At Alex’s recommendation, US army officers are taught to conceptualize the Afghan battlespace and the external influences thereon with reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of interior and exterior knowledge. (the IDF has been here before).
Military theory and Marxist thought have been fellow travellers for a while: example one being the influence of Maoist people’s war theory on counterinsurgency doctrine. But while the object there was to secure ever growing spaces in which insurgents could be out-governed, here the object is to embrace the chaos surrounding perhaps temporarily secured zones in order to consider more widely how varied forces emerging from it could influence these zones. In political terms this seems to reflect postmodernist despair at the inevitability and protean nature of ‘the market’. ‘Weaponized’, so to speak, it seems to represent the idea of the fog or war extended to a permanent condition of humanity. At any rate, you can see the parallel here between the state building military and the world of classical Marxist theory maybe fifty years ago, both trying to grope a way round a landslide of unexpected events.
Slightly relatedly, North Korean ‘military first’ theory is somewhat reminiscent of Guy Debord having his books bound in sandpaper so they would automatically abrade any others they came into contact with. Though I doubt there’s a direct influence there.
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