Description
The US Department of Defense has made improving ‘soldier lethality’ central to its future equipment, training and doctrine development. At stake is ensuring that US armed forces can defeat 21st century adversaries effectively and with minimum loss of life to American personnel. This may mean acquiring more precise weapons, autonomous systems or equipment that can outperform those used by an enemy force. Equally, it implies that American personnel must make use of technologies that improve survivability and neutralise enemy lethality so as to render them militarily ineffective. The centrality of this debate in US military circles has led to Britain’s armed forces showing an interest in lethality. In the British case, the Army seeks to use unmanned and autonomous systems as a way to make up for the declining number of recruits. This paper questions what lethality tells us about contemporary approaches to the conduct of war by examining the factors that frame and legitimise the development of certain technologies. What is meant by the word lethality? How do bureaucratic, doctrinal and technological interpretations of this term differ and how does the idea play out in legal, medical, moral and scientific terms. By reflecting on the contested and multidimensional ways in which lethality is understood, this paper considers the way martial values and democratic choices find themselves inscribed into the technologies and conduct of war.
