Description
This presentation analyses conceptions of future warfare through the prism of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), a joint French-German-Spanish air warfare system currently under development (and the subject of considerable disagreements). Centrally, this presentation engages with long-term future armament projects as a central element of discourses and imaginaries about the future of war. The FCAS, meant to enter into service between 2040 and 2045, thus provides an expression of a conception of security futures, one which (as Linda Ruppert and Annika Mattisek demonstrate) is subject to geopolitical shifts and tensions. In the case of the FCAS, the considerable disagreements between national parties and industrial forces further demonstrates the competing temporal horizons shaping conceptions of future war. In this presentation, therefore, I draw on an in-depth case study of the FCAS program to examine future armament projects as political discourses, which are shaped – and shape imaginaries of future war. As such, I situate them within political security projects, and interrogate the role of conceptions of future war in shaping concepts of national defence and military security.
