Wired’s Gee-Whiz High-Tech Militarism

A deluge of major Western publications stated last month that the US destroyed an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman (e.g., New York Times, 7/18/19; NPR, 7/19/19; NBC News, 7/18/19). Citing unproven reports from Donald Trump and the US Department of Defense, the outlets stated that the drone came within 1,000 yards of a US Navy warship, after ignoring “multiple calls to stand down.”

Iran denied the accusations, providing a time-stamped video meant to demonstrate that the drone remained airborne “before and even after the time Americans claim” (BBC, 7/19/19). The US, meanwhile, provided a dubious series of photos, with no indication of when they were taken or their relationship to each other.

A Wired article (7/22/19) celebrates “the first-ever ‘kill’ by a US directed-energy weapon.”

Most of the aforementioned media noted Iran’s denial. Wired’s take, however—entitled “The Marines’ New Drone-Killer Aces Its First Real World Test” (7/22/19)—ignored Iran’s response entirely. Instead, Wired accepted the US’s warmongering narrative fully, even cheerleading the military for its engineering prowess.

The article’s cause for celebration: The US Marines took down a drone for the first time by blasting radio signals to interrupt communications between the drone and its base, rather than using more conventional weapons such as guns or lasers. The article wasn’t concerned with the geopolitical or moral context of a potential act of US aggression against Iran. Rather, as Wired made explicit, its focus was the technological tour de force of downing the drone:

But the significance lies less in heightened tensions in the region than it does in the weapon of choice. The strike marks the first reported successful use of the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System, an energy weapon that blasts not artillery or lasers but radio signals.

After listing the technical merits—and, to a far lesser extent, shortcomings—of the energy weapon, the article proceeded to call the use of this weapon “fun.” 

Wired has a history of portraying US military operations as dazzling, do-good technological marvels. Days before championing the Marines’ energy weapon, the outlet published a ringing endorsement of the Air Force’s new rescue helicopter (7/19/19), which doubled as an advertorial for both the Air Force and aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Not unlike a car commercial, the article detailed the vehicle’s bells and whistles: Twice the fuel capacity! Extra range! New surveillance cameras! Weapon mounts! The idea that some of the countries targeted might seek to develop defenses to these devastating attacks was described as the “challenge” of “rapid evolution of opposition to the American military.”

A new fighter-jet ejection system garnered equally glowing coverage (8/31/18), promising to make “rocketing out of a B-2 bomber surprisingly safe.” A five-pound Lockheed Martin “hit-to-kill” missile, which Wired (5/5/18) playfully termed a “pocket rocket,” received the same PR sheen for its size. Lockheed (11/28/17) was similarly lavished with praise for supplying the US Army and Air Force with “sci-fi” laser weapons, described as a “toy” that “lets you waltz into enemy territory, do your job while zapping missiles out of the sky, and cruise home.” Noting that that “job” involves dropping high explosives on human beings is left unmentioned, lest all the fun be taken out of it.

Wired (7/2/19) compares a military development lab to the “storied garages where Apple and Hewlett-Packard began.”

Last summer, Wired (7/2/18) told the story of how the Army was “building a dream team of tech-savvy soldiers,” replete with a cast of noble, innovative characters. Matt, an anonymized computer scientist and Army captain, developed “hacks” to save money and time on drone-disabling technology, evoking what the story termed the “romance” of early Silicon Valley garage startups. Meanwhile, a group of plucky Army tech officials sought to render the Army more “nurturing” for talent like Matt. The result: Matt assembled the ballyhooed dream team, “like a scene out of Ocean’s Eleven,” where they’d work alongside former Facebook and Dropbox staffers now under the employ of the armed forces.  

An earlier piece examining the “future of war” (6/13/17) fawned over the prospect of videogame-inspired combat. Its premise: Wouldn’t it be cool if the Pentagon supplied soldiers of the future with algorithm-generated maps, notifications and color-coding systems? Its source—Will Roper, a Defense Department employee whose job was to “study where war is headed, and to develop the technological tools that help the United States win there”—threw the magazine’s political allegiances into sharp relief.

While the story acknowledged matters of morality, it offered little more than throwaway comments secondary to the wonder of fusing combat training with videogames. The Army could send machines into combat, Wired noted, but, it asked, “does any country want to delegate the decision to kill someone to a machine?” The article further conceded that “Call of Duty for real” may, to some, be “horrifying” (though “patriotic” to others). These could have been opportunities to include a dissenting voice that might elaborate on the inhumanity of a combat game come to life, or acknowledge the cruelty of using people to kill people. Neither concern was anywhere to be found.

It’s one thing to detail the technical properties of machinery, and quite another to try to leverage those properties into public support for US belligerence. In Wired’s propagandistic imagination, military weapons resemble otherworldly creations, high-tech spectacles, the stuff of science fiction. Within that framing, there’s no need to consider the people around the world for whom those weapons are all too real.

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