vehicle. The engineers adopt a body-centred lens to localise and reduce the impact of
terrain. They focus on how bodies become prone to impact as blasts travel through the
vehicle’s seats and into the seated occupants’ bodies; and they focus on how the bodies can
interface with the terrain without leaving the safety of the enclosure. The first situation is
grounded in a trauma pathology understanding of the body as an injury sustaining object,
while the second mobilises insights from assistive interfaces.
With new types of IED-related severe bodily injuries (see trauma levels in 4.2),
engineers tap into biomechanics, trauma pathology, and ergonomic design to protect the
soldiers’ body parts from bone fractures, back and head injuries, and other traumas during
explosion events. They innovate seat designs that absorb pressure waves and transfer less
impact to the soldiers’ heads, necks, spines, and limbs. Here is an exemplary invention
documented in Med-Eng’s patent Blast Attenuation Seat (Grant and Almstedt, 2015).
Starting as a patent application in January 2013, the patent of this leading protective
equipment manufacturer paves the way among other patents for attenuation seat design,
particularly by Granite Tactical Vehicles Inc. (Berman, 2017) and the now-defunct
Survivability Solutions LLC (Lamparter, Coman and McLeon, 2015). It describes a
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mechanism to reduce the impact122 of a blast on the seated123 bodies of the occupants. Its
aim is to attenuate the impact of a blast shock transferred to the occupants’ bodies through
the vehicle by reconfiguring the standard method of fixing the seats to the floor of the
vehicle. Instead, the seats are mounted to the ceiling or walls of the capsule’s interior so
they can oscillate with the vertical force of the blast (Figure 29). The mounting device has
elastic deformation properties that allow for vertical and horizontal swaying, using
hydraulic posts and trailing arms. In addition, a four-point harness (borrowed from Auto
Racing, instead of a three-point seatbelt) and a foot pad (independent from the floor)
secure each of the occupants’ bodies to move with the movement of the seats.
Complimentarily, engineers tap into robotics and human-computer interaction to
allow soldiers to operate from within the safety of the enclosure and to minimise the need
for stepping out to the dangerous terrain. We trace this improvement back to when the U.S.
Army’s Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate124 in Fort Belvoir, Virginia,
developed a robotic Interrogation Arm based on a similar device of the specialised
explosive clearance and disposal Buffalo MRAP (similar to 4.2). The Directorate’s work
extends this device from specialised vehicles like the Buffalo MRAP to other MRAPs like
the RG-31. An Army article reports on the effective timing to field the arm device “in Iraq
in May 2007 and in Afghanistan in July 2007” (Fineman-Bertoli, 2008), parallel to fielding
the first MRAP in Iraq in April 2007 (Friedman, 2013).
This invention is documented in the Harris Corporation’s patent entitled
Improvised Explosive Device Defeat System (Summer, Bosscher and Rust, 2015). A
specialist in aerospace and electronics, Harris Corporation’s invention – updated in a 2017
patent – employs its expertise in robotics for detecting and clearing explosive and
hazardous materials. It describes an interface and a mechanism for remote operation from
inside a vehicle (Figure 30). The interface includes a computer control system and a
special hand grip. The mechanism includes a robot system combining a well-articulated,
122 As described in the patent: “A typical mine explosion (such as a 8 kg anti-tank mine) will impart a 200 G load on the vehicle. The configuration of the vehicle seating and suspension and the location of the explosion … will result in the occupants of the vehicle experiencing approximately 80 Gs. Pulse durations are usually in the 10 ms range. Scientific data indicates that the human body can tolerate approximately 20 G pulses for 10 ms without experiencing injury” (Grant and Almstedt, 2015, col. 3). 123 Regular or hung seats in an MRAP fail due to violent vertical and lateral forces of a blast. Occupants’ bodies suffer collision injuries (hitting internal walls and roofs), shock injuries (transferred to legs through the floor), and flailing injuries (as legs significantly move with respect to torso). 124 NV&ESD is part of the C5ISR Center (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) subordinate to the CCDC (Combat Capabilities Development Command).
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well-controlled macro robotic arm and a high-precision, well-controlled micro robotic arm.
The macro arm moves in a plurality of directions to mobilise either the micro arm or a
motorised UGV (unmanned ground vehicle). The operator controls both arms and the
UGV through the computer and its special grip. The improvement responds to two major
limitations, as identified in the patent document: 1) a spatial limitation where fences and
debris restrict the movement of robots like a remote-controlled UGV (2015, col. 6); and, 2)
an operational limitation where precision lacks in some robotic arms – referring to those
early arms mounted on the Buffalo MRAP vehicle (2015, col. 1).
4.4.2. Intense Flows
A second improvement manages the intensities of flow between the inside and the
outside of the protected enclosure. The basic mechanics of entering/exiting a vehicle and
looking through its windows acquire larger complexity for safety, security, and what the
military calls “situational awareness,” which is the capability to remain aware of the
surroundings, to assess risks, and to react in real-time to avoid/reduce harm/injury. Here,
we analyse two patent documents, one concerned with accessibility and assistive
technologies and the other with sustaining a clear visibility for high situational awareness.
Engineers designed special door locks for the MRAPs to limit ingress/egress to
the capsule. Similar to the Berlin Key (see Latour, 1991), only the soldiers have a special
key and can enter – and thus exit – the capsule, denying entry to enemies and keeping them
on the outside. However, door locks might get stuck in the event of rollover (see Chapter
6); so, the army creates a universal key “that fits all locks … responding to emergency
situations when every second counts” (Terry, 2011). In addition, engineers equip the heavy
armoured steel doors with a power-assist system to aid soldiers in opening them and to
keep their hands and fingers safe when closing them. We trace such invention to Control
Solutions’ patent entitled Door Assist System and Method for Controlling Operation of a
Vehicle Door (McKee, Scholtes and Hayden, 2015). A motion control specialist for
medical applications, Control Solutions equips the Caiman MRAPs and other models with
what becomes commercially dubbed the Powered Door System (PDS). The patent – first
version in 2011 – describes a mechanism to automate the operation (opening/closing) of
heavy doors (Figure 31). The improvement motorises the operation of heavy doors and
powers the motors by a local source (battery) independent from the vehicle’s main power
supply. The powered door system has switches and pre-sets to open or close the door from
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inside or outside the vehicle; it also has manual latches to override the pre-sets in case the
power system fails. The system is programmed to control the speed of opening/closing –
including stopping mid-way, and it has sensors to ensure there are no obstructions between
door and frame in order to protect a soldier’s hand/fingers during stepping in/out of a
vehicle.
Situational awareness is the degree to which one is able to maintain a common operating picture of all aspects of the tactical situation. This picture includes an understanding of the friendly and enemy situation and the urban battle space. Since units will have to conduct operations in changing mission environments, it is imperative for commanders and leaders at all levels to achieve and maintain the best possible degree of situational awareness. Enhanced situational awareness will enhance lethality, survivability, and operational tempo.
Figure 28 Excerpt from FM 3.06-11: Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain (U.S. Army, 2002, p. 1.24)
Engineers also designed windows such that they continue to provide clear
visibility under various conditions. To maintain high levels of situational awareness
(Figure 28), and by extension survivability, the occupants of the MRAP depend on window
size/location and state. Situational awareness in the case of driving vehicles necessitates
that soldiers have clear, unimpaired visibility in order to observe the surroundings and
assess risks to reduce breakdown/injury. In Iraq and Afghanistan, MRAP windshields
suffered the impact of blasts and sand abrasion. Different MRAP models had varying
window sizes/locations that affected this capability; however, engineers had two concerns
for survivability: one was maintaining clear visibility through the thick ballistic glass (also
known as transparent armour), and another was protecting soldiers from broken glass
debris in an explosion event. They borrowed another innovation form Auto Racing,
specifically stock-car125, “to protect the expensive ballistic glass on [MRAP] vehicles in
Afghanistan” (D’Elia, 2012). This invention is documented in Clear Defense’s patent
entitled Protective Film Systems and Kits for Vehicular Windows and Window Assemblies
and Methods Using the Same (Cockman, Jennings and Martin, 2012). A leading specialist
in glass security, Clear Defense equipped MRAPs with film laminate. The patent describes
a twofold mechanism to catch shattered-glass debris and to maintain good visibility for the
occupants. This is achieved through applying a protective kit of multi-layered films on the
125 Known also by the name of its regulating body NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing)
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interior and exterior surfaces of a vehicle’s window panels (Figure 32). The interior film
catches shattered-glass debris thus preventing it from injuring the occupants. The exterior
film takes cracks, scratches, and abrasion from the terrain. In either case, the occupant can
peel the damaged film layer to restore a clear visibility.
4.4.3. Conclusion
The fourth section examined how the occupants’ bodies and their interior capsular
space became the focus of innovation for protection. Engineers continued to medicalise
survivability as severe bodily injuries focusing on the cognitive performance of soldiers
(situational awareness) and their bodies’ mechanical performance (seating, operating,
accessing). While it continued to be understood on the micro scale of pressure waves
traveling into bodies through the molecular structures of materials, terrain gained a bodily
scale where measuring its impact and scripting its resistance started from the occupants’
bodies inside the enclosure.
The improvements we analysed in the four patents distributed the work of
survivability over new sub-ensembles of the technical object: seats, doors, windowpanes,
and assistive interfaces. Similar to new meanings that the capsule brought (see 4.2.2), the
consideration of these interior sub-ensembles endowed the MRAP and its capsule with a
pronounced architectural character where humans sit, access, see, and work. Survivability
becomes a function of different corporeal and cognitive performances within/through the
enclosure, rendering the vehicle more than a mere mobile armoured container. The relation
between bodies, terrain, and vehicle is fully topological at this stage, and survivability is
assembled as a program of actions across multiple scales of molecular materialities, bodies
and body parts, vehicles and vehicle parts, and landscapes.
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Figure 29 Patent art showing blast attenuation seats; notice the fixing brackets that mount the seat to the ceiling and floor of the vehicle, and the telescopic oscillation mechanism in the back of the seat (Grant and Almstedt, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 15)
Figure 30 Patent art showing robotic arm operated through computer interface inside the vehicle (Summer, Bosscher and Rust, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 6)
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Figure 31 Patent art showing door assist mechanism separating inside the vehicle from the outside environment (McKee, Scholtes and Hayden, 2015, p. Sheet 1 of 12)
Figure 32 Patent art showing layers of protective and peelable film overlaying a vehicle’s glass panel (Cockman, Jennings and Martin, 2012, p. Sheet 1 of 11)
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4.5 Hybrid Scripts
So far, we collected technical responses to an IED-riddled terrain in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and we analysed how emerging concerns for survivability assembled the
MRAP script as multiple improvements, materialities, and scales. We showed how the
vehicular space, i.e., the capsule, that encloses soldiers’ bodies can be analysed through an
architectural lens to situate these improvements as associations among humans, enclosures,
technical objects, and terrain/landscape. However, we have not examined how the
concretisation of the MRAP, into the high performing survivability script it was designed
to be, assembles these multiple improvements as a functioning unity. So, how are they
“coordinated” (after Mol, 2002) as “functional synergies” (after Simondon, 2017) rather
than being a set of collected fragments?
In this section, we uncover this process of coordination by analysing how the
MRAP script progresses from the figure of the MRAP vehicle to that of the M-ATV and
JLTV vehicles. Specifically, we examine how subsequent improvements reference earlier
patents (which we analysed above) and further innovations from the domains of armoured
vehicles, commercial trucks, and heavy-duty construction machinery. The referenced
innovations go as far as the 1940s, collecting technical knowledge from various wars and
“circulating reference” (after Latour, 1999a) across domains and industries. We analyse the
coordination of improvements in four patents. The first describes the M-ATV (third
generation MRAP), while the other three describe the JLTV (post-MRAP).
M-ATV stands for MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle. It is the third generation of the
MRAP vehicles that the military designed with a lighter weight and improved mobility for
the rugged landscape of Afghanistan – hence, the “all terrain” designation. The patent we
analyse, entitled Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (Joynt, 2008), refers to one M-ATV
prototype – the Cheetah, which was among the finalists126 for the M-ATV program
competition. The Cheetah’s engineers are American defence contractor Force Protection
Industries, Inc. who initially supplied the Cougar and Buffalo MRAPs to the U.S. military
before defence giant General Dynamics acquired their company in 2011.
126 Eventually, the Oshkosh M-ATV won the bid to produce the third-generation vehicles and field them in Afghanistan as we shall see in Chapter 6.
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Unlike other patents that describe inventions of sub-ensembles (parts of vehicles),
this patent127 describes the M-ATV as vehicle, a full technical ensemble. It collects many
of the innovations described before: it has a V-shaped underbody geometry (similar to
4.1.2); a crew capsule (similar to 4.2.2); and enhanced capsule envelopes (similar to 4.3.1).
Unlike the separate capsule in a body-on-frame construction (discussed in 4.1.1), the
Cheetah’s capsule is a monocoque128 figuration. French for single shell, monocoque129 is a
structural enclosure that integrates the body, the skin/envelope, and the frame/chassis of
the vehicle. It isolates the occupants’ space (and engine, in the Cheetah) from the drivetrain
parts underneath (transmission, shafts, differentials, axles, wheels). Compared to the
original MRAP figure, the improvements of the Cheetah offer higher mobility and
survivability levels on Afghanistan’s off-road terrain. These include higher ground
clearance for better off-roading and to distance the vehicle from ground-originating
explosions; compound V-shape geometry with more angles to multiply deflecting IED
explosions; sloped sides, known as glacis, to deflect RPG attacks; and blast-energy-
absorbing pipes to reduce the impact of IEDs. Another version of the 2008 patent was
published in October 2011130 adding a dual V-hull that houses and protects the drivetrain
of the vehicle in-between, thus increasing chances for residual mobility (see 4.2.1).
Among the thirteen131 patents it references, the M-ATV patent cites a version of
Rheinmetall Landsysteme’s patent for modular designs (see 4.2.1), four patents of
armoured vehicles from Cadillac Gage (now Textron), and several other patents on
armoured tanks, amphibious armoured vehicles (including old proposals for submarine
tanks) from the Swiss company MOWAG (now GDELS-MOWAG) and the defunct
French engineering conglomerate Creusot-Loire Industrie. The referenced innovations are
as recent as 2005, but most of them date back to the 1940s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s
collecting work from World War II and the many wars and conflicts since.
127 It is the only patent to document a full MRAP vehicle. 128 The monocoque capsules was and remains to be the predominant design of the anti-landmine vehicles produced in South Africa since the Rhodesian Bush Wars. 129 This is not to be confused with unibody construction in commercial vehicles, which integrates body and frame, but the skin is not structural. 130 An updated version of this patent is US 8033208 Mine Resistant Armored Vehicle (Joynt et al., 2011) 131 See copies of all thirteen patents at the USPTO digital archive.
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HMMWV + MRAP + M-ATV JLTV
High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected-All Terrain Vehicle Joint Light Tactical Vehicle
Figure 33 Converging concerns for better mobility and better survivability into an integrated technical object (by author)
JLTV stands for Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. It is the newest military light
tactical wheeled vehicle platform to replace a portion of the MRAPs, M-ATVs, and
Humvees (Figure 33). It is engineered to be highly protected, light weight, and
electronically networked, thus combining some of the best capabilities of MRAP
survivability, M-ATV off-road agility, and Humvee high mobility. The “joint” qualifier in
JLTV refers to an economic concern for a joint-service program among the U.S. Army,
Marines, and Special Operations units, unlike the exorbitant multi-service MRAP program
that produced numerous custom models and variations. The three-patent set we analyse
below refers to the winning JLTV prototype from the Oshkosh Corporation, the giant U.S.
manufacturer of commercial and defence heavy vehicles. The patents were published in
2015, ten years after the initial urgent request for the MRAPs in 2005, and the first JLTVs
were fielded during April 2019 to Fort Stewart, Georgia in the U.S. (PEO CS&CSS, 2019)
not Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many of the technical improvements discussed earlier converge in the new JLTV
script. The first patent entitled Energy Dissipation System for an Armored Vehicle Having
Shear Fingers and Crushable Sections describes a mechanism to convert thermal energy to
mechanical energy through the deformation of vehicle parts (Richmond, Krueger and
Pelko, 2015a). The patent describes deformation as the distortion, crushing, bending,
and/or crumpling of parts, an improvement grounded in technics of smart environments
(see 4.3.2) and sacrificial parts (see 4.2.1). The second patent entitled Isolated Cab
Mounting System for an Armored Vehicle describes a mechanism to divide the vehicle into
modules of which one is a structurally isolated occupants cab (Richmond, Krueger and
Pelko, 2015b). The vehicle is assembled along a central structural frame (housing the drive
train and V-shape underbody; see next patent), front and rear sub-frames (housing axles
and suspension), and a crew cab. The improvement is grounded in technics of modular
design (see 4.2.1), capsules (see 4.2.2), and defensive geometry (see 4.3). The third patent
entitled Structural Tunnel Component for an Armored Vehicle describes a mechanism to
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correlate a vehicle’s structure and protection in one element, a structural tunnel
(Richmond, Krueger and Pelko, 2015c). The tunnel mounts the front and rear sub-frames,
and its curvature directs a blast force away from the frame and occupants cab, an
improvement grounded in technics of modular designs (see 4.2.1) and capsules (see 4.2.2).
Among the forty-seven132 patents this tripartite set references, the JLTV patents
cite BAE Systems’ patent (plus five versions of it) for capsules and several other patents
that embody similar technics of modular designs, capsules, intense flows, defensive
geometry, and energy transfers. In addition, they cite two patents for construction
machinery (from Komastsu and Kobelco, Japan), five for commercial cars (from the
General Motors and Chrysler corporations, U.S.), eight for Humvee survivability upgrades,
and others from Navistar, Plasan, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Ford. Unlike
Force Protection’s M-ATV patent, the bulk of the referenced innovations collect recent
work from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, the years of the advent of modern urban warfare.
4.5.1. Conclusion
The last section showed how the MRAP survivability script is assembled as
functional synergies of technical improvements and a coordination among various
conceptions of terrain, bodies, and vehicle. Each of the patents that we analysed in the
earlier sections focused on a localised association among actors and how its technics figure
out in an invention (such as enclosure, envelope, seats, wheels). On the other hand, the
patents that we analysed in the last section demonstrated how the localisations come
together in the final figure of the technical object (the vehicle). The vehicles became tactile
machines, as they traversed the landscape, sensing the undulations of the ground surface,
but also changes in pressure, temperature, density, and vibration of the surrounding
atmospheric environment. The engineers and military’s construction of terrain, and
consequently its associated survivability scripts, proves contingent not only on the
individual technical improvements but on their coordination into synergistic functions,
what we are referring to as technics. Moreover, we find how coordination performs
relationally across the technical landscape of inventions, where concretisation feeds across
the space-time of conflicts, technical objects, and rival corporate institutional networks.
132 See copies of all forty-seven patents at www.uspto.gov (unique link)
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4.6 Conclusion: Extreme Architectures
If a dynamic and realist grasp133 of the architectural upholds it as “a type of a
connector” (after Yaneva, 2010, p. 142), then we can attribute associations of an
architectural character to the MRAP’s capsular enclosure and protective envelope. We
advance this understanding of the MRAP as our analysis has shown a visible shift from an
armoured vehicle’s inert protective container space built around a passive human body to
an active human-vehicle-terrain machine for a mobility-survivability hybrid script.
In the introduction of this chapter, we set out to map survivability both as technics
and as a dynamic program of actions. As technics, we analysed how engineers figured
survivability as iterations of an “internal distribution of functions” (Simondon, 2017, p. 38)
and “functional synergies” (Simondon, 2017, p. 40) among the elements of the technical
object (the vehicle) and its sub-ensembles (enclosure, envelope, seats, windows, wheel
assemblies). As script (program of actions), we analysed how engineers modelled
survivability upon human and nonhuman associations, precisely between the militarised
bodies of occupants and their vehicles/enclosures. The analysed patents do not speak of the
pain134 of bodies of the occupants/soldiers, but they translate military scripts whose key
concern is to avoid injury or reduce its severity level.
We identified four key associations. The first and second are more topographic
than topological. The first bodies in container space is the basic relation of bodies as
objects in a Euclidean space. It starts with the adaptation of the Humvee’s cab and
continues with the development of the MRAP’s capsular enclosure. The second
capsularised bodies is a relation of intense inside-outside separation. It begins with the
MRAP script, then it figures in various iterations of armoured capsules and monocoque
enclosures. On the other hand, the third and fourth associations are more topological than
topographic. The third bodies in networked space is a relation of feedback loops between
human and/or nonhuman actors. It situates bodies amidst flows/transfers within the
enclosure, through the envelope, and with the environment. The fourth machinic bodies is
133 Here we borrow this theorisation of the architectural from Yaneva’s work, which originally looks at buildings (not other enclosures) as “quasi-autonomous architectural machine that mediates experiences and practices” (2010, p. 142). 134 This argument employs a trauma-informed lens specific to typical physical traumas resulting from IED explosions, as described in military and medical publications. Among the limitations to this argument is accounting for aggregate data on pain at different trauma levels and the trust that soldiers put into the MRAP vehicle (apart from general institutional publications with the catch phrase “this truck saved my life”).
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a relation of distributed agency within a hybrid body-vehicle machine. The occupants’
bodies are fully immersed within the mediation of the enclosure and the vehicle’s parts.
These associations are not mutually exclusive – technically or historically. They are
overlapping phases in the process of “concretization” (Simondon, 2017) of the MRAP as a
highly survivable mobile enclosure, whereby the technical object resolves antagonisms in
the functioning between its technical and geographic milieus.
These body-vehicle associations constitute the military’s feedback loops through
the environment, which inform the making of terrain through a process of reduction. The
landscape is reduced135 to dynamic disturbances and localised energy depositions that
compromise the military’s trinity of survivability– soldier, materiel, mission. Shockwaves
(expanding gases), blasts (expanding pressure), and armour penetration (severe
acceleration) became the actors terrorising the military by impairing the weakest link in the
trinity, the human body. Thus, we see the terrain emerge through the technical object as
breakdowns in mechanisms of protection and sensing, both functions of survivability and
mobility. And terraining, as a practice of reduction (or, making of terrain) falls at the heart
of realising a relationality as an operative (and real) practice, and it is continuously
constituted as a principle.
Collating the inventions from the analysed patents showed us the MRAP vehicle
as a “disparate aggregate of scientific and technical solutions” (Serres 1995, p.45 quoted in
MacKenzie, 2002, p. 70) from armoured vehicles to aircraft, rockets, trucks, race cars,
construction machines, assistive technologies, smart technologies, robots, and many more
others. Still, we know from Simondon that “the technical object is never fully known”
(2017, p. 39) as the milieus and technicity are constantly individuating in a dynamic and
changing world. We should continue to not assume that the military prefigures how terrain
evolves, and thus survivability and the technical object. In the next two chapters, we follow
the MRAP vehicles as they are fielded to Iraq and Afghanistan to examine how they allow
the military to simulate (reconstruct not represent) the landscapes as urban and rural,
respectively.
135 Reducing the landscape relative to survivability concerns is by no means the only reduction that the military practices (others are related to mobility, combat, and logistics to name a few); however, it is the one that takes priority in the situation of increased casualties from IEDs.
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Chapter 5
Electric Streets, Fortress Highways
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5.0 Introduction
In the previous chapter, we suggested that the MRAP’s capsular enclosure and
protective envelope can be examined through associations of an architectural character
between the vehicle’s occupants’ bodies and the extreme mobility terrain. The associations
realise the feedback loops from terrain, as “exchanges of energy” (Simondon, 2017, p. 39),
through the technical object. Hence, survivability is understood as a series of technical
improvements that individuate a new technical object (from Humvee to MRAP) and/or
concretise it by folding the antagonisms of its milieu (detonations) into its total functioning
(the MRAP script). But how can we follow the MRAPs in the field as they are deployed to
Iraq and Afghanistan? How to study the military’s figuring out of the urban through the
technical object? And how to study terraining in action – to emulate Latour’s insightful
title (1987)? The utility patents are exclusive references of countering the detonation event
through the work of engineers back in the lab. Their highly technical character136 reduces
the entire experience in the field to the combat-related detonation event; yet relations to the
landscape of the warzone reveal obstructions to the vehicles’ mobility through a range of
non-combat-related breakdowns.
This chapter analyses terraining137 in Iraq as a function of coordination between
survivability and mobility, eventually producing a very unusual survivability-mobility
hybrid script. For besides the advanced technical mediations for survivability developed in
the lab, the MRAP’s mobility in the urban landscape of Iraq runs against new antagonisms
and collects a wider network of human and nonhuman actors. The urban emerges as
encounters with infrastructural networks and risk for the local civilians, forcing the
military to coordinate their survivability with the civilians’ welfare. The urban is
differentiated across the expansive military landscape, and the military is forced to
consider infrastructure and civilians in Iraq and the U.S. We trace these processes of
coordination and differentiation in how the military urbanises the MRAP as a survivability
enclosure and a mobility vehicle.
136 Mainly because patents are a type of specialised documents belonging to a “techno-scientific order” (Hemmungs Wirtén, 2019) and conveying an inside/internalist technical level “occupied by company engineers, strategists, and scientists” (Bowker, 1992, p. 70). 137 We have defined terraining as an active process of interaction between a landscape and a technical object rather than referring to terrain as a static and merely physical geographic feature.
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Through quasi-ethnographic138 analysis of breakdowns in Iraq, we account for
specific situations of friction between the MRAPs’ physical features and the infrastructure
they encounter while moving. The first set of frictions take place on what The New York
Times once called “Iraq’s mean streets” (Dixon, 2008) and includes encounters between:
the vehicles’ high profile and the low clearance of overhead utility lines; the vehicles’
vertical extensions and overhead structures; and, the vehicles’ wide body frames and
narrow street layouts. The second set of frictions realise an expansive military landscape
between the warzone and the home front where the vehicles’ excessive weight
compromises pavement integrity upon its fielding back in the U.S.
We analyse these situations of friction and their interpretations in several sources
available from the digital archives of the U.S. military’s Defense Technical Information
Center (DTIC) and the U.S. Federal Government. The former includes invention briefings,
safety bulletins, medical studies, Department of Defense reports, user handbooks, doctrinal
publications, and risk guides; the latter includes regulations from the Department of
Transportation and the Department of Labor. In addition, we analyse military news articles
and corporate websites/brochures. The sources are selected such that they show the non-
combat-related antagonisms of the MRAP during its operation in Iraq (2007-2011) and
upon its post-war transfer to the U.S. (since late 2000s).
The visual strategy of this chapter complements the analysis in two ways. It
employs photographic evidence to illustrate human and nonhuman associations of the
survivability-mobility hybrid. And it sketches reductions in the physical environment (such
as urban street sections), borrowing from representation techniques in architectural and
urban design studies, to map the military terrain. Unlike the previous chapter, the soldiers
and civilians’ bodies are visible in the visuals, and the architectural associations of the
armoured enclosure get entangled in a wider network of landscape/terrain. Survivability is
shown to be continuously modelled and anticipated as a separation between an inside and
an outside, this time expanding beyond the technical mediation to relations of sociability
and psychology. Understanding the emergent urban environment/terrain in Iraq paves the
way to explore the non-urban/rural terrain in Afghanistan (Chapter 6).
138 Since we do not do ethnography and our work mainly consults digital archives, we use “quasi-” to denote the research’s ethnographic stance where we “devote ethnographic attention,” following Yaneva (2009a, pp. 25–26), through following the actors, collecting fragments of observations, and documenting arrangements (see more in the methodology chapter).
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5.1 Collecting the Urban Landscape
We address the questions of this chapter through exploring the urban as it emerges
out of relations of friction139 (see Figure 39). This means that we do not depart from a set
definition of the urban, but we expect to gain it as we follow the MRAP’s encounter with
its landscape of operation in Iraq. We define friction140 here as the physical resistance
between the survivable mobility of the MRAP and the built environment it encounters. It is
a physical resistance of a serial character141, i.e., it is sequentially experienced by the
MRAPs and their occupants as a series of physical encounters that interrupt their
movement paths and potentially lead to a breakdown. We start from the premise that the
domains of Traffic, Transportation, and Automotive Engineering, and in compliance with
governmental and industrial standards, fold these frictions into the figuration of the
vehicles: their dimensions, weight, and operational procedures. They endeavour to
maintain flows by reducing and/or managing road accidents, infrastructure maintenance, or
vehicle safety design. This is the reason heavy vehicles like trucks and buses142 have
weight limits on roads and bridges, height limits under overhead structures, articulated
arrangements for turning radii, and extra design requirements for visibility from inside the
cab, among others.
However, several factors rendered such compliance obsolete to the MRAPs. Their
survivability script (analysed at length in Chapter 4) increased the vehicles’ physical
dimensions143 far beyond those of their Humvee predecessor. Meanwhile, little
consideration was granted to this matter as priority went for rapid design and
manufacturing to satisfy the urgent needs for survivability in the battlefield, with a blatant
disregard for Iraq and Afghanistan as peoples and landscapes. It was not until the mass
139 What we call friction can be thought of as what the military understands as “second and third order effects,” where actions become entangled in chains of effects and causes beyond their control (Miller, 2006). 140 Our notion of friction is the actual resistance between physical objects; it does not relate to the metaphorical notion of frictions within commodity chains in the illuminating work of anthropologist Anna Tsing (2005). 141 We use the term as an analogy from Gordon Cullen’s notion of “serial vision” in urban design (1961; in Boyer) where pedestrians experience an urban landscape as a series of views sequentially revealed along their walking path. 142 Unlike everyday urban spaces that fold these requirements either in a seamless fashion (where , or until accidents happen (see Moses Bridges) (Mihandoust, 2015; Garutti, 2016; Yaneva, 2017), the warzone plays by different rules. The military prioritises their survivability and realises it in the hulking, inward-oriented architectures of the MRAPs. 143 Besides their basic large dimensions, the MRAPs get even larger with extra armour kits and electronic devices added to them to increase survivability. The add-ons that extend the height include the OGP kit, OWM kit, and CREW antennas; those that increase the width include the MEAP and Net kits; those that increase the length include the Jackal, Rhino, and SPARK.
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deployment of the MRAPs on the streets of Iraq that the extent of overriding established
arrangements of the urban landscape and antagonising local civilians became visible to the
military and their counterinsurgency strategies. The large physical dimensions of the
vehicles clashed with low-hanging power lines (see 5.3.1), overhead structures, and turns
on narrow streets, often leading to deadly non-combat consequences. Compliance with the
regular traffic standards on the streets of Iraq was not possible as an afterthought.
It is through these situated frictions of the MRAPs with the infrastructure and the
built environment of Iraq that we analyse three things: 1) how terraining reduces Iraq’s
urban landscape through the military’s feedback loops; 2) how survivability’s architectural
character grows through new body-vehicle associations; and 3) how the technical object
feeds outward to the urban terrain, becoming emblematically urban for the first time.
We begin tracing these frictions to the document that surveys them: the U.S.
Army’s MRAP User Handbook entitled MRAP Vehicles: Tactics, Techniques, and
Procedures. Published almost a year and a half after the fielding of the first MRAP in
April 2007, the handbook is an instructional guide to “familiarize Warfighters and leaders
with the MRAP vehicle, its capabilities and limitations, and planning considerations for its
employment” in Iraq and Afghanistan (2008, p. 1). We analyse this document144 as a
source that charts a survivable mobility map of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the form of
instructions, procedures, and warnings. Specifically, we analyse the handbook’s primary
concern for the restrictive technical and geographic relations between the vehicles’
physical dimensions and weight on the one hand and the confined character of some urban
areas in Iraq on the other hand. The document does not refer to cities and urban areas by
name. However, we trace references to the urban landscape reduced to terrain, such as
“urban areas and other restricted terrain” (2008, p. 3), “urban or confined areas” (2008, p.
6), “bridges” (2008, p. 25), and “through traffic” (2008, p. 26). The reduction process
emphasises antagonisms that restrict and confine a survivable mobility, consequently
concealing/eliminating the other elements of the landscape. The handbook has no shortage
of such antagonisms including narrow streets, gates, bridges and overpasses, traffic, low-
hanging wires and power lines, water bodies, trenches/ditches/culverts, and road shoulders
(2008, pp. 26–27). Understanding the landscape as series and intensities of antagonisms
144 Specifically, Chapter 6 “Capabilities and Limitations” and Chapter 7 “Employability Considerations.”
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facilitates the military’s mission to operationalise survivability as coordinated functions of
articulation, as we shall see next.
Avoid contact with overhead power lines. Avoid streets and alleys that are too narrow for particular
vehicles… Consider civilian vehicle and pedestrian traffic flow when
planning patrol routes… Heavy vehicles can damage or even destroy civilian roads in
the [Area of Operations]. They can also damage or destroy underground and above ground utilities.
Avoid using night-vision devices (NVDs) or blackout driving around civilian traffic using white lights. Doing so endangers you and the civilians, and they can see you anyway.
Figure 34 Excerpt on “considerations for urban operations” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 34)
The above excerpt (Figure 34) is representative of the handbook’s concerns for
survivable mobility in the warzone. It collects relations between road networks, utility
networks, civilian traffic flows (vehicular and pedestrian), and military traffic flows. It
describes a dynamic landscape where people and vehicles move, bodies and utilities risk
harm, and various factions of humans/nonhumans, enemies/allies, and civilian/military
collide. Surveying these relations allows the military to expand improvements of the
technical object to include the vehicles’ occupants – drivers, gunners, and passengers. The
handbook instructs its users on safe action and considerate behaviour while operating the
MRAPs, compounding survivable mobility with well-trained/behaved users and well-
scripted vehicles. Furthermore, documenting these frictions in a handbook realises larger
concerns beyond the immediate instructions to articulate imbroglios and comply with
traffic safety, as we discuss later in the chapter (see metascripts in 5.5).
In similar excerpts from the handbook, we trace the military’s methodical
attempts at outlining physical features of a landscape that foreground the different
frictions. It does not list frictions by type, but the handbook reduces the landscape into
groupings of serial/repetitive physical features based on the disruption and breakdown of
MRAPs on the streets of Iraq. In particular, the handbook reduces the urban to spatial
layouts of roads/streets/routes associated to walls and gates, poles and wires, overhead
structures, depressions in the ground, and traffic. We refer to these associations as quasi-
typologies of urban streets, similar to the analytical tools employed in architectural and
urban design studies; and we visualise them in a matrix to better understand the connection
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(see Figure 37). Despite the wealth of infrastructural and cultural difference among
Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, and other Iraqi urban areas, these quasi-typologies reduce the
urban to terrain, thus offering another way to engineer the body-environment relations.
Forward to 2013, we trace the continuity of this reduction in an article entitled
“Driver Training Revamped” from the Army’s official safety magazine Knowledge. The
handbook’s warning to avoid “streets and alleys that are too narrow” in Iraq develops into
two forms of improvements. One is the prerequisite driver training, an advanced five-day
MRAP driving program at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey; the other is a
simulation of Iraq’s cities, a training obstacle course that simulates “an array of terrain
features … including … narrow passages between shipping containers to simulate an urban
environment” (Dykstra, 2013, p. 12). A practice of reduction par excellence, the standard
shipping container145 replaces the built environment in Iraq to carve out the narrow flows
of the MRAP and reconstructs some frictions of the urban landscape.
Finally, we wrap up this section by analysing a unique account where these
military frictions overlap with civilian everyday life in a district of Eastern Baghdad146.
The situation is probably common in areas ravaged by conflict and occupation, but the
account is unique amidst news reporting on fighting and violence in Iraq. It is a personal
reflective piece by former Army Officer John Amble entitled “On MRAPs; or Protecting
Troops and Eroding Local Support in Baghdad” (2014) from War on the Rocks, an online
national security analysis platform hosting contributions from military scholars and war
veterans. Officer Amble’s account assembles an urban situation of streets, utilities,
civilians, urban activities, and conflict, which he contextualises through service experience
in a landscape divided by developmental disparities and socio-economic inequalities (see
Figure 38).
145 For more on the use of shipping containers and replicating “urban morphologies of the developing world” in the simulation of urban warfare, see the fascinating compendium Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (Kripa and Mueller, 2020). 146 The event takes place in ‘Tisa Nissan,’ a district in Eastern Baghdad. The name is an English-to-Arabic transliteration of ‘the ninth of April,’ and the district is also known as New Baghdad or ‘Baghdad Al-Jadeeda.’
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It was mid-summer 2008, another hot day in east Baghdad, and that was the sole topic of discussion among the group of Iraqi men who had gathered around our patrol. We were in a small square in Tisa Nissan, the part of the city at which the relative affluence of Karada to the west meets the chaotic, unplanned sprawl that had come to define much of Baghdad al-Jadida and Kamaliya to the east in recent years… “But why did they tear down our power lines?” For the first time in our deployment, the residents of our demographically diverse area of operations were united. They were united against MRAPs… The vehicles, newly arrived in our area of operations, were causing significant property damage. And so the commander of the brigade that my tactical psychological operations (PSYOP) detachment supported asked for my teams’ help with quelling the growing public anger.
Figure 35 Excerpt from officer Amble’s account (Amble, 2014)
The account is a unique source on such encounters, both in English and Arabic
news media reporting147. Its ethnographic narrative (Figure 35) of quotidian encounters148
captures a complex situation. The MRAP protects the soldiers, tears down the power lines,
and aggravates the locals. Different actions and actors that assemble around the technical
object and reveal the antagonisms and contradictions of the situation. The MRAP’s work to
ensure survivability of the soldiers stands at odds with its disruption of the civilian’s urban
environment and reconfigures the military-civilian relationship. We observe that officer
Amble’s training in psychological operations informs his account on the necessity of
building further and stronger relations between the military and the locals (see analysis in
5.4). Such perspective is not unique or new, and it is at the centre of the military’s
counterinsurgency strategy of coercing and co-opting the locals, also known as Hearts-
and-Minds. What is noteworthy though is how the technical object acquires a program of
distinct but complementary actions. One must protect the soldiers and their military
operations in urban areas. Another must cultivate and sustain the loyalty of the locals by
preserving their urban infrastructure, which feeds back to the first action. This second set
of actions by the MRAPs feeds into what U.S. military doctrine of urban warfare, in Field
Manual FM 3-06: Urban Operations, emphasises as an “urban focus” (see Figure 36) on
the battlefield through the “amplified importance of civil (societal) considerations” (see
Appendix B in U.S. Army, 2006b, pp. B1–B18). In the following sections, we explore this
147 Our online search for stories/reports about military vehicles cutting power lines in Iraq returned no results. It used different keyword combinations and Boolean search operators both in the English and Arabic languages, and it was last performed in February 2020. 148 The type of co-existence of contrasts that war photography is infatuated with.
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complex script further and examine how the military attempts to provision survivable
mobility while considering the interests of urban local civilians (see 5.4).
5.1.1. Conclusion
The first section set the ground to understand the urban as we follow the
movement of the MRAP. The MRAP becomes more than the capsular space or extreme
envelope engineered to protect from explosions (see Chapter 4). Its deployment in the filed
exposes the difficulty of coordinating the survivability and mobility scripts to produce a
survivability-mobility hybrid. Friction between the large vehicles – and by extension their
occupants – and the infrastructure generates further practices of reducing the landscape to a
terrain of physical urban obstacles and limitations that must be articulated to stay safe.
Unlike commercial vehicles engineered relationally within frameworks of traffic safety,
the military figure of the survivable MRAP has not been originally engineered as such
(more on safety in 5.5). Next, we analyse how the military attempts to coordinate
survivability and mobility through “corrective measures” and “mutations” to articulate the
urban terrain only to make the vehicles even larger and more cumbersome to handle.
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Figure 36 Diagram of “relativity of key urban environment elements” from FM 3-06: Urban Operations; notice how the right side of the diagram emphasises “society” over “terrain” in stability operations and unconventional warfare, i.e. counterinsurgency; infrastructure remains the domain of intersection between the social and the physical on both sides of the diagram (Appendix B in U.S. Army, 2006b, p. B3)
Figure 37 Sketch of possible quasi-typologies, as in urban design guides, that translates the military’s reduction of the urban landscape to a set of frictions for the MRAP vehicles; the first row shows sections and the second shows plans (by author)
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Figure 38 An urban morphology map illustrating differences in density and structure between what officer Amble described as an affluent Karada (left) and a chaotic Baghdad al-Jadida (right) districts in Baghdad (original map source: Google Maps, 2019)
Figure 39 Armoured vehicles driving on paved roads in urban settings amidst traffic and civilians: (left, DoD Observe archive) U.S. Marines LAVs driving past a checkpoint in Koretin, Kosovo, 1999 and (right, DVIDS archive) a U.S. Army Stryker driving on a busy street in Mosul, Iraq, 2008; photo credits to Sgt. Craig J. Shell, U.S. Marines (Shell, 1999) and Staff Sgt. Gretel Weiskopf, 139th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment (Weiskopf, 2004)
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5.2 Urbanising the Technical Object
Let us now examine how the MRAP created a new relation with overhead types of
infrastructure in Iraq and gave rise to a new understanding of the urban landscape. We
analyse the situation through the lens of a non-combat-related breakdown, electrocution,
that compromises survivability. The MRAPs were the tallest military vehicles serving in
Iraq. The V-shaped underbody and the high ground clearance increased the overall height
of the vehicles, in addition to vertical devices like antennas, turrets, and others. The
MRAPs operated in some of the densest built fabrics of Iraq where they ran into low-
hanging wires and power lines that stretched over the streets to connect civilian households
to utility networks (Figure 41, Figure 42, Figure 43). The combination of taller vehicles
and lesser vertical clearance with power lines became a recipe for electrocution – that is,
death from electric shock (Figure 44). The MRAPs sustained electric hazards to the
soldiers’ bodies and their equipment, leading to death, injuries, or damage from electric
shock.
Accidental contact (or close proximity) between a mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle (especially its radio antennae) and high-voltage power lines can result in severe injury or death to vehicle occupants… When an energized line makes contact or arcs through the air from the power line through the MRAP vehicle to the ground, the earth becomes hot and the voltage dissipates in concentric rings away from the initial contact point. The power in the gradient voltage rings will vary based on soil composition and moisture content … [extending] from 10 meters in dry soil and up to 40 meters in wet soil.
Figure 40 Excerpt from “Appendix B-2 Surviving Contact with High-Voltage Power Lines” in the MRAP Handbook (2008, p. 133)
This specific height relationship between land vehicles and power lines had not
been a key feature in the military’s repertoire of obstacles to mobility and survivability.
Rather, the military anticipated power lines in urban terrain as part of a network of “critical
infrastructure,” an electromagnetic restriction to radio communications, or a spatial barrier
to projectile trajectories in “urban airspace” as exemplified in the Army’s Field Manual
FM 3-06.11: Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain (2002)149 and the Marine
Corps’ Warfighting Publication MCWP 3-35.3: Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain
149 The same understanding continued in the Army Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures ATTP 3-06.11 Combined Arms Operations in Urban Terrain (U.S. Army, 2011a), which succeeded FM 3-06.11.
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(MOUT) (1998)150. Thus, a new associated milieu of tall-MRAPs-low-hanging-power-lines
emerged and obstructed mediating survivability, this time from above the enclosure.
The increasing number of fatalities (“severe injury or death”) is the military’s key
concern and measure of the electrocution breakdown. The above example from the MRAP
user handbook (Figure 40) shows how the military spatialised this concern as hazard
related to the location of the vehicle under the power lines and on wet soil. With the
capacity of flesh and metal to store/circulate electricity, the high-voltage electric current
associated the bodies and vehicles through harm. We traced the only documented fatalities
from electric shocks to the only findings documented in the Department of Defense
Inspector General’s report151 entitled Review of Electrocution Deaths in Iraq: Part II -
Seventeen Incidents Apart from Staff Sergeant Ryan D. Maseth, U.S. Army (2009). The
report investigated different causes of electrocution among eighteen military personnel
(Army, Marines, Navy) and contractors between March 2003 and March 2009 in Iraq (see
Table 2). Only four of the eighteen cases involved operating vehicles. Let us analyse the
four incidents to stay with the MRAPs, as reproduced in Table 2 from data in the report’s
appendix.
The four incidents might seem inconsequential to the statistics of war casualties
when compared to the colossal152 human, economic, and political costs of the wars on Iraq
and Afghanistan. They are not even the main cause of electrocution during military
operations in Iraq as the Inspector General’s report shows. However, this type of data helps
us examine the techno-geographic milieu of this breakdown. The report attributes the
hazardous situation to the characteristic “low-hanging” spatiality of the electrical wires,
which realises specific actions for the vehicles (“snagged”) and the soldiers (“grabbed,”
“came in contact with,” or touched). Unlike officer Amble’s description of “unplanned
sprawl” in some neighbourhoods of Baghdad (as in 5.1), the urban areas here are reduced
to metadata. The table lists the cities of Balad and An Nasiriyah and the military
150 The same understanding continued in the Marine Corps Reference Publication MCRP 12-10B.1: Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain (MOUT) (2016), which succeeded MCWP 3-35.3. 151 About seven years in the lead for developing a technical mediation against this hazard. 152 As per the latest update (Evangelista and Stern, 2018), the Costs of War project at Brown University reported that “more than 480,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan” including “at least 244,000 [Afghan, Pakistani, and Iraqi] civilians … killed in the fighting” and thousands of U.S. service members and civilian contractors died in combat or from injuries. Over eight million people are displaced by the wars, “hundreds of thousands of soldiers and contractors [are] wounded and [live] with disabilities and war-related illnesses,” and many civilians died “indirectly as a result of the destruction of hospitals and infrastructure and environmental contamination.”
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installations of Al Taqaddum and Al Asad without describing their socioeconomic
conditions or urban fabric. The key observation here is the formation of a body-vehicle-
terrain association that causes electrocution: intercepting live power lines atop the vehicle.
Table 2 Reproduced excerpt from “Appendix A: U.S. Military or Contractor Personnel Electrocuted in Iraq March 2003 through March 2009” (PL for power line, A for Army, M for Marines) in DoD Inspector General’s report (Inspector General, 2009, p. 29)
No. Rank Date Synopsis Code U.S. ARMY A1 CPT
(O3) 18-Sep-03 Balad ~Soldier inadvertently grabbed power lines and
was fatally injured when he tried to lift/move power lines while on top of Bradley vehicle.
PL
U.S. MARINE CORPS M1 LCPL
(E-3) 2-Apr-03 An Nasiriyah ~ While manning a .50 caliber rifle on
top of a 7-ton truck, he was electrocuted when the vehicle snagged low hanging power lines.
PL
M3 SGT (E-5)
28-Jan-05 Camp Al Taqaddum, Iraq ~ While assigned to a Route Recon Convoy that was conducting a search for unexploded ordnance, came in contact with a low hanging electrical wire and was electrocuted.
PL
M5 LCPL (E-3)
16-Apr-07 Camp Al Asad, Iraq ~ While riding in the gun turret of a 7- Ton Truck, he was electrocuted after touching a low hanging electrical wire.
PL
5.2.1. Conclusion
In both examples from the MRAP user handbook and the Inspector General’s
report, we observe how the military learns and produces knowledge: the military knows the
urban through the technical object and through the type of landscape that this object
encounters. In this situation, Iraq’s urban landscape is reduced to an infrastructural mesh of
low-hanging power lines made visible when encountered by the large physical dimensions
of the MRAP, thus operationalising an electrocution. But the MRAP had no measure
against electrocution in its program of actions; it concretised as a counter-IED capsule and
envelope. So, how did the military resolve this antagonism of the new techno-geographic
milieu? How did the survivability script integrate non-combat-related with combat-related
threats? Next, we examine how the new situation forced the military to improve the MRAP
in uncommon ways.
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Figure 41 Low-hanging wires in a Baghdad; original photo captioned “Electrical wires on a typical street corner in Baghdad, 2008” as found in officer Amble’s account (Amble, 2014); photo credit to U.S. Army Sgt. Mark B. Matthews, 27th Public Affairs Detachment
Figure 42 Low-hanging wires in a Baghdad suburb; original photo captioned “Capt. Marty Kulinski, a soldier with the 769th Engineer Battalion, motions for a woman to continue her normal routine Saturday in Sadr City, Iraq, as he pulls security for fellow soldiers who are interviewing an insurgent suspect…” (James Warden, 2008)
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Figure 43 RG33 6x6 MRAPs encountering low-hanging wires – notice how close to the wires the gunner’s position on the roof and the vertical antennas are; original photo (Alamy stock photos) captioned “MRAP … vehicles manned by soldiers of Charly Battery, 2nd Battalion 12th Field Artillery Regiment as part of 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division patrol the streets of Bohriz in Diyala province, Iraq” (Kli, 2008)
Figure 44 Illustration of electrocution from “Power Line Antenna Strike” as found in the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 42)
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5.3 Moving with Infrastructure
Let us continue to analyse how urbanising the technical object reintegrates the
MRAP with the urban landscape. The military attempts to restore a working relation
between the excessively high and wide MRAP vehicles and the urban streets of Iraq. While
the MRAP script furnishes a survivable enclosure against combat-related blasts and
shockwaves (see Chapter 4), the new technical improvements concerned the survivability
of the MRAP vehicle against non-combat threats in the urban landscape. This entailed a
program of actions that has not been figured into the MRAP survivability script. Here, we
notice a subtle differentiation between the MRAP as a script for survivability (analysed at
length in Chapter 4), which the military calls MRAP capacity153, and the MRAP-type
vehicle as the figuration of this script in a vehicular mode. Following Simondon (2017, pp.
38–39), we distinguish the vehicle as the “total functioning” (concrete technical ensemble)
of a mobility-survivability hybrid and the MRAP script as a “functional sub-ensemble
within the total functioning.” Such distinction allows us to analyse the non-combat-related
antagonisms as “marginal consequences” of the concrete object – the MRAP vehicle,
which become stages or “chain-links in its functioning.”
Next, we analyse how new improvements concretise the MRAP vehicle where the
military and their engineers attempt to coordinate the survivability and mobility scripts, to
eliminate or attenuate friction with Iraq’s urban areas. Specifically, we examine three
breakdowns: electrocution (intercepting low-hanging power lines), bridge strikes (hitting
overhead structures), and vehicle handling (tuning on narrow streets).
5.3.1. Power from Above
The first is the story of an improvement that expands the MRAP’s survivability to
mitigate the risk of electrocution. We analyse a story of technical improvisation in Camp
Taji north of Baghdad, in one of the earliest accounts that attempted to resolve the
antagonism of low-hanging power lines. The military starts to adapt the survivability script
153 The MRAP came to be, both as name and capacity, with U.S. Department of Defense’s 2006/2007 MRAP Rapid Acquisition Program. The first-generation vehicles were known as MRAPs, despite their various brands, categories, and variants. The second-generation were MRAP II. The third-generation vehicles retained the designation its name M-ATV for MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle, while the latest generation became a new platform all together. It was named JLTV for Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and it integrated most of the MRAP script although via advanced technics.
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(as discussed in Chapter 4) to the urban streets of Iraq consequently urbanising the MRAP
vehicles. An Army article entitled “Welding Together a Defense” (2009) recounts scenes
of soldiers fabricating on-site, low-cost, add-on devices to their “state-of-the-art” MRAPs
for an “an extra level of protection…to help brave the roads of Iraq.” The soldiers at Camp
Taji fabricate154 a rudimentary rail-frame-device and install it on top of the MRAPs “to
safely push low hanging electrical wires over the vehicle” (see Figure 48). They attenuate
the risk of electrocution through the makeshift device, whose non-conductive plastic tubes
push away the live electric wires and interrupt the flow of electric current into the vehicle,
the equipment, and the occupants’ bodies. This account is among the earliest attempts at
“corrective measures” (Simondon, 2017), i.e., quick fixes to the technical object.
The military recognised the usefulness of the mediation assembled in the field and
improved the rudimentary device into a standardised, modular version that was mass-
produced and fielded to equip most MRAP vehicles operating in Iraq. Since 2009, the
military developed the new device at TARDEC155, the Army’s lead R&D laboratory for
advanced military ground systems and automotive technologies (2017). The lab is in
Warren, Michigan, next to Detroit, the car capital of the world, and within a global
agglomeration156 of the automotive industry. All MRAP vehicles operating on the streets
of Iraq received this survivability upgrade warranted by the Army’s lead R&D
organisation. The invention concretises in two ways: it acquires a modular design that can
expand “to accommodate new technologies” (2010, p. 6), and it has feasible variants that
employ high-wear, commercially available components, to be installed using “existing bolt
holes” on the vehicles. The standardisation and modularisation aim to integrate the new
positive function to the total functioning of the MRAP vehicle.
The only reference to this improvement is a briefing from the digital archive of
the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), at the Department of Defense. The
briefing nominates a technology for the “Army Greatest Inventions” award, eventually
winning it at the 2009 Army Science Conference in Orlando, Florida. The invention is the
154 In other photographs, we come across multiple versions of this makeshift device including the following combinations: single/double arc, full/partial arc, and centre/side arcs. 155 TARDEC stands for the Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, subordinate to the Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM). In2019, TARDEC was renamed into Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC) and RDECOM into Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC). Both are subordinate to the U.S. Army Futures Command. 156 According to the Detroit Regional Chamber, the State of Michigan has 18 automotive manufactures HQ-R&D, 12 assembly plants, 27 components assembly plants, 8 proving grounds, 97 top suppliers, 85 entrepreneur resources, 47 mobility projects, 20 universities, and 24 transportation hubs (HERE et al., 2019).
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modular MRAP device called the Overhead Wire Mitigation kit, or OWM kit for short. To
better understand the figuration of the new device, we borrow an analogy from Forest
Ecology to compare the spatiality of the OWM kit to that of a tree canopy protecting a
micro ecology beneath it (see Figure 49). We shall call this device the Canopy. It is
basically a modular set of two non-conductive-curved-guides installed on an MRAP
vehicle (see Figure 49). The two guides/rails curve from the front to the back of the vehicle
to protect it during forward/reverse movement in the “confined spaces of an urban
environment” (2010, p. 6). One guide is installed on each side to protect the vehicle “even
when approaching wires at an oblique angle.” The guides are made of “non-conductive
fiberglass and CPVC tubing”157, which denies the flow of electric current through the
Canopy and into the metallic body of the vehicle. In turn, interrupting the flow minimises
“interference with on-board communication and jamming equipment” to preserve the
electronic capabilities for countering remotely detonated explosives (see device in 5.3.2).
Currently, all MRAP vehicles operating outside the wire in Iraq are required to have a wire-clearing device installed on their vehicle. To date, over 3,000 objective OWM kits have been fielded to units across Iraq… Without a doubt, the RDECOM-TARDEC OWM is having a lasting and significant impact on urban operations and continues to provide protection and greater mobility for our Warfighters.
Figure 45 Excerpt from the OWM Kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 5)
The functions of protecting soldiers were redistributed between the MRAP script
and the Canopy, add to it preserving the power lines as we shall see later (in 5.4.1). The
Canopy rounded and smoothened the movement space of the MRAPs through Iraq’s wired
streets, literally creating a large curve that scooped and pushed low-hanging power lines
over the vehicles. The Canopy, in its standard and modular figure, integrated the MRAP
vehicle a little further in Iraq’s urban landscape, and the device became a requirement for
all MRAPs operating in Iraq (Figure 45). The military realised a new level of survivability
for their soldiers, electronic equipment, and vehicles, and by substitution for the broader
connection to the military network across Iraq and the Pacific.
157 CPVC is a kind of plastic polymer; the acronym is short for chlorinated polyvinyl chloride which is a more flexible version than regular PVC.
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5.3.2. Overhead Boundary
The second example is an improvement to maintain electronic capacities and
advantage. Like electric wires, overhead structures obstruct the mobility of the tall MRAPs
and intercept their vertical extensions. This type of accidents is referred to as a “bridge
strike” in Traffic Engineering, where tall vehicles – usually trucks or buses – strike a low-
clearance overpass. Several procedures can mitigate – or not158 – a bridge strike including
signposts of clearance limits, prior planning of driving routes (see Figure 34), and/or driver
assistance technologies. The MRAP’s bridge strike is particularly threatening to
survivability if its CREW antennas run into a rigid overhead structure (see Figure 51).
CREW159 is a signal-jamming electronic system designed to disrupt and defeat remote-
controlled detonations of explosives (SRC, Inc., 2018). The U.S. military employs this
system to increase survivability, as part of the tactics of electronic warfare; so, it is
imperative for them to protect the antennas and reduce any friction with other objects.
This improvement is documented in an Army article entitled “Depot Produces 12k
Antenna Flex-mount Devices” (2009). The military develops an improvement at the
Tobyhanna Army Depot, which is the Army’s centre for industrial and technical excellence
and the military’s lead and joint160 logistics support C4ISR161 provider for the U.S. Armed
Forces (U.S. Army, 2019). Located in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, the Depot offers
logistical support including fabrication-manufacturing and engineering-design-
development among other capabilities as part of the U.S. Army Materiel Command. The
article describes a device to protect CREW antennas before “contact with a hard object
such as an overpass, bridge or low-hanging wires.” It is a “retrofitted” device made from
existing mechanical parts that the Depot employees “assemble, fabricate and ship … for
use in Southwest Asia,” a reference to the region of Iraq and Afghanistan. The two-part
device is a bracket kit performing two complementary mechanisms: a flex-mount and a
pull-down (Figure 50). The flex-mount allows the antenna to tilt upon contact with a hard
obstacle (see the triangle-axle part in Figure 50). The pull-down allows soldiers to
manually tilt the antenna from the safe interior before reaching an obstacle (see the pulley-
158 See the Robert Moses bridges story (Mihandoust, 2015; Garutti, 2016; Yaneva, 2017). 159 CREW is short for Counter RCIED Electronic Warfare, where RCIED is a Remote Controlled Improvised Explosive Device. Its formal name is AN/VLQ-12 CREW Duke System, manufactured by SRC, Inc. 160 The Depot two designations: one for the Army (Army Center of Industrial and Technical Excellence for C4ISR and Electronics, Avionics, and Missile Guidance and Control) and another for the Air Force (Technology Repair Center for Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence and Tactical Missiles). 161 Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance
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cord part in Figure 50). The advanced and costly CREW device receives a low-cost, basic,
mechanical mechanism to assist in protecting it. The mechanism works independently or
with the assistance of the soldiers.
The functions of protecting the soldiers were redistributed among the MRAP
script, the Canopy, and the tilt-pull device, add to it preserving civilian infrastructure as we
shall see later (5.4). The tilt-pull device provided basic technical (auto tilt) and
sociotechnical (manual pull) mechanisms to protect an electronically sophisticated CREW
antenna, which in turn maintained the military’s electromagnetic spectrum and fed out
survivability from within the MRAP on the streets of Iraq. Like the Canopy, the tilt-pull
device integrated the MRAP vehicle even a little further in Iraq’s urban landscape, as it
equipped many vehicles fielded in Iraq.
5.3.3. Tight Flows
To meet demand for a smaller and shorter version to improve mobility in Iraqi cities, Navistar developed the Dash … With the same engine as the MaxxPro Plus, it could do 67 mph and had a turning diameter of 55.5 feet, better than that of the lighter RG31. Compared to MaxxPro, MaxxPro Dash was also shorter and narrower, for better maneuverability in confined spaces.
Figure 46 Excerpt from This Truck Saved my Life (Friedman, 2013, p. 232)
Vehicle downsizing, sometimes referred to as rightsizing, is a policy or practice of preferentially replacing existing vehicles with the smallest appropriate vehicles, potentially offering improved direct vision of other road users, improved maneuverability in urban environments, and reduced conflict with human-scale street geometry.
Figure 47 Downsizing in transportation engineering; excerpt from DoT’s report Optimizing Large Vehicles for Urban Environments (Chiarenza et al., 2018, p. 10)
The third example is an improvement to navigate confined areas. Besides its
excessive height, the MRAP’s width obstructed its access through narrow spaces and
gateways, and its length compromised its turning radius around narrow curves. This is a
problem of flow and infrastructure in Traffic Engineering and a problem of vehicle design
in Automotive Engineering.
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Here is an account of this friction between the technical object and the urban
landscape in two sources. The first is the report documenting the official history of the
MRAP Program entitled This Truck Saved My Life (Friedman, 2013), and the second is the
corporate website of Navistar, a major defence contractor. The report describes how the
Army and their commercial-industrial partner Navistar Defense modify the Dash version
of the MaxxPro MRAP model to better fit Iraq’s urban streets. It discusses the urban as
attributes of the vehicles, enumerating the advantageous physical features for an effective
urban mobility (Figure 46). These are not mutually exclusive attributes, but ones that
together optimise this MRAP model as a better urban version than other models.
Table 3 Reproduced MaxxPro vehicle model comparison from the Navistar Defense website; smallest dimension shaded in grey and urban MRAP model dimensions emphasised in bold (illustration by author); all data is from the website, and all dimensions are in meters and weights in metric tons (Navistar Defense, 2019)
MaxxPro Model Le
ngth
Wid
th
Hei
ght
Whe
el B
ase
Turn
ing
Dia
met
er
~ B
ase
Wei
ght
~ M
ax
Ope
ratin
g W
eigh
t
Notes 1. MRAP 6.45 2.59 3.05 3.88 18.90 17.17 19.73 The basic model to
counter IEDs and small firearms
2. Plus 6.45 2.59 3.05 3.88 18.90 17.64 24.04 additional armour (EFPs), enhanced performance
3. Dash 6.25 2.59 2.77 3.68 16.46 15.42 22.23 “lighter, smaller and more mobile variant”
4. Dash DXM 6.25 2.62 2.92 3.50
3.73 16.46 16.91 23.36 “independent suspension … for extreme theatres like Afghanistan”
The report references the urban through the vehicle’s physical feature and ties
back to the corporate website of Navistar Defense. The website exhibits the line of Maxx
Pro MRAP models, including the Dash, and catalogues the various technical details of
each vehicle. We compiled this data from the website and reproduced a comparison (Table
3) between the four MaxxPro MRAP models. The numbers in the table illustrate that the
Dash’s dimensions became relatively smaller than the other models, an improvement
known as “downsizing” in Transportation Engineering (see Figure 47). The length and
wheelbase (distance between axles) of the Dash become 20 cm less than the initial MRAP
(see rows 1 and 3 of the table). This seemingly small difference amounts to a 13% (1.22 m)
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improvement in the turning radius, one that brings the MRAP closer to the turning162
figure of a car rather than a truck.
The functions of protecting the soldiers were now redistributed among the MRAP
script, the Canopy, the tilt-pull device, and the downsizing. Reducing the dimensions and
turning radius of the vehicle allowed for better manoeuvring in Iraq’s confined areas, thus
reducing situations where slowing/stopping vehicles make them sitting targets for an
ambush. While this improvement did not apply to all MRAP models, it differentiated one
specific model for urban operations and informed the design of the next generation M-
ATV and JLTV platforms.
5.3.4. Conclusion
The third section analysed how the new improvements to the MRAP vehicle
attempted to coordinate its survivability and mobility scripts to achieve a survivability-
mobility hybrid. The MRAP script was already concretised through extreme protective
architectural associations between the occupants’ bodies and the terrain, but the MRAP
vehicle required integration into the urban landscape. For, “possession of territory is …
first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation” as Paul Virilio succinctly put it
(2000). The MRAP vehicle, which is the figuration of the MRAP script in all its
possibilities and limitations, received bulky OWM kits, automatic/manual tilt-pull devices,
and modifications in physical dimensions. The improvements managed to urbanise the
MRAPs, i.e., integrate them in their new techno-geographic milieu (the warzone’s urban
landscape), at least until the withdrawal. Yet they produced a most uncommon, and dare
we say most hideous, technical adaptation that embodied the top-down, heavy-handed, and
scrambling approach of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq.
162 For technical standards, see “Appendix C: Bus Vehicle Characteristics” of AASHTO-TVF-1 Guide for Geometric Design of Transit Facilities on Highways and Streets (American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, 2014)
153
Figure 48 Improvising technical improvements in the field/warzone in Baghdad; original photo (U.S. Army website) captioned “Spc. Richard Pfleegor of Jersey Shore, Pa., a Soldier with Company B, 328th Brigade Support Battalion, 56th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, welds outriggers onto a bolt-on metal frame April 16…” (Roles, 2009)
Figure 49 Developing technical improvements in the industrial base/home front in the U.S.; photo from OWM kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 3)
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Figure 50 Assembling manually operated MRAP devices at the Tobyhanna Army Depot; original photo (U.S. Army website) captioned “Jerry Pursel, sheet metal mechanic helper, tests the pull-down kit assembly attached to a CREW antenna system flex-mount device…” (Boucher, 2009)
Figure 51 A convoy of Caiman MRAPs equipped with the hulking OWM Kit frames that protect the CREW antennas (the thick vertical casings in the photo), the gunner, and other electronic warfare devices against electrocution on top of the vehicles. Original photo (Getty Images) captioned “Soldiers watch as the last American military convoy to depart Iraq from the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division drives through Camp Virginia after crossing over the border into Kuwait on December 18, 2011 in Camp Virginia, Kuwait…” (Tama, 2011)
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5.4 Urban Scripts for the Warzone
We have now analysed how the military adapts the MRAP vehicles to an urban
milieu to minimise friction with infrastructure, thus increasing their occupants and
equipment’s survivability against non-combat-related threats. In this section, we explore
strategic scales163 of survivability and mobility that expand the milieu to include wider
networks and more actors. We stay with the technical object, but we trace associations of
survivability and mobility that extend beyond the vehicle’s physical armour and into the
sociology and psychology of Iraqi civilians164 and their urban environment. Enter
strategies of coercing and co-opting the locals, which we trace in counterinsurgency
publications to analyse how the various scales intersect through the MRAP. The military
adjusted the technical object to respond to the new concerns, as they were forced to
establish working relations with Iraqi locals affected by the MRAPs’ mobility.
One representative aspect of officer Amble’s account, which we discussed earlier
in the chapter (see 5.1), describes how the MRAPs assemble civilians around them as an
angry, disgruntled crowd. We do not know more about how that specific situation
unfolded, but we learn about the local sentiment against the disruption of ordinary urban
activities of civilian life and as conveyed through the officer’s experience. As such, we
scrutinise the psychological lens of the account – informed by officer Amble’s background
in psychological operations – to understand how the technical object gets entangled in this
situation. We start from TARDEC’s briefing (see 5.3.1) that emphasised the need for
“winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people” through preserving “power, telephone,”
and even laundry wires (2010, p. 2), which their ordinary activities depended on. We trace
the psychological lens from the briefing back to two sources where we explore an example
of the military setting out to make alliances with Iraqi locals through negotiating the bulky
size of the MRAP vehicles and the disconnect it creates between soldiers and civilians. The
two sources are the 2006 Field Manual FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency and the 2012
Monograph Hearts-and-Minds. They cut across a concern for ‘preserving existing
infrastructure’ (Figure 54) against ‘building trusted networks’ (Figure 52) and ‘appealing
to emotions and intellects’ (Figure 53), respectively.
163 When discussing similar scales, military publications do not formally refer to survivability; however, they convey concerns for the safety and survival of their soldiers, which we explore under notions of survivability. 164 Important here is the work of anthropologist Roberto J. González on how the military mobilised Anthropology and recruited anthropologists in counterinsurgency and its experimental program the Human Terrain System (González, 2007, 2008, 2012).
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5.4.1. Preserve Utilities
A-26. Once the unit settles into the [area of operations], its next task is to build trusted networks. This is the true meaning of the phrase “hearts and minds,” which comprises two separate components. “Hearts” means persuading people that their best interests are served by [counterinsurgency] success. “Minds” means convincing them that the force can protect them and that resisting it is pointless.
Figure 52 Excerpt from FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency (U.S. Army, 2006a, p. A-5)
… winning hearts-and-minds equates to subjugating the total person by appealing both to the emotions with a positive end-state vision of the future and to the intellect by presenting decisions of immediate consequence and rational self-import. Addressing the entire human psyche, the strategy is simultaneously one of conciliation and of coercion…
Figure 53 Excerpt from the monograph Hearts-and-Minds: A Strategy of Conciliation, Coercion, or Commitment? (Nell, 2012, p. 33 original italics)
Greater ability to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people – The high profile of the OWM kit makes a bold statement to the local population, and shows intent to preserve their existing infrastructure.
Figure 54 Excerpt from the OWM Kit Briefing (TARDEC, 2010, p. 5)
In the account of the Canopy device from TARDEC’s briefing (see 05.3.1), we
saw how the military sought to connect with Iraqi locals through preserving the power
lines that the MRAPs threatened to cut. The military accorded the Canopy device new
performative roles of technical mediation and symbolic representation to mediate this
friction, besides mitigating electrocution for the occupants of the MRAP (see 5.3.1).
Technically, the Canopy device was tasked with preserving the wire network servicing the
locals. As the MRAPs move, the Canopy performs a scooping mechanism: its curved rails
scoop and guide the low-hanging wires up and over the MRAP, aiming not to cut them in
the process (RDECOM Public Affairs, 2010; TARDEC, 2010, p. 3). Symbolically, the
Canopy’s hulking dimensions were tasked with conveying to the locals a sense of trust in
how the military cares about their ordinary lives through preserving their infrastructure
(Figure 54).
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This example is an uncanny hybrid of technical mediation and what Simondon
calls the “primitive structuration of the magical world” (2017, p. 227). It collects technical
expertise from the Army’s lead R&D laboratory for automotive technologies, and it draws
on basic – if colonial – psychological and anthropological representations of the locals and
their belief systems. For a moment, the briefing represents the MRAPs and their Canopies
as totem poles. Yet, and similar to Amble’s unique account amidst war reporting, we could
neither trace the successful impact – or failure – of the Canopy device in the military
publication that we have analysed nor could we find other stories about the wires in
English and Arabic news media reporting. Even more, the briefing does not foreground
who these locals are, how does the solidity of the military-civilian alliance hold, or whether
the technical-symbolic hybrid approach has any tangible effects. The only thread clear to
us is how the military’s predominantly technocentric lens of Iraq’s landscape attempts to
keep the locals/civilians at bay, thus making them elements of the techno-geographic
milieu of survivable urban mobility.
5.4.2. Build Sociability
The psychological lens in both accounts of officer Amble and the Canopy device
is part and parcel of the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency operations against armed
factions and their support civilian base in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military attempts to
recruit165 the allegiance and cooperation of the locals to aid military efforts in managing
hostilities. With this in mind, we continue to trace how the military set out to connect with
Iraqi civilians through negotiating the isolating effect of the MRAP design. To start, here is
an operational controversy for the MRAPs in Iraq: Should the soldiers operate from within
or without the safety of their vehicles? The psychological lens of this concern focuses on
how the MRAP’s inward-oriented design (see Chapter 4) prevents interpersonal contact
and trust building between the soldiers and the locals. We trace this concern to the
beginnings of the MRAP program and the initial fielding of the MRAP vehicles to Iraq in
2008, particularly to circulating references on the civilians’ psychology from the 2006 field
manual FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency.
165 See Anthropologist Roberto González’s crucial work on “mercenary anthropology” (2007, 2012), which critically scrutinises how the U.S. military expand their counterinsurgency efforts by recruiting anthropologists and social scientists via the now defunct Human Terrain System program (2008).
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A research paper from the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School for field
officers argues against employing the MRAPs as they de-humanise the soldiers in the eyes
of the locals. It references the pre-MRAP 2006 field manual FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency,
which is “the first US Army manual dedicated exclusively to counterinsurgency” in over
twenty years (reviewed in González, 2007). The field manual highlights the importance of
establishing presence in the field by working on the ground so that the locals “begin to see
Soldiers and Marines as real people they can trust and do business with, rather than as
aliens who descended from armored boxes” (U.S. Army, 2006a, p. A-5; quoted in Flurry,
2008, p. 4). Similar references circulate in the 2007 key pamphlet Counterinsurgency
Guidance, issued for U.S. soldiers operating in Iraq by their Commanding General
Raymond Odierno166. It calls on U.S. forces to “get out and walk – move mounted [in
vehicles], work dismounted [on foot]” in order not to insulate themselves from the Iraqi
people (Odierno, 2007). Likewise, the MRAP handbook (see 5.1) reminds military leaders
to balance protecting their troops and interacting with the locals, and it warns soldiers of
“the psychological effect large armored vehicles have on interacting with the population”
(Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 28). This last reference to the negative impact
of the vehicle’s large sizes on the locals’ psyche stands in stark contrast to the briefing’s
quasi-religious celebration of the positive symbolism of the hulking Canopy (see 5.4.1).
5.4.3. Conclusion
In the fourth section, we begin to see how the military considers the MRAP from
the point of view of the urban landscape and the civilians. On the one hand, it is an alien
machine that disrupts infrastructure that the Iraqi locals depend on. On the other hand, it is
considered an unsurmountable architectural fortress, a working envelop that hinders
interactions between humans (civilians and soldiers). These considerations were at the
heart of counterinsurgency operations, where often the military endeavoured to increase
sociability with the Iraqi civilians but the MRAPs did not facilitate it. In what concerns
survivability, the military attempted to overcome these antagonisms in the technical object
to win the locals over and reduce their support of the enemy. The improvements continue
to depend on the technical mediation of the bulky MRAP vehicles, and we witness the
development of more sociotechnical improvements that involve the humans (soldiers)
166 Commanding General of Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNC-I) then United States Forces – Iraq (USF-I)
159
stepping out of their vehicles and contributing to the overall work of their own
survivability.
5.5 Urban Metascripts for the Home Front
We set out at the beginning of this chapter to analyse the urban as emergent
relations by following frictions of the MRAP’s survivability and mobility in Iraq. We
focused on Iraq as the MRAP’s area of operations, but we always understood that within
the framework of “military landscapes” (after Woodward, 2014). These are the networks of
geographies shaped by military concerns and viewed through military visions of the world,
including extractive sectors, industrial bases, logistics spaces, and warzones. Following the
technical improvements of the MRAP in the previous sections, we traced actions to sites in
the U.S. where MRAP drivers train in Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey; the
OWM kit is developed in Warren, Michigan; MRAPs receive awards in Orlando, Florida;
and, the tilt-pull device is assembled in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania. Key epistemological
questions are due here: How does the survivability-mobility script perform across a varied
and expansive military landscape? How is the urban differentiated across geographies
through the same technical object whose circulation realises the networks of the landscape?
More specifically, what kinds of urban does the MRAP generate in what the military
calls167 “theater of war” (Iraq and Afghanistan) and “homeland” (the U.S.)?
To answer these questions, we analyse how the technical object “shifts out” from
one geographic frame to another168, what Akrich and Latour describe as a displacement for
an actant to leave the here and now (1992, p. 260). We turn to a specific situation to
examine associations between the MRAP vehicles and the urban landscape in the U.S. and
what that means for notions169 of survivability and mobility. It is when the MRAPs
returned to the U.S. upon the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Iraq since the late
2000s. This was a “program change” (see Prospective Technology Incorporated, 2010) for
167 For definitions, see DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2020, p. 97,216) 168 For example, the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are only applicable in CONUS. The U.S. Army had to develop a Programmatic Environmental Assessment for the MRAP vehicles upon their return from OCONUS to CONUS to meet these requirements, which outcome was no EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) required (see Prospective Technology Incorporated, 2010, p. ii). 169 In a research paper presented at the EASST/4S 2020 Conference in Prague, we explored this aspect of combat survivability as a speculative imaginary of militarised planetary designs.
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what the military calls “fielding” the MRAPs, i.e. deploying to the field/area of operations
(see U.S. Army, 2015). Despite manufacturing in and shipping from the U.S., the rapid
acquisition process of the MRAPs has only fielded them in Iraq and Afghanistan but not
the U.S. In the sections below, we look first at how the MRAPs embody common safe
mobility regulations across the military landscape. Then, we look at how they differentiate
the urban landscapes of the homeland and the theatre of war by submitting to distinct
frameworks of safe mobility.
5.5.1. Extend Safety
What is the problem with MRAPs returning to CONUS?
Figure 55 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 2)
We analyse the MRAP’s shifting out in a Safety Bulletin170 from the U.S. Army’s
Transportation Engineering Agency (TEA), where we observe for the first time how the
MRAP becomes the object to protect from (Figure 55). That is, the landscape needs to be
protected from the MRAP. As a Traffic Engineering and Highway Safety Bulletin, the
document frames this new understanding within concerns for maintaining public safety,
economic flows, and infrastructural integrity in the U.S. (see Figure 58). We connect the
bulletin’s operational notions and standards of traffic safety to higher level military and
governmental regulations grounded in structural practices of risk management. For risk
management cuts across the expansive military landscape (in the U.S. and abroad), unlike
public safety which is bound to the U.S. geographic limits.
First, let us consider how the shifting out is represented in the bulletin using the
territorial designations CONUS and OCONUS. Issued by the U.S. Board on Geographic
Names in 1959 (USGS, n.d.), the former delineates an inside and the latter an outside.
CONUS designates the Continental United States (the inside), which includes171 the forty-
nine172 States and the District of Columbia in the North American continent. The rest of
170 This is the only issue from the TEA dedicated to operating MRAPs on U.S. roads and highways. 171 Another version of the acronym is the Conterminous or Contiguous United States that includes the 48 States located “between Canada and Mexico” (U.S. House of Representatives, 1990; Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), 2017, p. DEF-6; United States Transportation Command, 2017, p. 17). 172 Hawaii is not included within CONUS as it is not considered part of North America’s geography.
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the world “Outside”173 CONUS is differentiated as OCONUS174 (Figure 63). We now have
overlapping yet distinct geographic, territorial, and administrative designations that
constitute the U.S. military landscape: CONUS, OCONUS, homeland, and theatre of war.
To simplify, let us consider this military jargon in the language of social science
borrowing from anthropologist Catherine Lutz and geographer Rachel Woodward.
CONUS represents the “battle’s other – ‘the home front’ – and war’s shadow –
‘readiness’” (Lutz, 2002a, p. 7), while OCONUS embodies the stretch of “military
landscapes” (Woodward, 2014) including the theatres/warzones. Now, we can follow the
MRAPs as they return from the warzone to the home front and examine how friction with
infrastructure shifts the military’s concerns from soldiers’ survivability to work safety,
public safety, and defence readiness.
Army operations, whether they involve military situations including tough, realistic training, combat operations, contingency basing, or the industrial base supporting research, development, testing, and production, are demanding and complex.
Figure 56 Excerpt from the pamphlet Counterinsurgency Guidance (U.S. Army, 2014, p. 1)
16–2. Policy: a. OSHA programs and national consensus standards will be applicable to and integrated into all Army equipment, systems, operations, and workplaces (CONUS and OCONUS).
Figure 57 Excerpt from AR 385-10: The Army Safety Program (U.S. Army, 2017, p. 17,83)
Let us examine work safety first. We analyse the MRAP’s association in two
Army documents on risk management. The first is Army Regulation AR 385-10: The Army
Safety Program 175, which is the main policy that cross-references the Army’s doctrinal
publications on managing risk176. The second is Department of the Army Pamphlet Pam
173 Together with “the Commonwealths of Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands; Guam; the U.S. Virgin Islands, and U.S. territories, and possessions,” the two states are referred to as the “non-foreign OCONUS area” (Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), 2017, p. 106). 174 OCONUS collects defence designations such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command), and others. 175 This version of AR 385-10, dated 24 March 2017, supersedes the version dated 27 November 2013. 176 Such as the System Safety Management Guide (2013) and Risk Management (2014)
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385-30: Risk Management providing guidance on implementing the former regulation,
which is also an updated version of the pre-MRAP risk document177.
The excerpt from the regulation (Figure 56) expands our understanding of military
operations from bound geographies, such as combat in a warzone, to military landscapes of
activities across geographies and territories. The other excerpt from the pamphlet (Figure
57) represents the enactment of this expansive landscape: as a State178 institution, the U.S.
military subscribes to – among others – the U.S. federal government’s national standards
and measures for work safety in all its areas of operation, inside and outside the U.S.
Reference is made here to the programs and standards of the Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, OSHA, which is a federal agency of the U.S. Department of Labor
whose requirements the military’s footprint – all their “equipment, systems, operations,
and workplaces” (Figure 57) – must follow within CONUS and OCONUS. Beyond its
instructive tone, we find that the regulation enacts the military landscape by scripting
OSHA’s requirements into the human and nonhuman actors of the military network. The
actors embody the scripts and transport them on a planetary scale. They extend and
territorialise the State’s institutional concerns of occupational safety across the U.S., Iraq,
Afghanistan, and the associated logistics and industrial geographies.
So, how does this add to our understanding of the MRAP’s survivability? The
combat survivability that we analyse in the technical improvements (see Chapter 4) is a
synergy of functions that serves the military’s direct engagement with violence in the
warzone, hence the protective architectural associations of the MRAP’s capsule and
envelope. However, the State’s concern for work/occupational safety constitutes what
design theorist Damon Taylor calls a “metascript” for engineering the MRAP vehicles,
which is a functioning “located in an ideological field of operation” (2013, p. 358) and
underlying the survivability script among others irrespective of operational geography.
This is why documents like the MRAP user handbook (see 5.1) have general instructions
for operating the MRAP everywhere, such as loading plans, maintenance, tire pressure,
vehicle crashes, falls (off the vehicle), and smashed/pinched extremities (fingers) among
others (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, pp. 31–43). Also, this explains why the
177 The Risk Management Pamphlet 385-30, dated 2 December 2014, is the updated version of the pre-MRAP Mishap Risk Management Pamphlet 385-30, dated 10 October 2007. 178 I use State (with capital S) to differentiate the United States as a polity from the U.S. 50 states (with small s) as political constituencies within the main polity.
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TEA bulletin references traffic safety in both military and federal regulations when
operating MRAPs in the U.S. Afterall, the MRAPs are equipment of the U.S. military
institution, built by taxpayers’ funds and submitting to State regulations. Accordingly, the
work safety metascript inscribes both the MRAP survivability script and the MRAP
vehicles, and it provisions a compliance with State regulations that facilitates the vehicles’
shifting out from the warzone to the home front. Thus, realising the flows of military
landscapes.
5.5.2. Scale Survivability
MRAPs will usually exceed the weight, height, or width limits … To preserve our Nation’s infrastructure and to keep trucks and buses moving efficiently, States must ensure that commercial motor vehicles comply with federal size and weight standards.
Figure 58 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 3)
Now, we examine public safety and defence readiness as the MRAPs returned to
the U.S. The technical object needed to be urbanised differently to preserve the home
front’s infrastructure. The MRAP ceased to mediate survivability as its counter-blast
capacity became dormant outside the warzone. The vehicles became “ex-MRAP trucks”179
(Friedman, 2013, p. 294), and their heavy weight and large physical dimensions
pronounced new frictions with the U.S. highway and road networks. We analyse how the
MRAPs continued to subscribe to the home front’s public safety rubrics through
compliance with traffic safety measures at the federal and state levels. Unlike the series of
improvements that articulated their mobility in the warzone (see 5.3), the MRAPs’
mobility became highly restricted180 in the U.S. to the extent that most MRAPs are
transported via other vehicles (trailers) to preserve the integrity of the home front’s
infrastructure (Figure 58).
179 Most of the MRAPs are originally based on commercial truck chassis. 180 This situation is specific to military operations. It might not be the case when later some MRAPs get transferred to Law Enforcement Agencies (like the police), although under a different set of rules for operating them in the U.S. and after stripping them of their military equipment.
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MRAPs are wider than most vehicles, which could contribute to sideswipe crashes. MRAPs are also higher, which makes it harder for the driver to see over the hood and vehicle edges. Additionally, the driver’s field of view is very limited due to small thick windows so other vehicles, pedestrians, and obstacles might be obscured … Because MRAPs ride high and have a high center of gravity, the vehicles are also susceptible to rollover. MRAPs are generally also heavier than standard passenger vehicles. This may in turn lead to damage to roads and bridges. Excessive use on roadway shoulders may cause ruts which may lead to an MRAP sinking into the ground surface or overturn.
Figure 59 Excerpt from the Safety Bulletin (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2014, p. 6)
The TEA bulletin assesses the key public-safety-related associations between the
MRAPs and the highway network (Figure 59). Its assessment posits the MRAPs against
heavy commercial vehicles such as trucks and buses, in relation to passenger vehicles
(cars), pedestrians, and the infrastructure itself. Just like in Iraq, the physical features of the
large and heavy MRAPs are at the centre of potential breakdowns of urban mobility and
the disruption of ordinary urban activities of civilian life. Designed from the outside in as
capsular enclosures, the MRAPs have limited visibility of their immediate context. Their
blind spots correspond to their general height, high hoods, long edges, and small windows.
In comparison, commercial trucks are designed from the inside out through high-vision
cabs and peep windows (see Figure 62) to optimise them for urban environments
(Chiarenza et al., 2018). The MRAPs have another limitation: their inadequate stability
due to their heavy weight and high centre of gravity, which could compromise bridge and
road durability and consequently traffic safety. Commercial trucks, on the other hand, are
designed with additional and distanced axles to distribute their weight for optimal
operation on roads and highways. This latter improvement subscribes to the provisions of
the federal Bridge Formula, which we discuss next. The bulletin ends with a list of existing
guidance on MRAP operations from different military commands and centres181 to
mitigate the risks of moving and transporting the MRAPs across the U.S. urban landscape.
We unpack the basic technical mediation to “preserve [the] Nation’s
infrastructure” 182 (2014, p. 3) in a mathematical equation that “establishes the maximum
weight … [that] a motor vehicle may carry on the Interstate highway system” (2015, p. 1).
181 The bulletin lists: The Joint Program Office MRAP, the Army’s Forces Command, the Army’s Evaluation Center, and the Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command. 182 This specific term is part of the actors’ language “to preserve,” and we use it here in lieu of Latour’s concept of “stabilization” in Reassembling the Social (2005).
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This is the Bridge Formula. We trace it from the safety bulletin to a guidance pamphlet183
entitled Bridge Formula Weights, issued by the Department of Transportation’s Federal
Highway Administration (FHWA). The federal jurisdiction of the FHWA and its formula
flattens the U.S. landscape and binds all large and heavy vehicles – commercial or military
– moving on public roads. In Figure 60, we can see how the formula associates heavy
vehicles and infrastructure through a function of weigh distribution. The acceptable
weight184 for a vehicle to drive on public roads and highways must spread over the
vehicle’s axles, those being the assemblies of wheels and shafts that carry the vehicle. The
more the axles and the greater the distance between them, the better the weight distribution
and the lesser the damage to roads and bridges. This is how multi-axle trailers and semi-
trailers haul heavy equipment and materials.
Let us do a small exercise. Apply the formula to Navistar’s MaxxPro Dash model
that was downsized to suit the confined urban spaces of Iraq (see 5.3.3). Based on data we
compiled from the company’s website (Navistar Defense, 2019), the Dash has: a 12.25 feet
wheel base (L), 2 axles (N), and a maximum weight of 51,500 pounds. Calculating the
Dash’s Bridge Formula (using the numbers above) yields a permitted weight on the road
(W) of 42, 250 pounds (Figure 61), which is almost twenty percent less (9,250 pounds)
than its actual maximum weight of 51,500 pounds. The extra weight of the Dash, originally
designed for survivable mobility in urban Iraq, does not make it eligible for safe mobility
in the urban U.S. Except in three cases: it is physically modified by distancing its axles
further (which is not feasible); it is transported via a semi-trailer truck that redistributes its
weight on the road (which is the most feasible); or it is approved via special permit (in
exceptional cases)185.
Through its submission to U.S. specific traffic safety regulations, the MRAP
vehicle – as a technical object – submits to State metascripts of public safety and defence
readiness, which are both vital to mobilise for war as embodied in provisions like the
Highways for National Defense186. The MRAP as a survivability script for soldiers in the
183 The pamphlet was issued in August 2006 and last revised in May 2015; the Bridge Formula was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1975. 184 Both, the total weight of the vehicle with passengers and cargo (Gross Vehicle Weight) and the max weight designated by the manufacturer (Gross Vehicle Weight Rating). 185 The States not the Federal Government decide on approving special permits since “they have absolute authority over their public highways in both peacetime and wartime” (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2019a). 186 The HND provision is part of the Code of Federal Regulations on integrating “the highway needs of the national defence into the civil highway programs of the various State and Federal agencies” and cooperating
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field and the military at large becomes part of a larger survivability system, that of the
State and its systems. The script and the system feed into each other (one allows the other
to progress) only as long as they do not compromise each other’s technical integrity.
5.5.3. Conclusion
The last section analysed a difference. In Iraq, the technics of the MRAP vehicle
were at the core of resolving non-combat-related mobility antagonisms/breakdowns with
the infrastructure and the locals, which complemented the work of the combat-related
survivability script against IEDs/RPGs. In the U.S., the survivability script of the MRAP
got deactivated (there are no explosions), and the technics of the ex-MRAP truck could not
resolve mobility antagonisms with the infrastructure. This is not a differentiation of the
urban between Iraq and the U.S. but one between the urban landscapes of a warzone and a
home front. The differentiation illustrates the variegated make up of military landscapes
and the layered work that attempts to coordinate them. The MRAPs’ return to the U.S. is a
displacement from one situation to another, a shifting out from fielding in the warzone
(OCONUS) to fielding in the home front (CONUS). The vehicles become unfit for urban
mobility once again and receive improvements external to the technical object all together.
The ex-MRAP trucks get transported via other trucks, creating a new technical ensemble
for traffic safety and defence readiness.
𝑊𝑊 = 500 �𝐿𝐿𝐿𝐿𝐿𝐿 − 1
+ 12𝐿𝐿 + 36�
W = the overall gross weight on any group of two or more consecutive axles to the nearest 500 pounds; L = the distance in feet between the outer axles of any group of two or more consecutive axles; N = the number of axles in the group under consideration.
Figure 60 Bridge Formula from DoT’s guidance pamphlet (Federal Highway Administration, 2015, p. 1)
with those agencies regarding highways use and construction (Transportation Engineering Agency, 2019b). Read more on HND and the Title I – Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (Public Law 84-627) at GOVINFO[DOT]GOV.
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42,250 = 500 �12.25𝑥𝑥2
2 − 1+ 12x2 + 36�
Figure 61 Bridge Formula, as in Figure 60, applied to Navistar’s “more” urban version of the MaxxPro Dash MRAP, as measured in Table 3 of sub-section 5.3.3 (by author)
5.6 Conclusion: Urban as Relational Object
In this chapter, we explored how the military constructs their knowledge of the
urban as a relational and emergent – not static and pre-figured – situation of actions for
different types of technologies (military or civilian). The urban emerges as a relational
object constantly improved by the military as much as the MRAPs are. Military terraining
progresses through folding relations with humans and infrastructure to improve their
scripts of survivability and mobility at home and in the warzone, always considering
civilians though for different reasons. These relations resolve antagonisms, what we called
frictions, between the MRAPs’ physical features and the urban landscape, and the military
urbanises the technical object through coordinating requirements for survivability and
mobility, such as traffic safety, civilian-military relations, and infrastructure integrity.
The strategic mobility of the MRAP between home front and warzone extends the
military’s practice/understanding of the urban as a relational object from the bound
geography of the warzone to the fluid spaces of the military landscape. In the process, they
compound various arrangements of mobility and survivability corresponding to the various
regulatory territories, and the urban becomes a differentiated object across the expansive
military landscape.
In analysing enclosures that protect humans, we distinguish between terrain in
Architecture where a building is designed according to a fixed location and terraining in
vehicular technologies where nothing is fixed. The enclosure of the MRAP is supposed to
ensure survivability and mobility; yet this hybrid script assumes a tabula rasa terrain.
When the vehicle moves with an urban landscape, the terraining leads to a new concept of
survivability that does not discriminate between humans (civilians) and the nonhumans
(urban infrastructure/the built environment). In the next chapter, we follow the MRAP as it
moves with the rural landscape of Afghanistan and see how terraining is performed by the
soldiers’ bodies and the MRAP vehicles.
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Figure 62 Comparison of urban design considerations in MRAP (photo from USAASC, 2018) and commercial truck (photo and diagram from Chiarenza et al., 2018, pp. 13, 23): the first has small-high windows that protect during war (outside inward); the second has large-low windows that expand the field of vision to nearby traffic (inside outward)
Figure 63 Sketch of U.S. military territorial extension via state metascripts, from the home front’s geography to the warzone’s territorialisations of bases and vehicles (by author)
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Chapter 6
Breathing in an Upside-down World
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6.0 Introduction
The preceding chapter attempted to answer epistemological and methodological
questions about terraining in action, as a relational and dynamic process of reducing the
landscape to a network of antagonisms. The epistemological part was concerned with how
the military learns about the urban landscape of Iraq as a structured environment with
developed infrastructure (roads, highways, bridges, power lines, dense neighbourhoods)
and through the technical object, the MRAP vehicle. Thus, we analysed terraining in Iraq
as a function of coordinating a survivability-mobility hybrid script through the encounters
of the MRAP with infrastructural networks and risk for the local civilians. The
methodological part was concerned with how we – as researchers, urbanists, architects –
can follow the MRAPs in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan to analyse the military practice.
Thus, we employed a quasi-ethnographic187 analysis of breakdowns in Iraq to account for
specific situations of friction between the MRAPs’ physical features and the infrastructure
they encounter while moving.
But how was the terraining process different in Afghanistan, knowing that the
military had to modify the same MRAPs intended for Iraq? How did the military assemble
survivability in the land of the Hindu Kush? And what do changes in the technical object
and script of survivability-mobility tell us about the reductions that shape and impose the
military’s worldview on the landscape? To answer these questions, the chapter analyses
terraining in Afghanistan as an expanded field of technologies, technical objects, and
training procedures. Contrary to Iraq, the MRAPs were up to a different relationality in
Afghanistan against a less structured environment and therefore more dangerous terrain.
There was less risk for civilians but higher soldier fatalities riding the MRAPs, a situation
that forced the military to mobilise innovations across its land, air, and maritime domains.
We continue to follow the MRAPs through a quasi-ethnographic188 analysis of a
brutal breakdown of the first-generation MRAP vehicles in Afghanistan as they rolled
187 Since we do not do ethnography and our work mainly consults digital archives, we use “quasi-” to denote the research’s ethnographic stance where we “devote ethnographic attention,” following Yaneva (2009a, pp. 25–26), through following the actors, collecting fragments of observations, and documenting arrangements (see more in the methodology chapter). 188 Since we do not do ethnography and our work mainly consults digital archives, we use “quasi-” to denote the research’s ethnographic stance where we “devote ethnographic attention,” following Yaneva (2009a, pp. 25–26), through following the actors, collecting fragments of observations, and documenting arrangements (see more in the methodology chapter).
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over, and often drowned their occupants in water. The analysis is structured in two parts.
The first part analyses the reduction of Afghanistan to rural terrain and the consequent
technical improvements that fold this terrain into the MRAP vehicles. It continues to
describe a terraining centred around the vehicle. We analyse this situation in engineering
studies, handbooks, technical biographies, and military news articles along two threads:
how the military builds its knowledge of terrain through rollovers; and how they collect the
antagonisms of a rural landscape that renders it terrain. The second part explores the limits
of concretisation of the MRAP as an enclosure-vehicle hybrid and focuses on the body-
vehicle synergy instead. It describes a new terraining centred on the human body. We
analyse this situation in medical studies, testing standards and procedures, doctrinal
publications, documentary videos, and magazine/newspaper articles along two threads:
how the occupants/soldiers’ bodies become active subjects of terraining upon encountering
water in the warzone; and, how the MRAP becomes more than one object tasked with
terraining functions.
Similar to the previous chapter, the visual strategy of this chapter complements
the analysis in two ways. It draws on photographic evidence from the empirical sources to
illustrate the dynamic interiors of the MRAPs as sites of instability and antagonism – not
mere occupant spaces. And it sketches reductions in the physical environment (such as
rural road sections) to explain military references for mobility, borrowing from
representation techniques in architectural and urban design studies. The soldiers and
civilians’ bodies are visible in the visuals, and the architectural associations are shown to
extend from the armoured enclosure of the MRAP vehicle to the enclosure of its new
device trainer – the MRAP Egress Trainer. It is our aim to show through the visuals how
the world of the MRAP transgresses bodily, architectural, and urban scales as it expands
the testing, simulation, and training requirements of survivable mobility.
6.1 Collecting the Rural Landscape
We approach the questions of this chapter through examining a breakdown event
specific to compromising the survivability of the MRAPs in Afghanistan: vehicle rollover.
Congressional, medical, and defence reports agree that MRAPs experience deadly non-
combat rollovers due to their physical features of heavyweight and high centre of gravity
(Feickert, 2010; Brooks et al., 2012; Pakulski et al., 2013). Afghanistan’s irregular, soft,
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and muddy ground resists the MRAPs and destabilises their safe mobility (Figure 68 and
Figure 82). Rollover on irregular surfaces became an event, a situation specific to the
military’s encounter with Afghanistan’s landscape. Accordingly, rollover serves us as a
lens to analyse how the military and the engineers responded to coordinate the
survivability-mobility hybrid script.
Rollover is a type of breakdown in the world of vehicular mobility. It is the event
when a moving vehicle flips on its side or back (see Figure 72). Engineering conceives it
as a relation of failure of stability between a vehicle and its environment, what we refer to
(after Simondon, 2017) throughout the chapter as the “technical milieu” and “geographic
milieu” respectively. We trace an early appearance of rollover in modern military
engineering to a 1979 testing report. In the section “survey of technical literature” (1979,
pp. 22–23), the report draws inspiration from what it describes as the “outstanding work”
on testing and studying highway vehicles (including cars, trucks, trailers, and buses)
mainly performed by the U.S. Department of Transportation and two prominent private
laboratories: the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and the
Highway Safety Research Institute189 at the University of Michigan. From the
bibliographic entries, we follow a researcher at the latter institute, Thomas D. Gillespie,
who went on to author one of the most cited books in automotive mechanics entitled
Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics. Gillespie’s influential work in automotive and
highway engineering spans university research, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Ford Motor Company, the White House, and the World Bank (Nexus, 2020). The
following excerpt from the book defines rollover.
Among the dynamic maneuvers a motor vehicle can experience, rollover is one of the most serious and threatening to the vehicle occupants. Rollover may be defined as any maneuver in which the vehicle rotates 90 degrees or more about its longitudinal axis such that the body makes contact with the ground. Rollover maybe precipitated from one or a combination of factors. It may occur on flat and level surfaces when the lateral accelerations on a vehicle reach a level beyond that which can be compensated by lateral weight shift on the tires. Cross-slope of the road (or off-road) surface may contribute along with disturbances to the lateral forces arising from curb impacts, soft ground, or other obstructions that may ‘trip’ the vehicle.
Figure 64 Excerpt from Fundamentals of Vehicle Dynamics (Gillespie, 1992, p. 309)
189 Today, this is the UMTRI: University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute
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The excerpt (Figure 64) conveys a technical description of a rollover, which relies
on a general differentiation between flat and sloped surfaces. It describes rollover as a
failure of stability between the vehicle’s forward movement and the lateral resistances
acting on it, which we interpret as aspects of the “technical milieu” and the “geographic
milieu” respectively. The two milieus connect through kinetics: in one situation, the weight
is the main actor inducing rollover on flat surfaces; in another, the road slope, type of
ground, and other obstacles contribute, with weight, to rollover. We count this as a first
instance of reducing the landscape to a terrain of surfaces and differentiating them as flat
or non-flat, which corresponds to urban and rural as we will later see in this section. Such
reduction, among others, converts landscape to terrain and informs automotive mechanics
and the automotive industry. But what makes rollover specific to Afghanistan, and how
does this change the MRAPs from their Iraq version? First, let us briefly examine how the
military contrasts Afghanistan to Iraq.
Afghanistan imposed very different warfighting requirements than Iraq. For the region, Iraq was a well-developed country with considerable paved mileage. More or less conventional trucks could operate there. Afghanistan was almost completely unpaved. In a territory about the size of Texas, there are only about 11,000 miles [~17,700 km] of roads, so vehicles operated mainly off-road. They had to be smaller and more agile than those used in Iraq. Trucks had to be far more maneuverable [emphasis added] … The Army operated in the mountains, where it was channeled so that an enemy could predict where its vehicles would go. It had to deal with the most powerful under-body IEDs, because the enemy could take the time to set them up. The Marines operated mostly in flat desert, where their movements were unpredictable. These different conditions were reflected in different decisions as to which vehicles to retain postwar, because the Services’ experience of combat was so different.
Figure 65 Excerpt from This Truck Saved My Life (Friedman, 2013, pp. 231–232)
A key observation across our empirical data is the methodical comparison of
operations and terrain between Afghanistan and Iraq. Reports on IEDs from the U.S.
Congress, the National Research Council, The Wall Street Journal, or Wired magazine
described how their threat increased with insurgents in Iraq then influenced those in
Afghanistan, though military operations started a year and a half earlier in Afghanistan
(Wilson, 2007; National Research Council, 2008; Dreazen, 2010; Higginbotham, 2010).
MRAPs were deployed, as counter-IED architectures, first to Iraq then to Afghanistan,
which meant that they were generally scripted to drive on Iraq’s urban terrain. The
comparison is almost consistent across the military publications we analyse, and the
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official technical biography of the MRAP Program entitled This Truck Saved My Life is the
archetype of such method. Military historian Norman Friedman and his team structure the
historiography of this account by differentiating the terrains of operation in both countries.
We analyse (in Figure 65) a functional differentiation of paved/unpaved ground
surfaces between Iraq and Afghanistan. We map it against a discourse of development
(“well-developed country”) that subscribes to what urbanists Brenner and Schmid call a
“metanarrative of the global urban condition” (2015, p. 155). So, the excerpt relates a
metanarrative of developed/underdeveloped and a differentiation of paved/unpaved ground
surfaces for vehicular mobility. We situate these techno-material realist understandings of
the physical landscape within larger developmental discourses (see Figure 67) that cut
across the military institution and the United Nations (UN), specifically the metanarrative
of urban age (see Brenner and Schmid, 2015, p. 155). Consider the following.
For example, a key strategy shift that accompanied the troop surge in Iraq – in which U.S. troops lived within the Iraqi communities they helped to secure – won’t necessarily work in Afghanistan, Petraeus said.
“You don’t move into a village in Afghanistan the way that we were able to move into neighborhoods in Iraq,” he said. “You have to move on the edge of it, or just near it, but you still have to have a persistent security presence.”
Figure 66 Excerpt from General Petraeus’s talk at Harvard (Miles, 2009)
U.S. military strategy of the aughts counterinsurgency operations can be roughly
sketched in the narrative upheld and presented by General David Petraeus, commander of
the U.S. Central Command. In an address to military veterans at the Harvard Kennedy
School (see excerpt in Figure 66), Petraeus made clear the urban-rural divide between Iraq
and Afghanistan. Iraq is cities and neighbourhoods open for integration; Afghanistan is
villages closed off to strangers. Petraeus’s urban-rural narrative was echoed by many, if
not most, military analysts, notably manifesting in branding an urban insurgency in Iraq
versus a rural insurgency in Afghanistan (see Malkasian and Meyerle, 2009; Meyerle, Katt
and Gavrillis, 2010). In parallel, the UN groups Afghanistan with the Least Developed
Countries (UN DESA, 2010), which are “low-income countries…highly vulnerable to
economic and environmental shocks … [with] low levels of human assets” (UN DESA,
2019). It is a theme and practice further reinforced in UN policy analysis on identifying
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Least Developed Countries to measure their progress through development indicators190
like “paved-road density, paved roads per capita, … and paved roads as a percentage of all
roads” (Kim, 2018, p. 18). We go a step further and compile the numbers referencing the
paved/unpaved indicators across Afghanistan, Iraq, and the State of Texas191 to illustrate
this point (see Table 4). Thus, we see how the lack of paved roads reduces Afghanistan’s
landscape to an off-road terrain and associates it with a rural/non-urban type consistent
with rural/underdeveloped cultural and spatial metanarratives. How does this feed into the
script of the MRAP vehicle?
Urban/Rural Developed/Underdeveloped Paved/Unpaved
Figure 67 Concepts, metanarratives, and techno-material realities (by author)
The association of rural and off-road takes us back to Gillespie’s differentiation of
flat and non-flat surfaces. On the irregular, sloped, and soft/muddy ground of Afghanistan,
the weight and high centre of gravity of the MRAP vehicles are bound to cause a rollover
and threaten the occupants’ survivability with a non-combat-related breakdown. We see
here that terrain is not a synonym for ground/topography, but a conceptual framework for
increasing the effective functionality of mobility through a twofold process: reducing a
landscape to a set of obstacles and improving the technics of articulating these obstacles.
Accordingly, the military seeks a technical improvement to make rural Afghanistan’s
MRAPs “smaller,” “more agile,” and “more maneuverable” vehicles (see Figure 65) in
contrast to those originally scripted for urban Iraq. In the sections that follow, we analyse
how such requirement informs such improvements to ruralise the MRAPs (see urbanising
the MRAP in sections 2 and 3, Chapter 5).
6.1.1. Conclusion
The fact that Afghanistan was a predominantly rural landscape, with a few small
urban centres, was not knew knowledge to the U.S. military. They had some idea about the
region’s socio-environmental and socio-political history, but they have not fought there
190 In this case, under ‘SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure’ of the Sustainable Development Goals. 191 Noteworthy here is the practice of referencing country sizes to U.S. state sizes; we trace the Afghanistan-Texas comparison back to a report from the Country Studies Program, formerly the Army Area Handbook Program, at the Library of Congress (2008). The profile is used by U.S. military and security organisations.
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before. The IED threat forced them to mobilise the MRAP vehicles to Afghanistan, which
were originally designed for Iraq’s paved roads and developed infrastructure (streets,
highways, bridges). They knew that the MRAPs were highly survivable against the deadly
IEDs, but they did not know that it was more difficult to operate them on Afghanistan’s
irregular, soft, and muddy ground. Rollover became the extreme non-combat breakdown,
and it provided the military with an opportunity to find more about rural terrain, to gain
knowledge and adapt the technology. Next, we analyse how engineering attempts to
capture the mechanics of rollover by reducing the landscape to functional parameters.
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Table 4 Comparison of total paved mileage with respect to overall country area among Afghanistan, Iraq, and Texas; areas are in square miles and road lengths in miles, sources of retrieval listed in the table (data compiled by author) Total Area (sq. mi.) Paved Roads (mi.) Notes Afghanistan ~ 251,773 in 2007
(UNSD, 2016) ~11,000 (Friedman, 2013, p. 231) / ~4,632 (extrapolated from SIGAR, 2016, p. i,1,6)
Iraq ~ 169,235 in 2007 (UNSD, 2016)
~ 21,490 [85% of 25,283] (Feghoul, United Nations Development Programme, and International Telecommunication Union, 2003, p. 3)
Texas, U.S. ~268,596 in 2010 (Census Bureau, 2018)
654,923 in Oct 2009 (Federal Highway Administration, 2017)
214,193 miles urban + 440,730 miles rural (Federal Highway Administration, 2017)
Figure 68 MRAP stuck in soft, muddy ground in Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan; original photo captioned “U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Kyle McGann, 466th Air Expeditionary Squadron, Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician, digs mud from under [MRAP] vehicle during demolition day, March 16, 2014” (Young Jr., 2014)
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6.2 Mobility as Parameters
We now analyse how engineering reduces survivable mobility against rollover to
a specific set of parameters corresponding to intensities of speed. We examine a 1979 Test
Activity Report from192 the U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command (TECOM) when the
military first studied rollover through the relation of “small military vehicles on flat
smooth roads” (Varigas Research, Inc., 1979). Entitled Methodology Investigation Final
Report: Military Vehicle Rollover, Analysis and Instrumentation (Phase I), the report
describes how rollover became a concern as “a major safety problem” to the Army whose
“improved test methods … have not been employed in the testing of Army vehicles”
(1979, p. 2). We sift the highly technical computing parameters and indices, data listing
and coding, equations and graphs, and statistical analysis of this report to analyse the
concern for rollover as a form of risk management for hazards such as “emergency
maneuvers particularly for accident or obstacle avoidance” (1979, p. 6). The Jeep – the
M151 MUTT193 in the report – is “selected for scrutiny” in the study (1979, p. 51) among
the military’s then light trucks194 and in comparison to the commercial 1963 Ford
Galaxie195 as “a more conventional vehicle” (1979, p. 88). This is one of many situations
where the military borrows from commercial improvements, expanding our thinking on the
primacy of engineering regardless of the domain (see Chapter 2). The military enters the
world of rollover by plugging in to the existing industry’s definitions and tests.
The field of vehicle modeling and simulation is sophisticated enough to handle the rollover description of small military vehicles on flat smooth roads … It is possible to calculate a rollover threshold or index for the M151 from forward velocity and steer angle, however, there are other effects which influence rollover which have not been fully accounted for in the rollover index. These include wheel deflections, vehicle loading, and terrain irregularities. These parametric inputs will increase the accuracy and applicability of the ‘index’ …
Figure 69 Excerpt from the Test Activity Report (1979, pp. 7–8)
192 The report was commissioned to Varigas Research, Inc. and monitored by the TECOM; the Army did not have the required research and computing capability for this kind of task at the time. 193 Recall that the MUTT (Military Utility Tactical Vehicle) is the Vietnam War era utility vehicle of the U.S. military preceding the Humvee. 194 Among the vehicles considered for this testing were five vehicle series categorised by load capacity and characterised by “a high rollover involvement” (1979, p. 6). 195 Back in the 1960s, Ford offered services for NASA through Philco, its subsidiary for electronics and computers (2019). Accordingly, the Galaxie series got its name in the spirit of the space exploration age. The report refers to the “1963 Ford Galaxy” but the right name is Galaxie. The Ford Galaxy is a minivan series produced since 1995.
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To describe and assess a rollover event, engineers reduce the factors affecting a
vehicle’s mobility to parameters and represent them in a computational model. The report
excerpt above (Figure 69) describes parameters of velocity, angles, deflection, loading, and
terrain based on data from tests recording the interaction (called “rollover threshold”) of a
technical object (the M151) and a terrain of flat surfaces. Modelling and simulation convert
the antagonism between vehicle and terrain into such parameters, conveying the primacy
of the technical over economic and ergonomic considerations. Absent here are descriptions
of other actors, mainly humans, costs, and non-flat surfaces. The report does not discuss
humans, be they drivers handling the vehicle or occupants/passengers riding in it, although
it briefly refers to driving skills. It is not concerned with costs, but with the physical
stability of military vehicles on the move. Also, it does not refer to any non-flat surfaces or
rural terrain except for a brief mention of “terrain irregularities” (1979, p. 7), which is
strange given that this was a time when U.S. military operations spanned the Indochinese
Peninsula, including Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia and included various sorts of
irregular and jungle warfare. Situating rollover in a relation among humans, technology,
and specific cities, towns, jungles, or landscapes in the Indochinese Peninsula was not
reflected in this landmark report. The excerpt, like the report, is focused on technical
resolutions to rollover. However, and as the military plugged into the world of commercial
vehicle rollover on highways and urban roads, rollover parameters for flat surfaces were
already developed and in use. The existing parameters informed and dictated how the
military went about integrating innovations in vehicular stability, which did not necessarily
correspond with its operational needs on irregular terrain at the time.
The translation made through testing and simulation prioritised those available
parameters of a breakdown. For the technical object, the parameters are “forward velocity
and steer angle” (1979, p. 7), the two main factors contributing to rolling the vehicle until
its body “makes contact with the ground” (Gillespie, 1992, p. 309). For the environment,
the parameters are smooth flat roads, also referred to in the report as “paved, level
surfaces,” “paved road network,” “paved road,” or “paved surfaces” (1979, p. 24). They
are flat/level meaning horizontal: no slope or grade. They are smooth/paved, meaning
covered with compacted asphalt concrete: no soft ground, surface irregularities, or
topographic features. The military scripted its vehicles for stability against an absolute
reduction for an ideal type of terrain of flat surfaces, leaving it to their drivers to navigate
the endless variations in the field.
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However, the report continues to explain how the same human factor tasked with
navigating the variations of terrain contributes to the breakdown of vehicular movement. In
particular, the Jeep drivers contributed to a most common and dangerous manoeuvre with
the propensity for rollover: The J-Turn manoeuvre. A driver’s knee-jerk reaction could
trigger this severe J-shaped manoeuvre, upon sudden steering and braking at high speed on
a flat surface (1979, p. 70). The high kinetic energy transforms into a force that topples the
vehicle from its stable position and into a rollover (see Figure 71). In 1979, these were the
limitations to stability – along with safety and survivability – not only in improvements
against breakdowns but also in testing breakdowns to gather more accurate and diverse
parameters that facilitate a more accurate and effective reduction of the landscape. We
shall keep this in mind as we analyse how the MRAPs rollover in Afghanistan over a
quarter century later.
This integration [of the Electronic Stability Control] makes MRAPs the first U.S. Army vehicle platform to incorporate this important safety technology intended to reduce the number of MRAP rollovers.
Figure 70 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Parsons, 2015)
Forward to 2015, almost thirty-six years after TECOM’s 1979 report and fourteen
years since the start of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, measuring and mitigating
rollover resurfaces in a new invention. The 1979 military study borrowed from inventions
used in “various off-road industries such as agriculture, mining, construction and rail” and
“highway vehicle research [including] trucks, tractor trailers, and buses” (1979, pp. 22–
23). Today, the military continues to plug into advanced innovations (Figure 70) in
Electronic Stability Control (ESC) systems of the automotive industry (Pakulski et al.,
2013, p. 10; Parsons, 2015). We trace the new technics of stability to the Army’s Red
River Army Depot in Texas, which is “the Army’s Center of Industrial and Technical
Excellence for Tactical Wheeled Vehicles” including the MRAPs (RRAD, 2020). A 2015
Army article reports from the depot on equipping 2,633 MaxxPro Dash MRAP models –
produced by Navistar Defense – with the ESC system and planning to do the same for the
rest of the MRAPs to “help maximize warfighter safety and survivability” (Parsons, 2015).
The article describes the ESC system as part of “driver assist technologies” that
complement a driver’s “intent” and “spatial feel” when negotiating a potential rollover
event (Parsons, 2015). In automotive language, the ESC is one of many Advanced Driver
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Assistance Systems working to automate many of the driver’s tasks to reduce human error
through information exchange between vehicle and environment, or vehicle and vehicle.
The ESC system automatically operates electronic mechanisms to assist drivers in
mitigating risky driving conditions, including situations of losing control over the vehicle.
The mechanisms include sensors, which collect data while driving, and an anti-lock
braking system, which slows down the vehicle (restricts its engine power) and redirects its
travel direction (redistributes braking on all wheels) (National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, 2007, p. 1; Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems, 2008, p. 5; Parsons,
2015). In other words, the electronic system collects information from MRAPs to
anticipate drivers’ knee-jerk reactions during the event of restraining unstable vehicles
going into a possible rollover. It achieves such mitigation by redistributing the competent
functioning of the brakes and the engine over the wheels, which are the primary friction
interface with the ground/surface. It mainly works on flat surfaces, hence why it is limited
to tackling rollovers on paved roads and highways but not on non-flat, irregular, soft
terrain. Here, we see how terrain continues to be defined by the same reductions of ground
surfaces, but the complexity of mediation increases with the additional parameters and
measurements that collect and process the terrain with higher accuracy. Mediation
redistributes the synergies of navigating terrain and anticipating rollovers over more
nonhumans including advanced sensing, computation, and braking mechanisms.
In the same reporting from the Depot, we observe how the story of technics
overlaps another of territory. The MaxxPro’s chief engineer at Navistar Defense recounts
another relevant and revealing dimension to the ESC story. The MaxxPro Dash MRAPs
borrowed the system from Navistar’s commercial vehicles, mainly the IC Buses (for
school and commercial use) and International Trucks (for construction, hauling,
emergency, tankers, and utility). We trace the electronic system to Bendix Commercial
Vehicle Systems196, a technology leader in braking systems who designed and produced
the ESC system for Navistar since 2007. This date marked the year when the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulated the ESC system as a standard for all
federal motor vehicles (military and civilian) operating within U.S. territory – proposed for
heavy vehicles since 2012. The ESC now translates a “metascript” (Taylor, 2013) of the
State (see metascript in section 5, Chapter 5) and finds its way into the MRAPs,
196 A member of the Knorr-Bremse Group, specialised in braking technologies
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irrespective whether the military is operating at home or overseas (see CONUS in section
5, Chapter 5). As a technical organisation, the military recruits the ESC system to upgrade
the stability of its vehicles; as an institution of the State, the military subscribes to the
federal regulations of safe driving that hold the U.S. society together, to rephrase Akrich
(1992) and Latour (2005). We see how the MRAP is once again coordinated as a
survivability-mobility script (technical mediation) and a federal vehicle (realising
territoriality).
6.2.1. Conclusion
The difficulty of managing the rural terrain of Afghanistan lies in the type of
antagonism to the stability of the vehicle on an irregular terrain. Iraq’s infrastructure
provided the soldiers with an almost homogeneous “[Euclidean] visual space” (after
Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 371) of the antagonistic elements, once they became known
(power lines, overhead structures, gates, narrow streets). In contrast, Afghanistan’s
irregular, soft ground was impossible to measure, a terrain with “an antagonism without
possible mediation” (Simondon, 2017, p. 168). The increased complexity of the rural
terrain pushed the military institution to plug into state-of-the-art innovation in engineering
from university institutes/labs and commercial industries of passenger and heavy
commercial vehicles. But even with advanced electronic sensing, it remained a “space of
contact” (after Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 371) that relied on human (driver) tactility
and reaction to aid the technical object.
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Figure 71 Technical representation of rollover on flat, paved roads as a function of a vehicle’s speed and its body angle relative to the horizontal ground (Varigas Research, Inc., 1979, p. 76)
Figure 72 A typical vehicle rollover on flat, paved surface; original photo in Baghdad captioned “A Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle rests on its turret and hood after a rollover…” (Burke, 2009)
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6.3 Environmental Translations
We analysed how the military framed Afghanistan as rural landscape, but we have
yet to see how the military knows the rural terrain through the technical object and its
encounters with Afghanistan’s physical environment. Let us go back to the MRAP user
handbook (introduced in Chapter 5) and analyse how reducing landscape to terrain works
in this situation. The handbook informs the vehicles’ users/occupants about the spatial
dimension – among others – of employing the vehicles, giving techniques and procedures
on how to articulate the vehicles’ movement and mitigate potential obstacles. One thing to
note here is that there is no mention by name of Iraq and Afghanistan in the handbook,
although it is produced based on feedback loops from the operational experience – mostly
failures and breakdowns – of the MRAPs in those particular geographies. Such omission of
names is another form of reduction in line with a relentless military endeavour to
standardise and generalise best practices and lessons learned out of situated events and
case studies197. Let us analyse other reductions that allow the military to know the
characteristics of a rural landscape.
Soft soil poses a risk to MRAP vehicles. It is likely that the four-wheeled MRAP vehicle poses a greater risk of sinking or bogging down in soft soil. Avoid moving too close to the edges of roads that may collapse and cause the vehicle to tip over … Operating on single-lane and/or steeply crowned rural roads, roads with no shoulders, roads with soft shoulders and/or washouts around culverts and especially any road bordering water (canal/irrigation ditch/pond) requires extreme caution. The majority of MRAP vehicles rollovers are due to the road/shoulder/bridge approach giving way under the MRAP vehicle’s weight and high center of gravity … The MRAP will ascend longitudinal slopes of up to 60 percent; however, extreme caution must be exercised on slopes greater than 50 percent. The MRAP vehicle is capable of operating on side slopes of up to 30 percent (use extreme caution on side slopes greater than 25 percent) … Cross-country speeds are significantly reduced due to the high center of gravity. Tall vehicles pose a greater risk of tip or rollover when negotiating slopes, trenches, ditches, and other obstacles.
Figure 73 Excerpt on “Capabilities and Limitations” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, pp. 25–26)
We analyse a first excerpt drawn from the handbook’s “Capabilities and
Limitations” chapter, which describes the spatial challenges of manoeuvring MRAPs
197 Recall the U.S. Marines’ intelligence report “Urban Warfare Study: City Case Studies Compilation” (1999) that was at the forefront of redefining ‘urban warfare’ after the Cold War.
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(2008, p. 25). In the excerpt (Figure 73), we identify an architectural mode of thinking
about the spatiality of the MRAP’s mobility, which reads the landscape as relations along
consecutive crosscuts in the road/path. The excerpt collects roads, soils, slopes, and water
bodies as a loose set of natural and human-made elements whose specific features –
separately or combined – limit or hinder the mobility of the MRAPs. But to compare this
with Traffic Engineering’s road design manuals or Urban Design’s street design guides, we
regroup the handbook’s textual descriptions as visual representations of typical road
sections and surface materials. We draw (see Figure 75) typical sections of narrow widths
(single lane), hazardous geometry (steeply crowned, side slope, longitudinal slope),
precarious edges (no/soft shoulders, trenches), and risky context (bordering water), which
cause vehicles to tip or rollover. Similarly, we create a list (see Figure 75) of materials of
unstable surfaces (soft soil) and submersible mediums (water bodies: canal, ditch, pond),
which cause the vehicles to bog down or sink.
The typical sections and list of materials are useful tools to help us visualise the
antagonisms of MRAP mobility relationally to the technical object’s characteristics of
speed, weight, height, and high centre of gravity. Just like with the Jeep driver in 1979 (see
6.2), articulating these antagonisms is tasked to the human cognitive capacities of the
MRAP drivers: their situational awareness198 (see section 4, Chapter 4). The handbook’s
instructions reinforce what drivers learn during training, through warnings (avoid moving,
use extreme caution) and measurements (slope percentages). Thus, we see how the
survivability-mobility hybrid script expands to include driver training/driving capacities
along with the technical object itself.
In the same handbook, we complement our analysis of mobility drawing on
another excerpt from the “Employment Considerations” chapter, which sets guidance on
how best to use the MRAP on restricted terrain (2008, p. 31). The description (Figure 74)
expands the network by adding actors and employing new discursive strategies, while it
continues to describe a terrain of roads along edges and near water bodies. We can list rain,
locks, doors, and bridges among the new actors. Heavy rains undermine the little structural
integrity unpaved roads possess and multiplies the risk of rollover on weak road edges.
Locked doors risk trapping soldiers inside an overturned vehicle, increasing the risk of
drowning upon rollover into water bodies. Unrated bridges risk collapsing under the
198 Which is the capability to remain aware of the surroundings, to assess risks, and to react in real-time to avoid/reduce harm/injury.
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vehicles’ heavy weight, possibly leading to overturning/drowning in water bodies. Thus,
terrain is not fixed factors but ones whose intensity increases – and with it the intensity of
terrain – with changing climatic conditions (heavy rains), combining the technical and the
geographic (locked in water), and lack of information (unrated infrastructure).
Heavy rains in theater may cause unpaved roads to loosen and give way under the weight of the MRAP vehicle, especially if there is a steep embankment or canal running alongside the road … Unlock combat doors when around bodies of water if the tactical situation permits … Use caution on rural roads. When a vehicle goes off a rural road, the vehicle can overturn when it strikes a ditch or embankment or is tripped by soft soil … Road shoulders in the Middle East do not meet U.S. standards and may collapse under the weight of the MRAP vehicle, especially when the road is above grade and can fall to lower ground (ditches and canals) … Use caution when crossing bridges that are unrated (get prior guidance from combat engineers).
Figure 74 Excerpt on “Vehicle Safety” from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, pp. 39–41)
Furthermore, the excerpt mobilises the military’s metanarrative of development to
oblige the actors, as Callon puts it, “to remain faithful to their alliances” (1986a, p. 204).
The military’s metanarrative reduces the entire Middle East region to a single
underdeveloped landscape type by reminding the MRAP drivers that the region has no/low
technical standards for roads and load ratings for bridges. Earlier in the same chapter, a
section on “rough terrain driving” complements this reduction through instructing drivers
not only to acquire training (“good off-road driving Techniques”) but to practice judgment
(“well trained in judging terrain”) and discipline (“must be extremely careful and
mindful”) (2008, p. 35). The survivability-mobility hybrid script expands to account for
new terrain actors and to expand the drivers’ capabilities to include decision making skills.
6.3.1. Conclusion
In the third section, we analysed how the MRAP user handbook realised the
military’s effort to homogenise and systematise the antagonisms of irregular terrain. First,
it homogenised them by collecting and cataloguing reductions of the landscape as typical
elements antagonistic to the MRAP (soft shoulders, water bodies). Its logic separated
antagonisms along two general strands: underdeveloped (rural infrastructure) and unknown
(unrated infrastructure). Second, it systematised the antagonisms as instructions and
warnings talking to the MRAP drivers’ hard skills (driving, situational awareness) and soft
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skills (cognition, judgment). As discussed in the previous section (see 6.2), the
survivability-mobility hybrid script continues to rely on drivers and driving instructions to
complement the work of the MRAP.
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Figure 75 Sketch of possible road sections and surface types, as in urban design guides, that translates the military’s reduction of the rural landscape to a set of obstacles for the MRAP vehicles; both rows show cross-sections (by author)
Figure 76 Instructions to keep an organised and stowed layout of an MRAP’s interior, to protect soldiers from random flying objects in the event of an accident; from the MRAP Handbook (Center for Army Lessons Learned, 2008, p. 67)
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6.4 Recruiting Humans
The first half of this chapter focused on the reduction of Afghanistan to rural
terrain and the consequent technical improvements that fold this terrain into the MRAP
vehicles. It showed how the MRAP’s survivability-mobility hybrid script in Afghanistan,
as in Iraq, continued to be assembled as a highly political and opulent project of occupant-
centric engineering to safeguard the lives and bodies of U.S. soldiers – not locals/civilians
– riding with the vehicle’s armoured enclosure. However, an unexpected type of
breakdown specific to the terrain of Afghanistan changed the narrative and the practice.
The MRAP went rogue, and its occupants lost control over it when the capsular enclosure
functioned as a lethal rather than a survivable interior. The vehicle’s armoured architecture
separating the occupants from the physical harms of humans and nonhumans outside (as
seen in the patents analysis in Chapter 4) became the antagonism, the terrain.
In the second half of the chapter, we explore the limits of concretisation of the
MRAP as an enclosure-vehicle hybrid and focus on the body-vehicle synergy instead. This
is when the militarised bodies of the occupants change from passive objects of the
enclosure to active subjects in the process of terraining. Fast forward from the early
consideration of rollover in 1979 to a 2008 rollover incident in the Kandahar Province,
Afghanistan. Through a slow quasi-ethnographic description, we analyse a breakdown
account where the human body becomes more visible than before. Two soldiers rolled over
in their MRAP into a water canal. Water bodies entered the scene as a new actor disrupting
survivability. Drowning in water – on land – became the new antagonism to the bodies of
the occupants. We let the detailed description of the event guide us to understand the
intricacies of this breakdown, and our analysis eventually leads us to new improvements
that expand the network of mediation to the humans.
For us readers, the story starts on the pages of the metropolitan daily The San
Diego Union-Tribune (Liewer, 2009) and the inter/national daily Los Angeles Times
(Goffard, 2008). We read two versions of an obituary of Sergeant James Treber and his
heroic act of saving his teammate. Treber was born in Hawaii and graduated in the city of
Imperial Beach near San Diego, California, where he participated in the Reserve Officers’
Training Corps. In June 2008, Treber and fellow soldiers drowned in their RG-31 MRAP
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near Khosrow Sofla199 in the Kandahar Province, Afghanistan; his military body was
buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia; his military unit was based in Eglin Air
Force Base, Florida; and his obituary reported a tribute ceremony at his command’s base
where he received his training in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. So many biographies200 to
recollect; so many bodies to inhabit; so many geographies to dwell. The honouring
obituaries connect and celebrate social relations of military training, service, patriotism,
and heroism across geographies through the fallen soldier’s body. Treber’s drowning made
particularly visible a multiplicity of relations between his body and his MRAP, and it
localised the war from the far mountains201 and deserts of Afghanistan back to the Pacific
and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. Through localising the breakdown amidst a network of
actors, what Latour refers to as “localizing the global” (2005), we collect the distributed
sites of action where the military forges relations among Treber’s body, the MRAP, and
the environment.
We follow Treber’s tribe of Special Forces to identify some of these distributed
sites. According to the Army’s Special Operations Command website, entry-level202
members of the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group – like Treber – train in unconventional
warfare among other things (USASOC, 2020). This is part of the doctrine of Irregular
Warfare203, where the unconventional character refers to a set of military tactics and
techniques that enable and support “a resistance movement or insurgency in a denied area”
(Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2014, p. xi). The denied character refers to restricted or inaccessible
areas to the operations of the military’s local204 “friendly forces” (Joint Chiefs of Staff,
2014, p. GL.7), hence why special operations entail “greater requirements for regional
orientation and cultural expertise, and a higher degree of risk” among other things (Joint
Chiefs of Staff, 2014, p. I.1). Treber and his MRAP operating in Afghanistan’s rural terrain
were informed by such meanings of unconventionality and denial.
199 This same hamlet was among three others, including Tarok Kolache and Lower Babur, that the U.S. military violence literally “flattened” in October 2011 claiming to destroy IED factories (Ackerman, 2011b). 200 See Igor Kopytoff’s “cultural biography of things” (1990) 201 For a better context of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan’s mountains, see Judith Matloff’s fascinating account of “The Green Mountains and the Hindi Kush” (2018, pp. 169–187) and how the air that is depleted of oxygen becomes the soldiers’ enemy. 202 On his first service tour in Afghanistan, Treber was in a 1st Battalion, i.e., entry-level in special forces. 203 Also, includes Counter Terrorism, Counterinsurgency, Foreign Internal Defense, and Stability Operations 204 In the Joint Publication Special Operations (2014), as well as many others, the military employs the term “indigenous” to refer to the locals
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Treber and his fellow entry-level members of the special forces conducted their
training in “urban and rural locations throughout central North Carolina” (USASOC, 2020)
before his deployment to Afghanistan. He never actually trained in the rural terrain of
Afghanistan, only in its replicated/simulated/reconstructed version in rural North Carolina.
The military deemed such training on U.S. terrain satisfactory, but obviously it was not. In
Kandahar: the terrain took control, the MRAP rolled over, and Treber drowned. Rural
North Carolina was not rural Afghanistan after all. The mediation failed, both the training
of the special forces and the engineering of the MRAP.
Treber’s account epitomises the rollover event in the uncharted rural terrain of
Afghanistan. Although not all rollovers led to death or drowning (similar to electrocution
in Chapter 5), the account is central to the story of survivability breaking down and the
military’s worst nightmare coming true: dying in a non-combat related event. Let us
continue analysing Treber’s account in two excerpts, one from the same obituary in The
San Diego Union-Tribune and another from an earlier reporting in the U.S. Special
Operations Command magazine Tip of the Spear.
Treber was one of three soldiers who died June 29, 2008, after a road gave way underneath their [MRAP] and sent it toppling into a canal in Kandahar province. One soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Joe Serna, survived 40 minutes in the chilly water by breathing in an air pocket … Serna…said he was trapped upside down in the MRAP’s rear seat behind some ammunition cans, unable to free himself as water crept up to his face. He hollered for help. Treber, one seat in front of him, climbed over and popped loose his seat belt. ‘He picked me up and moved me to an air pocket,’ Serna said. Treber realized it wasn’t big enough to save them both, so he swam away to find another. [They] tried unsuccessfully to open the vehicle’s doors and hatches. The last thing he heard Treber say was, ‘Joe, my legs are going numb.’ Serna didn’t know until after he was rescued that Treber and the other soldiers, Master Sgt. Shawn Simmons and Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Rada Morales, had died.
Figure 77 Excerpt from the Union-Tribune newspaper (Liewer, 2009)
Master Sgt. Shawn Simmons, Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Rada Morales and Sgt. James Treber, all from Company A, 1st Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), drowned June 29 when, under the cover of darkness, their heavily armored vehicle, an RG-31, dropped off a narrow, unimproved dirt road and rolled upside down into a water-filled canal … Following recovery efforts performed by the rest of the combat convoy, Serna was found alive but suffering from hypothermia and hypoxia.
Figure 78 Excerpt from Tip of the Spear magazine (USASFC Public Affairs, 2008, p. 22)
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Both excerpts recount the breakdown event, although the SOCOM magazine’s
narrative talks to the U.S. military community (Figure 78) and the that of the San Diego
metropolitan daily speaks to the general U.S. public (Figure 77). The excerpts describe two
aspects of the rollover-drowning situation: how a specific terrain – or geographic milieu –
contributed to the rollover of an MRAP, and how the breakdown affected four human
bodies inside the vehicle. Both narratives portray a crude and rudimentary landscape in the
Kandahar Province similar to the MRAP handbook: “a narrow, unimproved dirt road” and
“a water-filled canal.” The Los Angeles Times obituary even refers to the rollover on a
“primitive road” (Goffard, 2008). The MRAP rolls over into a water body, disorienting205
the interior (“upside down”) and compromising its integrity as water seeps in and fills the
breathing medium. The bodies of Treber and his fellow soldiers now struggle for air inside
a trapping enclosure, where the inside-outside separation works contrary to the script. The
occupants need to get out from the enclosed and sealed inside. That drowning MRAP in
Khosrow Sofla switched allegiance206 as a generative site of politics for terraining the
warzone. It became part of the terrain’s antagonisms, which the military set out to control
in the first place.
The outside terrain extended inside the capsular enclosure. In the excerpts above,
the realisation of the deadly outside-inside relation is revealed through an entanglement
between the actions of Sergeant James Treber and Sergeant First Class Joe Serna. Treber
died while saving Serna. The obituaries and tributes celebrated the event as an act of
patriotic and humanistic heroism, but there has not been an official publication
investigating the accident like that concerning electrocution in Iraq (see section 5.2 in
Chapter 5). However, a few rogue actors and their actions emerge, which we encounter
again later in improvements to the training and the technical object. Unlike the highly
organised and disciplined layout of the utilitarian interior we read207 about in the MRAP
user handbook (see Figure 76), the rolled over, drowning interior became a chaotic space, a
water-filled interior trapping all four soldiers. The door and hatch locks were stuck on the
inside, blocking access out of the vehicle. Serna’s seatbelt harness was stuck, confining
him in an awkward, upside-down position until Treber freed him to move. Water seeped
205 It is interesting to see how the etymology of ‘disorient’ comes from the French désorienter or ‘to turn from the east,’ a fit description for a Western colonial power getting resisted in the East by forcing it to turn from the east. 206 In Some accounts, soldiers even dub such failures the “Kevlar coffin” for the U.S. Stryker (Robson, 2011) and the “coffin of wheels” for the British Vector (Johnson, 2009). 207 Recall here the highly technical descriptions of seats, seatbelts, and stowing restraints discussed in Chapter 4.
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from the canal into the interior, replacing air and forcing Treber to move Serna to “an air
pocket” where he can breathe. By the time help arrived, the vulnerable soldiers’ bodies lost
oxygen and heat until they gave up. The dirt road and water canal of Afghanistan’s rural
terrain, together with the disoriented interior, displaced air, stuck seatbelt harnesses and
door/hatch locks, brought fatal consequences to the trapped occupants. We begin to
witness the “dephasing” (Simondon cited in Combes, 2012) of survivability and a
differentiation between the soldiers’ bodies and the technical object emerges more clearly
in the breakdown.
The gone-rogue technical object was an RG-31 model MRAP, a model that the
military trusted with enhanced off-road capabilities. According to historian Norman
Friedman208, “the first MRAP vehicles were deployed from Iraq to Afghanistan in October
2007” in response to the growing IED threat; however, the irregular landscape and lack of
paved roads in Afghanistan entailed that all RG31 MRAPs be assigned to operations there
since 2008 as this model was “the lightest and most maneuverable of the early MRAP
vehicles” (2013, pp. 88, 231, 232). By that time, the terrain in Afghanistan already proved
difficult for many U.S. military vehicles, most prominently the Strykers209. Add to this the
proliferation of IEDs in urban areas and along rural and mountainous roads. Despite its
enhanced mobility, Sergeants Simmons, Rada Morales, Treber, and Serna’s RG-31 MRAP
failed to protect them in the Kandahar Province, leading to fatal consequences in the same
year of its deployment. Eventually, a third-generation model engineered specifically for the
“largely off-road environment of Afghanistan” (Friedman, 2013, p. 2) replaced all first-
and second-generation MRAPs operating there. The name of the new technical object
promised folding more antagonisms: M-ATV or the MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle (see patent
analysis in section 4.5 of Chapter 4).
6.4.1. Conclusion
We conclude this section with some help drawing on philosopher Muriel Combes’
introduction to the work of Gilbert Simondon (2012, p. 4). Particularly, we explain how the
208 The principal investigator for the official MRAP account This Truck Saved My Life 209 As one journalist describing the situation in Afghanistan put it, “the Stryker Brigade [went] Stryker-less” to Afghanistan (Ackerman, 2011a). The reasons, he continues to describe, are two: the “flat bottom of a Stryker absorbs the brunt of a bomb impact, rather than deflecting it;” and, “the Afghan terrain [of mountains and valleys] can’t handle a heavy wheeled vehicle that’s about the size of a school bus” unlike Iraq’s “paved roads, less rugged terrain (on the whole)” (Ackerman, 2011a).
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narrative of military survivability changes through a process of “individuation,” or
being/becoming the thing/individual that the military knows. We should understand the
individuation of survivability in terms of a “resolution of tension between potentials
belonging to previously separated orders of magnitude.” The survivability that the military
knows before rollover facilitates a communication between a bodily order (head, neck,
spinal cord, limbs, severe burns) and a molecular order (expanding gases and pressure,
density and phase change, severe acceleration). The resultant is the MRAP script mediating
the two orders and a milieu that is the MRAP capsule as a highly protected and separated
enclosure. But survivability is not one thing, so its pre-rollover phase is one among many.
When the MRAP submerges, the milieu changes as soon as water replaces air and another
order of magnitude (air as “medium of life”210) connects to the bodily order. A new phase
of survivability comes into being where the human body (of the occupants) becomes part
of the technical ensemble. Next, we analyse the new phase of survivability as associations
among bodies and vehicles that usher technology transfers from the military’s air and
aquatic domains to the land domain.
6.5 Testing Atmospheric Limits
In the era of the MRAPs, controlling and surviving rollover-breakdown events
came a long way from the 1979 initial study. Technical improvements in military and
commercial vehicular mobility grew more complex and expanded to include further
environmental considerations, terrain elements, and vehicle types to serve a growing U.S.
economy of warfare. Accordingly, we continue to analyse the complexity of rollovers in
further military publications, shifting our focus and analysis from an engineering lens (in
the handbook, briefing, and technical studies) to a medical lens of survivability. We follow
the military as it employs its medical expertise on traumas and injuries to expand the
network of survivability from the bounds of the vehicles’ technical systems to include an
improved performance of the human body. To address life and death concerns like those in
the excerpt below (Figure 79), the military expands its repertoire of rural terrain to include
rollover-drowning breakdowns, like the Treber-Serna story.
210 We borrow the term from cultural theorist Eva Horn (2018)
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Imagine being in a combat environment taking enemy fire when, suddenly, your vehicle flips over violently from the force of an improvised explosive device (IED), caved road or impact from another vehicle. Your vehicle is now upside down and water is rapidly filling the inside of the cab. How do you survive? Could you effectively respond to a similar situation and live to talk about it? Could you unfasten your seat belt, recover from being hit by radios, ammunition cans and other equipment flying around in the vehicle, while remaining calm so you can reorient yourself and egress from the vehicle?
Figure 79 Excerpt from the Army AL&T magazine (Myers, 2007, p. 52)
Let us consider an example to illustrate how the military trains human bodies,
adding them to the elements that mediate terrain. We start on the pages of a medical study
entitled Prevention of Injury in Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) Vehicle
Accidents (Pakulski et al., 2013). This is the only document discussing survivability
through the lens of the soldiers’ bodies, available online from the U.S. Army Aeromedical
Research Laboratory211 website. A group of medical and safety experts monitored the
performance of MRAPs against IEDs, due to their “high public profile and cost” (2013, p.
1) and as rollover became the “deadliest and costliest” Army MRAP accident type (2013,
p. 10). Unlike documents that read survivability through the technical design of the MRAP,
these experts took a trauma pathology approach to understand the accidents (Figure 80).
The technical object and its components, the soldiers’ insufficient training, and the
mobility terrain became causes of the accidents. The experts analysed the causes, types,
and chronological sequences of these accidents in relation to the severity of injuries and
traumas that the soldiers’ bodies sustained.
Although it does not name specific accident locations or soldiers, we examine the
study’s trauma pathological methodology through the Treber-Serna story analysed earlier.
The study listed the same rogue actors of a rural landscape (dirt roads, weak edges, water
bodies) and a technical object (displaced air, stuck seatbelt harnesses and door/hatch locks)
as the “top five MRAP accident injury causes and outcomes (road hazard, rollover, vehicle
issues, personnel, and driver response)” (2013, p. 11 original italics). It concluded with
recommendations for improving the soldier body’s response through a different type of
training (for drivers212 and occupants) and additional technical devices, like the ESC (see
211 Located in Fort Rucker, Alabama, and part of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command 212 The study references Training Circular No. 7-31 (U.S. Army, 2011b) for MRAP driver training, which has restricted access and could not be downloaded at the time of completing the thesis.
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6.2) and the HEED (see 6.6). We observe a first instance of how the technical ensemble of
survivability expands beyond the vehicle to include the human body. The medical lens
details the new survivability as associations between antagonistic parts of the MRAP
vehicle and its occupants’ bodies.
130 Army MRAP accidents were identified in the USACR / SC data set, which involved 220 Soldiers and Army civilians, 95 of whom were injured, and nine of whom died (2013, p. 4) … Approximately $900,000 of the $1.84 million in rollover injury costs (49 percent), were due to drowning fatalities resulting from rollovers into bodies of water (2013, p. 8) … rollovers were the deadliest and costliest accident type, accounting for all nine fatalities and $3.7 million (56 percent) of $6.6 million in total accident costs. Yet, rollovers made up only 37 (28 percent) of the 130 Army MRAP accidents occurring during the study period. Of particular concern are rollovers into bodies of water, trapping occupants inside the submerged vehicle. Drowning fatalities from such rollovers comprised 56 percent of total fatalities and 49 percent of rollover injury costs.
Figure 80 Excerpt from the ARL’s medical study (Pakulski et al., 2013, p. 10)
Besides bodies, vehicles, and accidents becoming numbers in a warfare economy,
the excerpt (Figure 80) introduces a new powerful actor: water bodies, or “bodies of water”
as in the report. The new actor causes drowning and holds the power of life/death over the
soldiers. The MRAPs are land vehicles. They were not engineered as watertight enclosures
to fully submerge under water, and thus to prevent the drowning of their occupants. The
land is their spatial domain and operational terrain. But not all land; not where there is
tension between land and water. In Afghanistan, such tension materialised in a rural terrain
of soft, weak edges (shoulders, washouts) on narrow dirt roads, which forced the heavy,
high-centred metallic objects to rollover and topple from one medium to another. An
aquatic medium replaced the atmospheric one, generating a new milieu that did not
complement the survivability script of the existing technical object.
Let us examine the existing relations between military land vehicles and aquatic
mediums. Like other land vehicles, engineers test the MRAPs for traversing various land
covers, topography, and human-made obstacles under different environmental conditions,
including some forms of withstanding immersion in water. The main reference source for
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all military vehicles is the Department of Defense’s Test Method Standard213 (MIL-STD-
810) entitled Environmental Engineering Considerations and Laboratory Tests (2000).
Under the Laboratory Test Methods sections, four methods are listed that test for the
impact of water on military materiel214 corresponding to four actors: rain (Method 506.4),
humidity (Method 507.4), salt fog (Method 509.4), and immersion (Method 512.4). Rain,
humidity, and salt fog may pose challenges to the performance, sealing, protective coating,
or physical deterioration of materiel. Only the last test method on immersion addresses
concerns of and limits for “materiel that may be exposed to partial or complete immersion,
with or without operation” (2000, p. 512.4–1). In other words, testing for the MRAPs’
immersion capacity is the closest method to address any potential for drowning in water
bodies. However, this test method is limited in explaining the relation between rollover and
water, as this was not a concern for testing in the first place.
In the technical details, the Immersion Method tests for land vehicles immersing
or submerging in water “to verify watertightness,” or how closely sealed vehicles are
against any water penetrating from the outside. It aims to mitigate or avert effects like
corrosion, short-circuiting, fouling of lubricant, impairment of cargo/weapons, and “failure
of vehicle engines to operate” (2000, p. 512.4–1). It is a test for vehicles whose primary
mobility environment is land, not one for “buoyant items” such as amphibious215 vehicles
designed to operate in water. Application of the test sets limits for the duration and
depth216 of water covering the vehicle, at test facilities called Shallow Water Fording Basin
and Deep Water Fording Facility217. Any vehicle that passes this test is assumed to drive
without interruption within the specified depths and periods of immersing or submerging in
water. Take, for example, how Crystal Group Inc. designed rugged218 computer systems
for the U.S. military, which met219 MIL-STD-810. In an online corporate video, Jim Shaw,
executive vice president of engineering at the group, explains how his company designs
two versions of equipment: one for immersion where they “might see some water
damage;” and, another for fording where they are “mounted in something like a MRAP or
213 This TMS version MIL-STD-810F, dated 1 January 2000, existed during the engineering, testing, manufacturing, and fielding of the MRAP vehicles; it was later superseded by version MIL-STD-810G N1, dated 15 April 2014. 214 Materiel means all equipment, including weapons and vehicles. 215 Such as the LAV, the AAV-7, and the M113 APC. 216 On Average, up to 1-meter over 30-minutes for the Immersion Test and over 1-hour for the Fording Test, specifically for shallow fording depth for tanks and armoured vehicles. 217 See Vehicle Test Facilities at Aberdeen Test Center and Yuma Test Center (2017, pp. 31–32) 218 Built for tough terrain and extreme environments 219 According to their website, these systems are “designed to meet and exceed military standards that test for shock/vibe, extreme temperatures, sand, dust, salt and fog” (Crystal Group Inc., 2019)
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a Stryker that would be flooded occasionally and actually fording through waterways”
(Crystal Group Inc., 2016). While the test method accounts for changes in the milieu (dry
to wet), its focus remains to test for protecting the technical object and by extension the
humans and the mission (the military’s trinity of survivability). It does not test for directly
protecting the humans.
The focus on the technical object and not the humans is not exclusive to the
Immersion Method. For the relation to land entails the impossibility of testing the MRAP
vehicles – or any others – against all possible breakdown scenarios. Hence why, the
military complements the performance of its technical objects by issuing warnings and
instructions (see 6.3) and through providing training (see 6.7). The rollover is a specific
case in point when the terrain antagonises the MRAP. There are no standards or tests for
scenarios where vehicles fall of edges to the ground or into a body of water. Even the Test
Method Standard document (MIL-STD-810) does not mention culverts, ditches, canals,
shoulders, crowns, bridges, or mud – elements of an irregular/rural terrain – in the
laboratory test methods. Add to it the Army’s Test Operations Procedure document entitled
Vehicle Test Facilities at Aberdeen Test Center and Yuma Test Center, which lists separate
test facilities for each situation. Resistance to fall and rollover, or a vehicle’s tilt angle
threshold, is measured at the Tilt Table Facilities and the Side Slope courses at the
Aberdeen Test Center (2012, pp. 35, 64) and the Yuma Test Center (2012, pp. 96, 119).
Resistance to getting stuck in mud (Figure 82), or a vehicle’s traction and abrasion
capacity (Figure 81), is measured against clay and silt Mud Courses at the Aberdeen Test
Center (2012, pp. 28, 60) and the Yuma Test Center (2012, p. 100). All these tests reveal
the complexity of the irregular/rural terrain, but they only scrutinise its antagonisms that
can contribute to rollover. Their technical capacities do not extend testing to humans.
6.5.1. Conclusion
The fifth section analysed how a new phase of survivability emerged through a
change in the “associated milieu” (Simondon, 2017). An aquatic medium replaced the
breathable atmospheric medium inside, rendering the MRAP’s capsular enclosure obsolete.
It follows that, the military learned through rollover about the dangerous terrain of
Afghanistan, and the rollover centred the survivability concern around the human
occupants of the MRAP. The new phase of survivability required assembling innovations
across the three terrestrial environmental mediums of military operations: land, air, and
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maritime. The military transferred breathing technologies from its air and aquatic domains
to that of land vehicle, forging new associations between the humans and the nonhumans.
Let us see how the military figures the new phase of survivability and improves the MRAP
in the next section.
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Figure 81 MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle testing at the Laguna Mud Course, Yuma Test Center (YTC), Yuma, U.S.; this facility tests for the military vehicles’ traction in mud (ATC Automotive Directorate, 2012, p. 101)
Figure 82 MRAP-All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) stuck in a muddy rural road in Afghanistan, despite all the testing it went through at the YTC (Image source: U.S. Army)
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6.6 Technology Transfers
The story that started with the military viewing the MRAPs through a medical
lens of the human body now continues as a story of transfer of technology. The emerging
focus on the body-cum-technical-object leads the Army and Marines – the main operators
of the MRAPs – to mobilise expertise and knowledge from a comparable long-studied
breakdown. Inspiration would come from the military domain that assembles atmospheric
and aquatic mediums in its technology. This is the domain of military naval aircraft220, the
one that combines air and maritime powers. For aircrew members have long experienced
disorientation, panic, trauma, injuries, stuck seatbelts, and drowning in situations where
their aircraft collided with ground or water. In aviation, these injuries and outcomes fall
within the scope of a medicine subdiscipline called aerospace medicine221. This
subdiscipline deals with “spatial disorientation and other motion and acceleration-based
phenomenon,” according to Navy Captain and NAMRU-D222 commanding officer Rees
Lee (quoted in Ripple, 2016). Lee was interviewed for an Air Force news article on the
occasion of inaugurating the $19 million Kraken Disorientation Research Device at the
Captain Ashton Graybiel Acceleration Research Facility in Dayton, Ohio. Let us examine
how medicine informed a technology transfer to improve the survivability of the MRAPs.
… as Kaneb remembered one senior officer commenting, ‘Teach them what it is like to be drowning.’ With all due respect to that officer, Kaneb’s objective was not to simulate drowning, but to teach the trainees to orient themselves underwater, though even he later recalled that this was accomplished with ‘water in every sinus’ of those under instruction.
Figure 83 Excerpt from the NAM website (2013)
We trace the beginnings of connecting the atmospheric and aquatic to a history
brief from the website of the U.S. National Naval Aviation Museum (NAM). The present
technical and economic development of the Kraken device is grounded in the research
work of physician Ashton Graybiel and his team on the “physiologic impacts of motion
and acceleration on the human body” (Ripple, 2016). It is a type of research that tests for
the endurance of the human body under the influences of velocity and gravitational forces.
220 Here, we recall the works of Peter Sloterdijk (Sloterdijk, 2009, 2016) and Thomas Hippler (2017) about how the air force attacked the enemy’s environment by contaminating the atmospheric medium. 221 Also referred to as Aviation Medicine 222 The Naval Medical Research Unit – Dayton at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
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The Kraken’s brochure describes it as a capsule with the capacity to rotate trainees bodies
along six223 different axes and under variable velocities (NAMRU-D, 2018). The
astounding Kraken device, named after a mythical sea creature, replaces the still-in-use
Dilbert Dunker device, named after a clumsy comic character224. Formally known as the
Underwater Cockpit Escape Device, the dunker was designed by engineer and naval
officer Ensign Wilfred Kaneb back in 1944 (NAM, 2013). Besides the focus on drowning,
Kaneb’s work pioneered training through recruiting the pilots’ human bodies to experience
the trauma of an antagonistic environment (Figure 83). Unlike the Kraken’s “fully
networked capsule” (NAMRU-D, 2018), the Dunker’s capsule is a basic cockpit replica
that flips into a body of water, sometimes rotating along one axis, while trapping pilots
against seatbelts and equipment. To escape, pilots need to unlock their seatbelts and avoid
potential harm from any flying objects, all while controlling their breath and enduring the
shock of crashing into water. By having “water in every sinus,” trainee pilots develop a
familiarity with the possible traumatic event. Thus, the antagonisms of the milieu get
folded into the human body to improve its performance under sever conditions. The
functioning of the improved militarised body becomes more synergistic with the total
functioning of the technical ensemble. This function of the training to develop a trainee’s
“muscle-memory” (see 6.7) gets transferred from aircraft to MRAPs.
Borrowing and collaboration across domains is a growing practice of modern
militaries. Both Graybiel and Kaneb were Navy Officers stationed at the Naval Air Station
in Pensacola, Florida. However, the Kraken device is currently located within the NMRU-
D at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, a move representing a military
realignment that, as Lee puts it, “[brings] together Air Force and Navy scientists with long
histories of ground-breaking and innovative aeromedical research to work side-by-side”
(Ripple, 2016). With the non-combat breakdown of MRAPs and Humvees in Afghanistan
and Iraq, this cross-domain collaborative practice crossed over to land vehicles as never
before. Take, for example, how the MRAP borrowed the HEED – short for Helicopter
Emergency Egress Device – from helicopters, aircraft, and a long history of technical
improvements to scuba225 diving. An emergency breathing device in service with the U.S.
Navy, Air Force, and Marines since 1987 (Submersible Systems, 2019), the HEED is a
223 Including roll, yaw, and pitch. 224 The Kraken refers to a mythical creature in Scandinavian folklore, mostly depicted as a giant octopus or squid. While the Dilbert Dunker is named after Dilbert Groundloop, a WWII-era clumsy comic character featured in Navy instructional publications. 225 SCUBA is an acronym of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.
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handheld air container to breathe under water, or to avoid chocking from smoke. The
Army’s Aeromedical Research Laboratory’s MRAP medical study recommended using
this handheld, emergency breathing technology to mitigate drowning and reduce soldier
fatalities (Pakulski et al., 2013, p. 10).
We continue to follow the technology transfer in another specialised military
publication from the Army’s Acquisition, Logistics and Technology (AL&T) organisation.
We analyse how the Army’s AL&T acquired the naval aviation technology to employ
alongside the Army’s vehicles. These would be the HEAT and the MET trainers. The new
devices will become the model rollover simulators that take into consideration the new
breakdown’s complexities. They perform an egress simulation, where soldiers train on how
to exit the trapping enclosure of a toppled MRAP. The October-December 2007 issue of
the Army AL&T226 magazine describes how the Army found the solution to survive
vehicle rollovers in “current technology used to train pilots — the dunker trainer” (Myers,
2007, p. 53). This was Kaneb’s device that trained pilots to escape the submerged cockpit
of their drowning aircraft. The Army drew inspiration from the design of both: simulator
and simulation. They built the HEAT – short for Humvee227 Egress Assistance Trainer –
by adapting the “key [survivability] ideas” of the pilots’ trainer to a Humvee assembly.
When the MRAPs replaced the Humvees, the MET – short for MRAP Egress Trainer –
replaced the HEAT. With the new trainers and their training programs, the Army’s land
vehicles acquired a major improvement, one where the bodies of soldiers become fully
prepared for the technological complexity of the MRAP.
In the technical details, the new land vehicle trainers are drum-like devices that
seat trainees inside and turn them upside-down to simulate a rollover event. One article
even compares the devices to “some sort of Army-inspired amusement park ride” (Miller,
2008). The drum-like device mounts an actual or replica capsule (Figure 88) of the
MRAP/Humvee and trainees sit inside to simulate a combat situation. The MET seats up to
ten occupants and has a gunner’s hatch on the roof, while the HEAT seats four. The cab,
then, turns along a horizontal axis for partial, full, or multiple turns to simulate different
scenarios of a rolling vehicle (see Figure 86). Cameras inside the cab relay228 the soldiers’
226 Acquisition, Logistics and Technology 227 The original acronym is for HMMWV, not Humvee; used here in this form for simplicity and consistency 228 For more on media technologies, political violence, and vision, check the works of Orit Halpern on cybernetic perception and computational cognition (2015) and Derek Gregory on scopic regimes (2011a).
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movements and performance to the trainers outside, who in turn observe and control the
simulation and communicate with the trainees. This training (Figure 89) does not use water
to submerge the trainees, but rather it focuses on the disorientation, shock, and possible
hazards inside a vehicle’s capsule during a rollover event (Figure 87). Drowning is
addressed through adding the HEED devices, as discussed earlier.
Since 2005, there have been 34 Humvee Class A rollovers, accidents that have either resulted in property damage totaling $1,000,000 or more, permanent total disability or a fatality, according to Fort Rucker’s Senior HEAT instructor William Peyregne. Prior to 2005, the Humvee was only involved in 30 Class A rollovers in its 18-year existence.
Figure 84 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Miller, 2008)
Before HEAT, Soldiers were not trained how to properly exit a vehicle that had turned over on its side or top because of a rollover incident. During these exit attempts, Soldiers were experiencing various problems including: Disorientation…, Loose equipment…, Unlocking seat belts…, [and] Unlocking doors…
Figure 85 Excerpt from the Army AL&T magazine (Myers, 2007, p. 53 original emphasis)
A statistical rationale explains the effectiveness of the new training at improving
survivability (Figure 84), as documented in an Army news article reporting from the
Goodhand Simulator Complex at Fort Rucker, Alabama. That article counts more Humvee
rollovers between 2005 and 2008 – the time the explosion threat intensified in Iraq and
Afghanistan – than in all its previous service years combined in Panama, the Middle East,
Somalia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. The Humvee’s mediation across all these
geographies reached its expiry date. The first HEAT was developed in 2005; by late
2007229, thirty-one first-generation HEATs were built – with “parts from battle-damaged
HMMWVs” – for use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of soldiers were trained
(Myers, 2007, p. 53). The Army’s TARDEC230 designed and built the HEAT prototype,
and the Red River Army Depot manufactured and produced the device’s systems (Myers,
2007, p. 54). A recent description of HEAT training on the Marines website reported that
Army soldiers’ survivability in a rollover event increased by 250 percent (U.S. Marine
Corps, 2018a), thus reducing the time of their emergency reaction to exit the vehicle and
229 First MRAP fielded in Iraq was in April 2007. 230 Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center; the same organisation that designed the Overhead Wire Mitigation (OWM) kit (see Chapter 5).
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engage if needed (Figure 85). The transfer of technology from Kaneb’s Dilbert Dunker to
the HEAT was now completed, and the Humvee’s cab served a separate purpose from the
Humvee vehicle.
Production of the METs ensued soon after the HEATs, also designed by
TARDEC and produced by the Red River Army Depot in Texas. The depot completed and
fielded the first seven METs in April 2009 (U.S. Army, 2009), two years after the fielding
of the first MRAP in Iraq in April 2007 (Friedman, 2013). One Army article reported how
General David H. Petraeus, commander of the U.S. Central Command, rushed the MET
production (U.S. Army, 2009) upon statistics of “121 non-hostile-related MRAP rollover
incidents … between Nov. 1, 2007 and Mar. 31, 2009” 231 (3rd Expeditionary Sustainment
Command, 2009). There were twenty METs in total fielded in Iraq and Afghanistan by
June 2009 (U.S. Army, 2009), and many others fielded in the U.S. by 2010 (U.S. Marine
Corps, 2018b). The transfer of technology from Kaneb’s Dilbert Dunker and the HEAT to
the MET was now completed.
6.6.1. Conclusion
The consequences of the rollover-drowning breakdown (previously discussed)
made the humans more visible and therefore the need to focus on training and preparing
them for potential accidents. Thus, the MRAP’s survivability progressed through a major
improvement: the technical ensemble expanded to include two new elements. One is a
rollover training device, and another is the human body. The training device transferred
training/simulation technology from naval aviation to the MRAPs and added new
synergies to equip soldiers with better, trained, and improved bodies. In a Simondonian
sense, the MRAP capsule “individuated” yet into another “being” other than the armoured
capsular enclosure or the cab of a vehicle. It became the new individual of the new phase
that survivability associated to a new milieu, that of training soldiers on rollover at a
training site – not to combat.
231 The article states that the cost of each MET is about $500,000 in U.S. Dollars, with each additional cab at about $200,000 in U.S. Dollars. To keep matters in perspective, here is an excerpt from a Congressional Record: “Adding armor to a Humvee cost only $14,000; a Humvee armored at the factory cost $191,000; today, an MRAP costs between $600,000 and $1 million, though some foreign models cost only about $200,000 in 2004” (Senator Biden (DE), 2007, p. S9604).
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Figure 86 MRAP Egress Trainer (MET) prepared for simulation-training at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S.; the device setup is straightforward: an MRAP cab (without the engine, chassis, and wheels) rotating around a horizontal axis (Stagner, 2013; Rogoway, 2017)
Figure 87 Airmen flipped upside-down during an MRAP Egress Training (MET) rollover simulation at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S. (Stagner, 2013)
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Figure 88 Patent art showing the cab part of an MRAP vehicle used in the MRAP egress training simulator (Henriksson, 2014, p. Sheet 12 of 16)
Figure 89 Preparatory training to spatially familiarise soldiers with the team’s seating positions in an MRAP (seated driver, seated soldiers, standing gunner) prior to initiating the MET egress training – device seen in the background (Prince, 2019)
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6.7 Terraining Moves
Our story ends with examining how the MET device simulates terrain. The
MRAP vehicle was the technical object mediating survivability and mobility in the field
during operation, but the MET device became the technical object tasked with simulating
(and mediating) survivability during training. The narrative of survivability changed from
one merely relying on the nonhumans to one of more pronounced alliances between
humans and nonhumans, also human and humans. Or, as one Sergeant 1st Class K.
Hands232 says in a MET training video, “We’re not teaching combat maneuvers or
anything, we’re teaching how to save each other” (Hiler, 2013). In the last section, we
survey how the MET and HEAT trainers operated through specific training procedures,
risk assessments, and geographic distribution.
We examine examples of rollover training documented in various sources,
including online videos and images of rollover simulation and training. These media are
available from the Department of Defense’s multimedia digital archive DVIDS, short for
the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. At the time of search in June 2019,
there was a total of eight documentary videos on MET and HEAT training for U.S.
soldiers, officially produced by active-duty military personnel in locations like Fort Hood
(Texas), Camp McGregor (New Mexico), Joint Base Balad (Iraq), the Redstone Arsenal
(Alabama), and Joint Base Mcguire-Dix-Lakehurst (New Jersey). We analyse the visual
content, transcribe the interviews with the trainee soldiers, and crosscheck with Army
published news articles. Furthermore, we analyse related risk management procedures and
survey the different distribution locations of the MET and HEAT trainers.
As Staff Sgt. Thomas Schwenkler crouched awkwardly on the ceiling of an upside down Humvee last week, he wondered why in the world his door wouldn’t open. “When you are upside down, everything gets turned around and it takes a second to figure it all out,” the B Company, 46th Engineer Battalion engineer said. “I kept pushing the door handle down when I should have been pulling it up.”
Figure 90 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (Miller, 2008)
232 Non-commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) of the Dual Vehicle Egress training site at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey
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Pretty much what happened is that I found myself pinned at the seatbelt area…and my head hit the ceiling of the MRAP, and my feet touch the ceiling of the MRAP, and I kind of found myself making a little pyramid, to where, the seatbelt was though unbuckled wouldn’t release from my [inaudible]. With a lot of angling, I was able to become free, but, it was an awkward position just for a moment.
Figure 91 Transcript from MET egress training video (Simon, 2009)
The first excerpt above (Figure 90) is from an Army article on the HEAT, while
the second (Figure 91) is a transcript from an Army video on the MET. The descriptions in
the two excerpts are representative of similar ones found in the other videos and articles. In
the videos, we observe soldiers sitting in MET devices, buckling up their seat belts, and
spinning until they are “upside-down” (Miller, 2008; Simon, 2009; Siniard, 2011),
sometimes rotating a few times in one go. Similar to pilot training (see 6.6), the simulation
induces the experience of disorientation, panic, confusion, and even bodily injury, within
the bounds of a “controlled environment” (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018b). In post-training
interviews in the videos and similar reporting articles, we hear trainee soldiers embody this
control through a differentiation between the training and “the real deal … outside the
wire”233 (Zimerman, 2009), “an actual rollover” (Simon, 2009), “a real-world situation …
in real life” (Carkeet IV, 2013), or “in case it does happen overseas” (Leigh, 2018).
Although it is real, simulation works through this inside-outside opposition between
replicated/re-enacted and the combat situation (the real), constantly associating the latter
with an outside.
The specificity of the MET and HEAT trainers as independent devices –
“individuals” of survivability – necessitates identifying their own training hazards, other
than those of the MRAP vehicles. Put differently, training for safety and survivability in
the field required its own safety during training as the Army’s Risk Management pamphlet
designates “tough, realistic training” under the remit of military operations (U.S. Army,
2014, p. 1). Receiving rollover-egress training became a requirement for troops, even
generals (Zimerman, 2009; U.S. Marine Corps, 2018a), and a “proactive responsive” type
of training (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018b) that developed the soldiers’ “muscle-memory” to
react quickly and communicate effectively in the event of rollover (Hiler, 2013; U.S.
Marine Corps, 2018b).
233 ‘Outside the wire’ is military speak for outside protected installations (camps, bases).
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We trace such requirements to the Army’s Fort Bragg234 website, which lists two
relevant forms235 in this regard: DD Form 2977 Deliberate Risk Assessment Worksheet and
HEAT MRAP Training Participant Screening Sheet (see U.S. Army, 2018). The forms
embody a similar medical lens to the Army’s Aeromedical Research Laboratory’s study
(see 6.5). The first risk assessment form is a spreadsheet that follows the guidelines of the
Army’s Risk Management pamphlet to identify and assess hazards and to develop and
implement controls (U.S. Army, 2014). The form lists four shared hazards between
training with METs and operating MRAPs, which lead to head/neck, pinch point (finger),
struck-by-loose-object, and weather types of injuries. The remaining three hazards are
specific to the training, which include slipping/tripping, ejection of gunner, and injuries
from moving parts. We trace the same hazards to the standardised Army Risk Matrix (see
Figure 96). The second screening form is a questionnaire to survey trainees for temporary
or permanent medical conditions that could affect their participation in the training. It
covers a range of conditions from illness to medication, immunisation, dental work, bone
fractures, back/neck trouble, pregnancy, alcohol, sleep, eating habits, and prior “traumatic
experience in vehicles…such as a HMMWV.” As required risk assessments before any
training exercises, the MET and HEAT trainers establish themselves as independent
technical objects of survivability and extend the metascripts of occupational safety of the
State (see section 5.5 of Chapter 5).
By the end of June, MET systems will spread to 20 locations, including 13 camps in Iraq and six in Afghanistan, said Bill Huggins, the project manager for [PEO-STRI]236 …
Figure 92 Excerpt from U.S. Army article (3rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, 2009)
234 This is the home base of the airborne and special forces where Sergeant James Treber trained 235 See forms in the Appendix 236 Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation in Southwest Asia, an Army agency responsible for developing and fielding new equipment
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MET has been fielded since 2010 at Camp Pendleton, CA; Camp Lejeune, NC; 29 Palms, CA; Camp Hansen, JPN; Kaneohe Bay, HI; New River, NC; Cherry Point, NC; Beaufort, SC; Yuma, AZ; and Miramar, CA.
Figure 93 Excerpt from U.S. Marine Corps website (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018b)
As of FY 2010, 13 [HEAT] have been fielded [at] Camp Pendleton, [California]; Camp Lejeune, [North Carolina]; 29 Palms, [California]; Camp Hansen, [Japan]; Kaneohe Bay, [Hawaii]; New River, [North Carolina]; Cherry Point, [North Carolina]; Beaufort, [South Carolina]; Yuma, [Arizona]; and Miramar, [California]; with another five are to be fielded in FY 2010 to include fielding are Iwakuni, Japan, and Quantico, [Virginia].
Figure 94 Excerpt from U.S. Marine Corps website (U.S. Marine Corps, 2018a)
The MET and HEAT trainers replicate the effects of terrain from the dangerous
field “outside the wire” to the safety of training. Unlike the MRAP vehicles whose milieu
is bound to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the trainers’ milieu is bound to training on
military installations regardless of their geography. The trainers follow the soldiers: they
are fielded to military installations in the U.S. to train soldiers awaiting overseas
deployment (Figure 93 and Figure 94); or, they are fielded to Iraq and Afghanistan to train
soldiers already deployed there (Figure 92). Their transportability – ease of transportation
(see Figure 95) – facilitated their mobility across sites to deliver survivability training. The
devices were manufactured in the U.S. and distributed to military installations, and the
training was subcontracted to commercial subcontractors like OT Training Solutions and
the Pulau Corporation237. The excerpts above list the distribution of the METs and HEATs
across military installations in the U.S., Iraq, and Afghanistan. They entered Iraq through
Kuwait: first, they arrived in Camp Arifjan through airlift or sealift; this was a forward
logistics base that received materiel from the U.S. Then, they were deployed to Camp
Buehring, “the gateway” to Iraq (3rd Expeditionary Sustainment Command, 2009; U.S.
Army, 2009); this was a staging post for deploying materiel received from Camp Arifjan to
the areas of operation in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the devices arrived at Bagram Airfield
before deployment to the rest of the country. Thus, terraining is not only assigned to
engineers in the workshop and MRAP vehicles in the field, but it is distributed over
237 More can be found on the websites of OT Solutions (2015) and the Pulau Corporation (2017)
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training devices, training sites, training tactics, and safety regulations/procedures across the
military landscape.
6.7.1. Conclusion
The last section analysed how the military folded the terraining of Afghanistan
into its soldiers’ bodies. The MET and HEAT trainers became independent objects of
survivability with their own networks (manufacturing, transportation, operator
subcontractors, trainees), safety measures (risk assessment, screening), and geographic
distribution (U.S., Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Japan). They simulated a shocking but not
harmful rollover and contributed to a macro-scale production of territoriality, across the
military landscape. Besides muscle-memory, the trainers imprint a particular notion of
terrain into the soldiers’ bodies rendering them more adapted to various landscapes.
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Figure 95 The transportable MET training devices delivered by trailers at Camp Buehring, Kuwait (U.S. Army, 2009)
Figure 96 Standardised Army Risk Matrix from the Risk Management Pamphlet (U.S. Army, 2014, p. 8)
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6.8 Conclusion: Pre-injured Bodies and Technics
[ [human body] vehicle ] ] body—vehicle—terrain [
Figure 97 Changing relation from a passive body (closed brackets) within a technical object (closed brackets) to active human and nonhuman associations (open brackets) (by author)
The military continued to construct their knowledge of the landscape as a
relational and emergent context of actions for the mundane use of technologies. When the
MRAP vehicles broke down upon deployment from Iraq to Afghanistan, the military were
up against new antagonisms for survivability and mobility, which called for new
improvements and differentiated a new type of terrain through the technical object. A
precarious mobility surface gave the rural its character against the urban’s hazardous
mobility infrastructure. Iraq’s urban infrastructure provided the soldiers with an almost
homogeneous “[Euclidean] visual space” (after Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 371) of the
antagonistic elements. In contrast, Afghanistan’s rural, irregular, soft ground was
impossible to measure, a terrain with “an antagonism without possible mediation”
(Simondon, 2017, p. 168), at least not those intended for Iraq. Rollover became the
deadliest non-combat breakdown, providing the military with an opportunity to find more
about rural terrain, to gain knowledge and adapt the technology.
The differentiation of terrain (and landscape) as rural (unpaved/off-road) or urban
(paved/flat) becomes deeply grounded in a process of “individuation of oversaturated
systems” (Simondon, 2017, p. 168). This means that tensions between the urban version of
the MRAP vehicle and Afghanistan’s rural terrain oversaturated the military’s desired
survivable mobility, then proceeded to “successive resolutions of tensions” (Simondon,
2017, p. 168) through the potentials of survivability itself. These potentials are a “power of
coming-into-being without degradation,” a reality and “not the simple virtuality of future
states” (cf. Heidegger, 1977, p. 17; Simondon, 2017, p. 168). The military transferred
breathing technologies from its air and aquatic domains to that of land vehicle, forging new
associations between the humans and the nonhumans. Survivability “dephased” (Combes,
2012, p. 4) from a script mediating bodily and molecular orders of magnitude and a milieu
that is the MRAP capsule as a highly protected and separated enclosure. A new phase of
survivability came into being when water replaced air, creating a new order of magnitude,
and the human body (of the occupants) became part of the technical ensemble (Figure 97).
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The MRAP capsule “individuated” yet into another “being” other than the armoured
capsular enclosure or the cab of a vehicle. It became the new individual – the MRAP
Egress Trainer – of the new phase of survivability, and the terraining of Afghanistan was
additionally realised through rollover training that produced a form of pre-injured bodies
that could anticipate extreme rollover breakdowns.
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Chapter 7
Discussion: Politics of Survivability
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7.0 Introduction
In the final chapter, we bring together the analysed accounts of the engineering,
scripting, and breakdown of military survivability to discuss the empirical chapters’
findings. We compare how our findings on body-vehicle-terrain associations are different
from those of a defence matrix or a political economy in the reviewed literature on military
urbanisms and architectures (Chapter 2). It is a difference informed by a Simondon and
ANT-STS inspired methodology for tracing associations (sociotechnical, techno-
geographic, architectural, and urban) with the technical object as the unit of analysis (i.e.,
the MRAP vehicle), rather than mapping networks of constituted artefacts and social
structures. We enumerate three original research contributions and explain their extent in
urban studies, architectural humanities, and STS, reflecting on the novelty of studying the
politics of survivability in primary sources like utility patents and military publications and
on reporting the findings through urban and architectural lenses. Finally, we list the
research limitations and identify prospects for further research.
The three contributions are as follows. First, the research advances the
epistemological position that survivability would not be the same without the technical
object. Second, it expands on the relational theory of the architectural and the urban as
characters of associations and modes and intensities of connection in armoured vehicles,
extending the scope and domain of architectural and urban studies beyond the figure of the
static building. Third, it answers a methodological question about how to employ technical
objects to study the spatialisation of urban warfare and the reduction of the landscape into
terrain. The research also makes general contributions to applying the philosophy of
Simondon in urban studies, the architectural humanities, and STS and to exploring the
synergies between philosophy of technics and sociology of sociotechnical scripts. The
following sections discuss the contributions through the research findings and explain their
extent based on the extensive analysis of the original empirical sources.
7.1 First Contribution: Survivability as Concern
This research’s first contribution is to reframe the factuality of militarisation and
the spatialisation of warfare within concerns of survivability. It adds to existing framing on
state power, military force, crimes against civilians (genocide) and their built environment
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(urbicide), occupation, and militarisation at large. For the discourses of “the new military
urbanism,” Haussmannisation, and “the architecture of occupation” miss the premises that
underpin such concerns (Chapter 2). Survivability offers a lens to examine the urban/rural
landscape primarily as a terrain to be survived during the time of war and through the
interdependence of humans and nonhumans, both military and civilian.
The military’s combat survivability is highly sociotechnical: soldiers are trained to
look out for themselves and their fellow soldiers, always with the help of technical objects
and through the disciplined training and instruction of military doctrine. Similar to Butler’s
call for “interdependence” and relational ontology of the body (2016), the military trains
soldiers on a relational responsibility for interdependence which we read about in various
accounts of military brotherhood like that of Sergeant Treber saving Sergeant Serna in
their drowning MRAP in Afghanistan (Chapter 6). However, the Treber-Serna story is
layered with the presence or lack of nonhuman agencies, from the heavyweight of the
MRAP that rolled it over into the water to the tight enclosure of the capsule that confined
the soldiers, and the lack of additional air supply sources that did not account for losing the
atmospheric medium. Despite it being an account of war like those that Butler critiques,
the vulnerability and failure of the occupants’ bodies in the drowning MRAP are the more
possible due to the lack of adequate technical mediation. This specific breakdown is later
negotiated and reduced by adding air-breathing devices and introducing mandatory
rollover training for all soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, the human body’s
vulnerability is not ontological like Butler argues (2016, p. 33); instead, it emerges as a
situated relational intensity of the strength/weakness of the sociotechnical associations
between humans and nonhumans. This explains why rollover training aims to produce a
form of pre-injured bodies that could anticipate extreme rollover breakdowns (see “third
advantage” in 7.3).
Moreover, the relational responsibility for interdependence extends the
sociotechnical associations of survivability from intra-military to military-civilian
relations. Contemporary urban warfare forms might have a lineage in the 19th century
militarised urban renewal paradigms, like Haussmann’s, and colonial military strategies,
like Bugeaud’s (Chapter 2). However, these forms evolve with the protections extended to
civilians under new international laws and humanitarian treaties, but most importantly – as
shown here – relational to the increased value attributed to the armed forces’ survivability.
In other words, the military is increasingly forced to coordinate with local communities of
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citizens, be it in the warzone or the home front. When the MRAPs experience electrical
shocks from low-hanging power lines on Iraq’s urban streets (Chapter 5), the military’s
concern is twofold: electrocution of their personnel and materiel and antagonising local
civilians upon cutting their electrical supply. Their response is adding a device to the
MRAP that articulates both concerns: eliminate electrical shocks to soldiers/equipment and
cultivate good relations with the locals by preserving their infrastructure. When the
MRAPs return to the U.S. upon withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan (Chapter 5), the
military’s concern aligns with national defence strategies to preserve the highways’
integrity for defence and public safety purposes. They subscribe to federal policies to
protect local civilians by transporting the heavy MRAPs only via designated means. In
both examples, the military-civilian relations are extended upon immediate or strategic
concerns for survivability through sociotechnical associations between humans and
nonhuman infrastructure.
The survivability lens does not dismiss the fact that civilians are the first and most
casualties of modern wars and conflicts. Neither assumes that international laws and
humanitarian treaties are devoid of biases, inequalities, and militarised mobilisation.
However, in a world of increasing armed conflicts and vast civilian displacement,
survivability is one pragmatist and realist view of the changing relationship between
humans and technology, where interdependence is a hybrid politics and ethics of human-
nonhuman and military-civilian networks and associations. Hence, the thesis contributes to
a sociotechnical understanding of survivability.
7.2 Second Contribution: The Urban and Architectural
This research’s second contribution is extending the theory of the architectural
and the urban associations as modes and intensities of connection that hold, wither, or
change. It draws on the ANT-inspired STS theory of associations, specifically the work of
Albena Yaneva, and on Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, precisely its concern with
technical objects as technical beings. Based on our analysis of protective envelopes and
relations with infrastructure and land, we argue for extending the notions of architectural
and urban associations to the MRAPs and vehicles in general. A better framing of the
notions would be associations of an architectural or urban character since vehicles are not
architectural objects like buildings but could act as urban objects. The following diagram
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explains the relation between the two theories as they emerged throughout the empirical
chapters.
[ {Body-Vehicle} + Terrain] = Body-Vehicle-Terrain
Figure 98 The body-vehicle associations of an architectural character present in the MRAP capsule part merge with the MRAP vehicle part to produce the body-vehicle-terrain associations of an urban character (by author)
The diagram (Figure 98) shows two sets of associations that merge into a hybrid.
It frames a multiplicity of associations that we claim to possess an architectural or urban
character. Our realist accounts of combat/non-combat related breakdowns, urban/rural
terrains, and warzone/home front deployment situate these associations and localise their
politics (Chapters 5 and 6). However, it is not only the different types of accounts that
enrich such a realist approach. The analysis shows that the technical individuals in these
accounts are dynamic and improving to maintain the solidity of the connections; once their
improvement reaches oversaturation, these individuals become new ones (i.e.,
“individuate”) with new associations to new milieus. It is in this process of individuation
and the coming-into-being of successive individuals (what Simondon terms the
“transindividual”) that both sets of associations merge the architectural character of the
capsule with the urban character of the vehicle. Next, we explain each type of associations
as it emerges in the analysis.
7.2.1. Associations of an Architectural Character
The first set of associations in Figure 98 represents those between humans and
their technical object, i.e., the soldiers and the MRAP capsule. They are associations of an
architectural character where the capsule envelopes the soldiers’ bodies within a safe
atmospheric enclosure and separates them from dangerous external terrain. While this is
not the realm of architectural design, style, iconicity, and technology, the MRAP capsule
provisions space explicitly planned for activities like sitting, interacting, working,
communicating, and stowing while on the move (Chapters 4-6). This enclosure must be
structurally sound (monocoque, unibody), safe (armour, door locks), ergonomic
(responsive seats, assisted doors), connected with the outside (windows, radio/microwave
frequencies), and thermally controlled (air conditioning). The architectural character of the
MRAP’s body-vehicle associations realises different modes of connection (move mounted,
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work dismounted) and varying intensities (with/without injuries from detonation) between
the soldiers and their operational terrain. Furthermore, this architectural character is further
elaborated and enacted to extend the solidity of the connections through techniques,
procedures, and instructions in the military’s field manuals, regulations, user handbooks,
and training.
The architectural character of the MRAP’s associations does not instantly reveal a
grounding in architectural schemas as we know them. Unlike the building figure that
realises architectural schemas for living, working, sleeping, eating, and recovering, the
MRAP’s vehicle figure has a technical lineage closer to trucks than buildings. However,
improvements to the MRAP capsule as a protective enclosure/envelope have much in
common with past military fortifications’ schemas. The fortress may have withered as a
building type. However, we see old fortification principles, like those described by
historian of technology Janis Langins (2004), continue to inform the engineering of
contemporary fortifications: armoured vehicles. The MRAP capsule embodies a schema of
principles related to geometry238 (angled/sloped parts, greater distance from the threat),
separation (inside/outside envelope, controlled openings), and visibility (windows, lines of
sight). The import of these schemas from the stationary figure of fortifications to the
mobile figure or armoured vehicles travel from artisanal ensembles of stone masonry
(where thick stone walls respond to artillery fire) to thermodynamic ensembles of
metallurgy (where thick armour steel responds to IED detonations). This lineage239 of
fortification schemas endows the MRAP’s associations with their architectural character.
Nevertheless, we differentiate the MRAP from buildings grounded in a fixed terrain as a
mobile object displaced across varied terrain. The result is a hybrid script that coordinates
survivability with mobility (Chapters 4-6).
Withstand IED detonations + Travel across urban/rural terrains + Transport soldiers and equipment
Figure 99 The associated milieu of the MRAP’s survivability-mobility hybrid script (by author)
238 We find such schemas across different applications. Consider the angled/sloped plane. It is one of the oldest technical schemas for deflection. It is found in houses/buildings where the roof pitch angle redirects rainwater and snow away from the building. It is also found in fortifications where angles of star-shaped plans improve visibility and reduce “dead ground.” 239 What gunpowder artillery was for fortification engineering in the 16th and 17th centuries parallels what IED detonations are for contemporary armoured vehicle engineering.
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This notion of associations in military technical objects has parallels and overlaps
in the literature of military urbanisms and architectures; however, it also shows profound
differences in how the politics of spatialising militarisation is approached. Consider the
lineage of fortifications. It is present in Weizman’s “the architecture of occupation” that
describes matrices, nodes, walls, checkpoints, and an “optical urbanism” (2017b). And
although it does not employ the notion of “the architectural,” the account describes modes
of connection and flow intensities (Chapter 2). However, Weizman’s “the architecture of
occupation” remains closer to a systems architecture240 lens whose constituted objects fall
into their place in the network/structure and territorialise241 the landscape.
In contrast, as a schema, counter-IED fortifications embody the figure of a new
technical object, i.e., the MRAP capsule-vehicle. The MRAP individuates as the new
technical individual of survivability (Figure 100) upon the Humvee’s oversaturation, and it
concretises as a technical object associated with a mobility terrain of powerful detonations.
Then, the MET (MRAP Egress Trainer) individuates as another technical individual of
survivability (Figure 100) upon the MRAP’s oversaturation, and it concretises as a
technical object associated with rollover. Rather than a static territory, the MRAP and the
MET facilitate and spatialise temporary territorialisations242.
HMMWV (mobility script oversaturated for survivability) MRAP
MRAP (mobile vehicle oversaturated for stability) MET
High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (Humvee) Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected MRAP Egress Trainer
Figure 100 The individuation of survivability’s technical individuals (by author)
Now, consider the associations of the MRAP capsule. These are not similar in any
way to Graham’s capsular space of the SUV. The two notions of the capsule are very
different. Graham’s SUV capsule offers a sweeping psychoanalytical explanation of the
SUV users’ politics and ideologies of patriotism and militarism (Chapter 2). And although
it attempts to trace the military origins of its technology, the SUV account remains
240 Similar to a national master plan only focused on defences. 241 Weizman’s description of territorialising the Palestinian landscape resembles Vauban’s 16th-century Pré Carré strategy to cordon off the French territory. In contemporary military strategy, the closest thing to this practice is the network of U.S. overseas military bases, both main bases and forward operating bases. 242 See Mattias on “territorial stabilization” (Kärrholm, 2007, 2013, 2016)
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primarily set against an epistemology of the urban grounded in a logic of resource
extraction that explains the political economy of war and fossil fuels.
In contrast, the MRAP capsule offers a realist account of relations between the
inside (the capsule) and outside (the terrain). For example, the capsule’s envelope deflects
or absorbs the force and fragmentation of detonations to protect its occupants from
injury/death (Chapter 4). However, a breakdown could reverse the capsule’s script into one
that threatens its occupants’ lives (Chapter 6). Furthermore, the users’ judgment (i.e., the
soldiers) could override the capsule’s agency if they decide to step out and be more
sociable with the locals (Chapter 5). In no way our description of the capsule implies that
the MRAP users are devoid of political beliefs and ideologies; however, our argument
contests making sweeping assumptions that reduce the technical object to a set of symbols
and signs tailored to established social structures. The MRAP’s survivability informs the
soldiers’ actions and the vehicles’ scripts first and foremost through the body-vehicle
associations that enable technical mediation.
Thus, these associations’ architectural character offers a crucial insight into how
we study militaries and militarisation and their spatialisation of warfare. It allows us to
understand the MRAP enclosure – and maybe vehicles, in general – as a hybrid of
networks of action/mediation. Medieval fortification schemas inform modern armour
designs; technical progress deterritorialises the figure of stationary buildings into that of
mobile vehicles; and heterogeneous networks of technical inventions and training realise a
liveable inside-outside separation. The military, as we understand it, “has never been
modern,” to use Latour’s perceptive expression (1993). Rather than Subjects and Objects,
Nature on the one hand and Urban culture on the other, its processes of militarisation
reassemble hybrids based on experiences of breakdowns, failures, and tried-and-tested
principles; it does so through invention, scripting, and multiplying the mediators first and
foremost of survivability.
7.2.2. Associations of an Urban Character
The second set of associations in Figure 98 represents those between the technical
object and its associated milieu, i.e., the MRAP vehicle and urban warfare terrain. They are
associations of an urban character where the vehicle safely transports the soldiers across
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the landscape and articulates the terrain’s obstacles. This is not243 a typical account of
urban studies. Yet, it is about how the military experiences the urban landscape as
intensities and relational to the MRAP’s mobility. The movement of the armoured vehicles
must consider limitations of road geometry (width, vertical clearance, lane size, slopes),
ground cover (hard, soft, flat, paved, irregular, land, water), and public safety (visibility,
weight, stability, human scale). The urban character of the MRAP’s vehicle-terrain
associations realises different modes of connection (movement with/without infrastructure
and civilians) and varying intensities (vibrations with/without injuries from detonation,
electrical shock, and rollover) between the soldiers and their operational terrain. As with
the architectural character, the urban character is further elaborated and enacted to extend
the solidity of the connections through techniques and procedures in the military’s
doctrinal and instructional publications.
The urban character of the associations is situated as much as the technical object
is. The MRAP is not like any other armoured vehicle, for it is explicitly engineered to
mediate high survivability levels for soldiers, vehicles, and missions during the aughts
occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan (Chapter 2). The MRAP withstands the extreme
disruption of detonations through several synergistic technical functionings (Chapter 4):
thick metal alloy armour; integrated capsule design; unique underbody geometry; high
ground clearance; dynamic interiors; advanced materials; and electronic systems.
Compared to similar truck types, the protective script endows the MRAP vehicle with
excess dimensions (due to extra components), weight (due to extra armour), and instability
(due to a higher centre of gravity). Thus, its geographic grounding corresponds to and
complements the technical functioning best when the MRAP operates on flat surfaces, at
low speeds, on wide lanes, and with enough overall height clearance. This “techno-
geographic milieu” coordinates the MRAP’s functions as an armoured capsule and a
mobile vehicle (Figure 101), and it realises the MRAP as a self-regulating, or
“concretized,” technical object of military survivability.
243 Except in parts of the literature on mobilities in Human Geography (see Bissell, 2010; Merriman, 2019)
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Armoured Enclosure (Capsule) + Motor Vehicle (Truck) = MRAP
Figure 101 The MRAP is a hybrid of two sets of associations: one with an architectural character (capsule) and another with an urban character (capsule + truck). The former could exist on its own, but the latter is a hybrid of both. Otherwise, the mobile MRAP vehicle becomes the stationary MRAP Egress Trainer device (by author).
However, it is precisely because the mobility landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan
do not always fulfil this specific techno-geographic milieu’s requirements that the MRAP
breaks down. Unlike buildings grounded in a fixed terrain, the MRAP’s mobility displaces
the vehicle across varied terrain and informs its associations to be responsive to that
displacement. Notably, the resultant excess dimensions, weight, and instability of the
MRAP become adverse effects for protected mobility, i.e., antagonisms that disrupt the
technical object’s self-regulation. When exceeding height and width limitations on the flat
and paved roads in densely built-up areas in Iraq, the MRAP risks what we called frictions
(Chapter 5): electrocuting its occupants and equipment from encountering low-hanging
power lines, damaging its jamming devices from hitting overhead structures, getting stuck
on narrow streets and gates, and agitating the locals upon disrupting their infrastructure.
The vehicle’s mobility becomes relational to the landscape’s infrastructural oversaturation,
and the MRAP receives improvements that urbanise it as a technical object (such as
downsizing, height negotiation devices, electrical shock instructions). When exceeding
speed and surface geometry limitations on irregular and soft roads in open areas in
Afghanistan, the MRAP risks rolling over on an unstable ground surface or into bodies of
water, which at best injures the occupants and at worst traps them inside and even causes
their drowning (Chapter 6). The vehicle’s mobility becomes relational to the landscape’s
infrastructural undersaturation, and the MRAP receives improvements that ruralise it as a
technical object (such as off-road suspension, lower centre of gravity, oxygen devices,
rollover training). Through such technical relations, the military realises the landscape as a
terrain safe for their operations.
Thus, the military constructs their knowledge of the operational landscape through
relational and emergent sites of action, in this case, within the MRAP and during its
mobility. They differentiate the landscape through modes of connection (size, weight,
stability) and intensities of infrastructural oversaturation (i.e., more urban) or
undersaturation (i.e., rural/less urban), which gives the MRAP’s associations their urban
character. Furthermore, these modes of connection and intestines of infrastructural
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saturation differentiate the warzone from the home front. On the one hand, the home front
geography of the U.S. is where the MRAP subscribes to “metascripts” of public safety for
transporting on highways and defence readiness for maintaining infrastructural integrity
(Chapter 5). On the other hand, the home front territory of the U.S. extends beyond its state
geography and into places where U.S. soldiers (i.e., labour) and equipment (i.e., property)
operate within “metascripts” of occupational safety in overseas bases and vehicular
enclosures (Chapters 5 and 6).
7.3 Third Contribution: A Method for Tracing Associations
The third contribution of this research is methodological insights into studying
militarisation’s technical objects as dynamic, evolving, and grounded individuals of
survivability. Rather than analysing discourse or content, our method traced and analysed
two sets of associations (Chapter 3): sociotechnical ones between humans and nonhumans
and techno-geographic ones that concretise the technical object – and feeds into the former.
We started from breakdown situations where these associations’ strengths and weaknesses
were explored as to whether their networks seemed to hold up or not. To resolve the
limitations of being on-site or following discussions in real-time, we opted for a quasi-
ethnographic approach to tracing these associations by following actor-networks,
collecting fragments of observations, and documenting processes of assembling in primary
and secondary sources (Chapter 3). We explored the MRAPs’ genesis that made them what
they are (Chapter 4) and followed whom they negotiated the emerging non-combat related
breakdowns in the field (Chapters 5 and 6). The method has three advantages.
The first advantage of this method is that it allows us to study relational politics
through the MRAP’s technical evolution processes. These processes converge from the
development of armour, trucks, aircraft, missiles, and computing across military and
commercial domains (Chapter 4), which is a substantial rationale to study technological
change beyond the military-civilian binary. Accordingly, we do not start from the MRAP
as a “constituted individual” but as a synergistic assemblage of functioning or “sub-
ensembles.” Primary sources like utility patents are home to these synergies, where
improvements to the MRAP travel across the domain and history of inventions in land
vehicles and aerospace engineering. Patents are full of references to basic and advanced
technicities in elements (e.g., fastening/screws, elasticity/springs, strength/Steel alloys,
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lightweight/Aluminium alloys, heating/lasers, and fusion/thermoplastics, among others)
and synergies among sub-ensembles (e.g., wheels with independent suspension, underbody
armour housing drive trains, and occupants’ capsule and monocoque structural frame
among others). The patents allow us to trace how these technicities travel across time and
domains and get deposited in thermodynamic, electrotechnic, and electrometallurgic
ensembles. The MRAP becomes a technical object whose elements of technicity lie
elsewhere (Simondon, 2017, pp. 71–81) in metallurgical processes, material science,
computing, and robotics, and whose technical progress develops many of its parts and
systems from commercial trucks and passenger cars. Tracing such associations in the
sources allows us to examine militarisation and the spatialisation of urban warfare through
the MRAP as a mediator of relational politics and its situatedness across multiple sites of
politics (lab/field, combat/non-combat, urban/rural, warzone/home front).
The second advantage is that it allows us to examine the effectiveness of technical
progress in producing viable survivability politics. Based on the same invention processes
discussed earlier, effectiveness relies on increasing the quality and quantity of information
flows – what Simondon refers to as “cybernetics” – to make intelligent decisions that
resolve technical and geographic antagonisms. Such cybernetics is responsible for realising
the “techno-geographic milieu” of the MRAPs, and the method traces them across primary
and secondary sources. Whether in patents (Chapter 4) or field manuals, medical studies,
testing documents, user handbooks, or technical brochures (Chapters 4-6), the method
finds these cybernetics in the figure of reductions made to the operational landscapes of the
vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. This practice of reducing the landscape yields what
militarisation and engineering designate as the terrain in its different versions: urban
(Chapter 5), rural, mountain, and desert (Chapter 6). More importantly, the relational and
processual underpinnings of the method allow it to read these geographical reductions as a
lineage or series that parallel and evolve with the technical improvements. Therefore, we
introduce the relational and processual concept of terraining (Chapters 2, 4-6) as a practice
of making of terrain and its continuous constitution as a principle.
The third and lesser-explored advantage of this method is that it allows us to
analyse human-technology relations where human bodies become pre-injured bodies. The
more advanced and self-regulating the MRAP became, through incorporating automated
systems, the more its function of regulation presupposed what Simondon calls “a
variability in its operation” (2017, p. 139). This is why, to stay with Simondon, the self-
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regulating MRAP needs the soldiers as “associates” (2017, p. 139) to participate244 in
stabilising the technical object and maintain high levels of survivability. However, soldiers
are, primarily, the objects of protection of the MRAP, not only the associates regulating it.
Thus, the method traces a scale shift, in the military publications and training media, from
the regulation of humans to their bodies’ pain, that is, the fragility of bodies under the
extreme impact (physical acceleration, pressure, temperature) of IED detonations. These
extreme antagonisms are translated245 through the military’s medical lens (trauma
pathology) to specific injury types (head, neck, and spinal injuries, severe burns, electric
shock, and suffocation) from detonations (Chapter 4), electrocution (Chapter 5), and
rollover and drowning (Chapter 6). Furthermore, the method traces a scale shift across
“orders of magnitude” from a molecular-bodily order under detonations to a bodily-
medium of life order when drowning. This instigates a new technical mediation of the
terrain, only this time one folded into the soldiers’ bodies to complement the technical
object’s work. The MRAP Egress trainer comes-into-being to produce pre-injured bodies.
This is where the MRAP-type of armoured vehicles serves as a lens and a site to
open the black box of terraining246. As a survivability script against powerful detonations,
the technical mediation of the sub-ensembles documented in the patents brings forward a
combination of improvements and redundancies (Chapter 4). Generally, the improvements
account for new antagonisms, and the redundancies account for old recurring ones. They
are not exclusively mutual, as the vehicles simultaneously resolve various antagonisms,
such as mobility, survivability, naturally existing, and human-made. This happens when
the MRAP becomes the vehicle that is not as stiff and obdurate as its predecessor, the
Humvee, was. It concretises as a modular vehicle with a structurally contained capsule,
angular geometry, independent suspension, sacrificial parts, dynamic interior, and thicker
armour. When an IED explodes, all these parts work in coordination to deflect, absorb, and
dissipate the force and pressure of the detonation. All improvements become redundancies
244 Here, we observe that the notion of pre-injured bodies is different from the Foucauldian one of disciplined bodies (Foucault, 1995) in its human-nonhuman interdependence. Pre-injury does not necessarily associate with a specific disciplining that makes bodies docile and responsive to power. Instead, it adds a form of pre-injury as a specific type of experience involving bodies and technical objects, anticipating what might happen during a breakdown. The aim is to reduce the impact of the antagonism, but the outcome is not guaranteed. 245 Similar to what STS scholar Donna Haraway calls “biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices” (1991, p. 164) 246 In analysing the MRAP as a protective envelope/enclosure, we distinguish between terrain in Architecture where a building is grounded in a fixed location and terraining in Vehicles where mobile objects are grounded in a changing location.
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to withstand all antagonisms at that moment, including those of the detonation, the debris,
and even the accelerating vehicle parts.
The MRAP reveals other insights into terraining when it encounters non-combat
related breakdowns. Rollover is the result of destabilising the techno-geographic milieu of
the MRAP as a heavy vehicle with a high centre of gravity (Chapter 6). Terraining reduces
the landscape to heavy-MRAP-speeding-on-curves or heavy-MRAP-driving-on-soft-edges;
the military associates the former with paved roads and an urban Iraq and the latter with
unpaved roads and a rural Afghanistan. Similarly, electrocution or damaging equipment
results from destabilising the techno-geographic milieu of the MRAP as a tall vehicle with
vertical antennas and devices (Chapter 5). Terraining reduces the infrastructural landscape
to tall-MRAP-with-vertical-devices-encountering-low-hanging-power-lines-and-overhead-
structures, mainly associated with an urban Iraq. In all cases, these scenarios are to be
anticipated and mediated with additional devices to prevent breakdown.
It is logical to follow the literature of military urbanisms and architectures and
describe the space of the MRAP’s mediation and breakdown as volumetric or three-
dimensional. In Afghanistan, the rollover flips the vehicles on their sides and sometimes
from an air to a water medium (Chapter 6). In Iraq, the vehicles are confined all over: the
paved road from below, power lines and overhead structures from above, and narrow
streets and gates on the sides. Rather than reading the object as an artefact in space, our
method of analysing the MRAP through its associations to its techno-geographic milieu
makes the object an integral part of that space and making247 it. There is an existing
schema of space where the MRAP is expected to move, but once the MRAP moves, it
generates its version of that space and smooth mobility or a breakdown. Hence, we also
propose to think of terraining as an instrument of making space; only it is the more
specialised practice of identifying and articulating antagonisms of the process.
Thus, the method mirrors the processes of engineering and militarisation in their
realist pursuit for the self-regulation or “concretization” of the MRAP. While military
objects are typically analysed according to how they control flows and separate groups like
the walls, flyovers, tunnels, SUVs, and electronic detection systems of military urbanisms
and architectures (Chapter 2), the MRAP heavily relies on reducing the landscape to a
247 Similar to Latour’s notion of “spacing” (1996c)
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terrain of antagonisms to be overcome/survived by creating and sustaining the military’s
inside-outside separation in the vehicles. By mirroring and rethinking engineering, the
method learns how the military acts; it is no coincidence that engineering is the descendant
of military engineering as we learn from historians of science and technology.
7.4 Addressing the Gap in the Literature
This research, and within the scope of military urbanisms and architectures,
examined an era of technological change situated in a military worldview shifting from air
superiority and targeting from above to urban warfare and occupation intricacies.
However, unlike the literature, we claimed that scrutinising a politics of survivability that
underpins militarisation is more pertinent to recognise a relational spatialisation of this
type of military operations rather than a social constructivist politics, which theorises cities
as mediums subordinated by established social structures.
We set out from recognising a gap in the literature (Chapter 2), whose approach
remains mostly social constructivist and anthropocentric. Its technical objects are stable
artefacts reflecting and embodying Politics with capital “P” as they remain subordinate to
humans and not relational to their environments. Through examining breakdowns that
make visible the networks holding the solidity of militarisation, the survivability lens
allowed us to bridge the gap in two ways: first, by studying a military practice of
spatialising survivability through the reduction of the landscape (what we called terraining
in 7.3); and second, by uncovering a relational politics based on “technics” or technical
thought (after Simondon, 2017), among the technical objects, the terrain/landscape,
engineering and the military (see 7.2).
In the research findings and contributions discussed earlier (7.1, 7.2, and 7.3), we
addressed the three aspects of the literature gap. First, we showed how technical objects are
dynamic and relational assemblages that mediate survivability as a script and through
sociotechnical associations between engineering, the military, and their armoured vehicles.
The MRAP realises the shift to urban warfare through a shift in the military script from
mobility to mobility-survivability hybrid. The military’s parameters of the urban bounce
back to their technical object’s objectivity. Second, we showed how human-nonhuman
relations become symmetrical through “a relation of equality” (after Simondon, 2017, p.
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105) between the means of realisation of survivability in both the MRAP and the soldiers’
bodies. The vehicles evolve and individuate into technical objects/individuals of
survivability, and the soldiers add to the regulation of the technical object through training,
techniques, and regulations. Third, we showed how landscapes are relational to the
technical object’s mediation, mainly through their reduction to a terrain that realises the
military vehicles’ associated milieu. The urban becomes an intensity of terraining, and the
MRAP embodies a double relation of exteriority: keeping out the terrain and folding it.
Unlike the literature on military urbanisms and architectures, our analysis was not
interested in a general history of war where people and objects are artefacts that move,
circulate, and collide in space. The aim was to trace politics in a technical lineage of
military technical objects through associations between soldiers, vehicles, and terrain.
There was no description of combat or military operations except for parts (detonations,
driving, training) where we witness the MRAP break down in Iraq and Afghanistan or
causes controversy on how to best conduct counterinsurgency on the streets of Baghdad.
The MRAP (capsule and vehicle) was analysed as a dynamic mediator of military
survivability and not as an object of military strategy that moves in formations of vehicles
or executes different mission types.
Moreover, the chapters did not start with the MRAP or the soldiers (or the
military at large) as constituted entities endowed with power. The aim was to uncover a
politics of survivability that explicates the vulnerability of soldiers’ bodies, training, and
vehicles relational to technological change. While the military institution, strategies, and
objects are vital figures of technical progress, economic spending, and monopoly on
violence, a localised and situated worldview of military performance redistributes notions
of absolute power to a politics of sociotechnical associations, synergies amidst technical
functioning, stabilisation of figure-ground, and coordination across programs of actions.
Thus, our findings on body-vehicle-terrain associations traced the technical object
during functioning, breakdown, and improvement. Instead of embracing the grand
narratives of militarisation that explain established power structures and social systems, we
emphasised the need to study the spatialisation of urban warfare as a process that can be
better unpacked at the level of the daily functioning of military technology. Next, we
reflect on the novelty of studying the politics of survivability in primary sources like utility
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patents and military publications and on reporting the findings through urban and
architectural lenses.
7.5 Relations of Equality and Difference
A politics of survivability achieved through human-nonhuman interdependency
proves the timely relevance of Simondon’s philosophy of equality between human beings
and technical beings (2017). It is not an absolute type of equality as a human political
ideal; it is one where ontologies of coming-into-being are equated, allowing for politics to
emerge as relations of difference (see Combes, 2012, including LaMarre’s Afterword)
among humans or between humans and technical objects. This way, we can examine war
as localisations of human-technology relations, be it those of improvised devices that blow
up millions of dollars worth of technical objects and their associated humans or those of
the same costly technical objects breaking down and failing to protect their associated
humans. It is a political difference between what the human bodies could handle in a
“destructive rupture effect” (2017, p. 265) and what the armoured vehicles could.
The Simondonian relations of technical equality and political difference have
implications to our thinking method as urban and architectural researchers. To avoid a
notion of space as a container of constituted technical objects, i.e., artefacts, we ought to
give more attention to the notion of the geographic as the extension of the technical, thus
realising a relational figure-ground and an association between the technical and the
geographical worlds. This associational notion of the geographic, be it of architectural or
urban character (see 7.2), implies assembling the landscape (natural/made, urban/rural,
people/infrastructure) as series of reductions and feedback loops that inform the objectivity
of the technical object and the symmetry between humans and technical beings. Rather
than a constituted medium to plough through as in the Haussmannisation paradigm
(Chapter 2), the landscape is continuously assembled as the ground for technical thought,
application, and potential that politically differentiates military-civilian, urban-rural,
human-technical, and warzone-home front relations.
Likewise, we ought to give more attention to the notion of the technical through
“technicity,” besides the program of actions of a technical object. Let us recall that
technicity is the evolved technical functioning across time (Chapter 2), which conveys
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knowledge of resolving tensions and mediating antagonisms “deposited” (after Simondon,
2017, pp. 73, 168–169) in the associated milieu. On the one hand, it allows us to study a
“stable equilibrium” (2017, p. 177), which is the concretised mediation (see 7.2) where the
technical individual realises a specific techno-geographic milieu (Figure 99). This is the
concretisation of the MRAP where the program of actions – incorporating technical
mediation and delegations between humans and nonhumans – could be traced. On the other
hand, it allows us to examine (see 7.3) a “metastable equilibrium” (2017, p. 177), which is
potentials of mediation where the adaptation of the technical individual reaches
oversaturation and pushes individuation, i.e., coming-into-being, of a new technical
individual that realises a new techno-geographic milieu. This is the individuation from
Humvee to MRAP to Egress Trainer (Figure 100), where persisting tensions reveal a
structuration process that realises successive structures – and thus, politics – of
survivability within evolving, multiple technical individuals.
7.6 Prospects for Future Architectural and Urban Research
The contributions of the current work open new avenues for research and practice
in architectural and urban research. The first prospect belongs to studying the technicity
that assembles buildings and performs technical mediation. The focus on technical thought
and evolution is of timely relevance to thinking about buildings through eco/environmental
lenses as situated technical objects in a milieu or grounded ensembles. This has
implications for environmental modelling, digital studies, and even fabrication
technologies in architectural research.
The second prospect would be extending the fields of urban studies and
architectural humanities to study the architectural and the urban as modes of connection,
beyond the figures of the building and the city. While those figures remain useful, there is
ample potential in studying the envelopes and atmospheric enclosures of new figures in an
increasingly mobile world, evolving the experimental architectural thought of the 1960s on
walking cities. Furthermore, there is potential for studying how designing buildings for
certain forms of inhabitation affects or gets affected by designing cars for other
inhabitation forms.
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The third prospect would be expanding the scope of architectural and urban
studies to examine the less-studied ensembles of the urban landscape that Simondon
introduces in his work On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (2017). These
include but are not limited to construction sites, shipyards, factories, workshops, and train
depots. These are the places that architectural pedagogy favour less compared to residential
and commercial building types.
The fourth prospect would be to study how the soldiers’ bodies become enrolled
in the military’s survivability and mobility scripts as affects, movements, and speeds
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 260–261). It is an enrolment that is “progressively
acquired” in parts (Latour, 2004a, p. 207), literally to protect the limbs, necks, spines, and
skin/flesh of the soldiers, relational to the soldiers’ worlds of detonation, electrical shocks,
and rollover. Furthermore, it is an enrolment that inscribes soldiers as “a type of user
represented in a blueprint” (Latour, 1996b, p. 238) against detonations anticipated in the
Rhodesian War years before the War on Iraq.
The fifth and final prospect would be expanding the scope of STS to study the
urban as the associated milieu for vehicular mobility technologies. There is potential to
study how car and truck movement shapes the mobility landscape and how the figure of
the vehicle changes with assistive technologies, self-driving technologies, and electric
motors.
7.7 Conclusion
The MRAP as a survivability script against detonations and ambushes tells us a
lot (as urbanists and architects) about the landscape, including its buildings, infrastructure,
organisation, and people. Detonations must exist along routes and ambushes within
concealed environments. It also tells us about the human body’s relations to enclosures,
particularly ones engineered to tolerate intensities of extreme antagonisms, be they human-
made or naturally existing. However, most importantly, the MRAP as a technical object
that assembles technicity across various inventions and histories tells us even more about
our changing association to technology in war and peace and all the uncertainty levels.
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