Silhouettes of War: Technologies of U.S. Soldiering and Surveillance

Jessica J. Behm
2010 Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research  
This paper forwards a theory of silhouetting in relation to technological augmentation in U.S. Military uniforms and suggests that the increasing utilization of metamaterials, nanotechnology, and surveillance technologies operates under a rhetoric of invisibility that complicates the technologies' visible destruction. Methodologically, the paper attends to three general technological developments in the evolution of the U.S. Army uniform: the design of the new Army Combat Uniform (ACU); the
more » ... nological advances in the uniform, including embedded wearables, biometric identification devices, and 3D combat enhancement systems; and the bio-networking, GPS, and digital communication arrays that physically link digital uniforms to a larger geopolitical network of U.S. military strategy and surveillance. Throughout, the work traces the aforementioned theory of silhouetting in relation to select sociopolitical consequences of linking digitally enhanced soldiers into a transnational grid of surveillance.
doi:10.3384/cu.2000.1525.102437 fatcat:opoae34jc5b3jicc46mpbfzxge