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The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare Annals of the American Association of Geographers ISSN: 2469-4452 (Print) 2469-4460 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raag21 Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare Ian G. R. Shaw To cite this article: Ian G. R. Shaw (2016): Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2015.1115333 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2015.1115333 © 2016 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC© Ian G. R. Shaw Published online: 01 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=raag21 Download by: [University of Glasgow] Date: 02 February 2016, At: 03:26 Scorched Atmospheres: The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare Ian G. R. Shaw School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, The University of Glasgow This article explores the violent geographies of the Vietnam War. It argues that the conflict is crucial for under- standing the security logics and spatialities of U.S. state violence in the war on terror. An overarching theme is that U.S. national security has inherited and intensified the atmospheric forms of power deployed across South- east Asia, including ecological violence, the electronic battlefield, counterinsurgency (the Phoenix Program), and drone surveillance. All of these attempted to pacify and capture hostile circulations of life and place them within the secured and rationalized interiors of the U.S. war machine. The article thus expands on the concept of atmospheric warfare. This is defined as a biopolitical project of enclosure to surveil, secure, and destroy humans and nonhumans within a multidimensional warscape. Since modern state power is becoming ever more atmospheric—particularly with the rise of drone warfare—dissecting the origins of that violence in the Vietnam War is a vital task. Key Words: biopolitics, security, Vietnam War, violence, war on terror. 本文探索越战的暴力地理。本文主张, 冲突是理解美国在反恐战争中的安全逻辑与国家暴力的空间性之 关键。总体的主题是, 美国国家安全已继承并强化了其于东南亚所部署的大气权力形式, 包含生态暴 力、电子战场、反叛乱 (凤凰计画), 以及无人机监控。这些形式的目的皆在于企图安抚并捕捉怀有敌意 的生命循环, 并将之置放于安全且合理化的美国战争机器内部。本文从而扩张大气战事的概念。该概念 定义为在多维战争地景中, 监控、保卫并摧毁人类及非人类的围堵生命政治计画。随着现代国家权力愈 发大气化——特别是无人机战事的兴起——仔细研究此般暴力于越战中的起源, 便是一项极为重要的工 作。 关键词： 生命政治, 安全, 越战, 暴力, 反恐战争。 Este artıculo explora las geografıas violentas de la Guerra de Vietnam. Se arguye que el conflicto es crucial para entender la logica de seguridad y las espacialidades de la violencia de estado de los EE.UU. en la guerra al terror. Tema crucial es que la seguridad nacional de los EE.UU. ha heredado e intensificado las formas atmosfericas del poder desplegadas a traves del Sudeste Asiatico, incluyendo la violencia ecologica, la guerra electronica, con- trainsurgencia (el Programa Fenix) y la vigilancia con drones. Con todas estas cosas se intento pacificar y cap- turar circulaciones hostiles de vida y colocarlas dentro de los interiores seguros y racionalizados de la maquina de guerra de los EE.UU. Por eso, el artıculo se extiende sobre el concepto de guerra atmosferica. Tal cosa se define como un proyecto biopolıtico de encierro para vigilar, asegurar y destruir humanos y no humanos dentro de un paisaje belico multidimensional. Puesto que el poder en el estado moderno se ha hecho cada vez mas atmosferico—en particular con el advenimiento de la guerra de drones—analizar minuciosamente los orıgenes Downloaded by [University of Glasgow] at 03:26 02 February 2016 de esa violencia en la Guerra de Vietnam es una tarea vital. Palabras clave: biopolıtica, seguridad, Guerra de Vietnam, violencia, guerra al terror. n 30 April 1975, U.S. helicopters evacuated than half a million U.S. soldiers stationed in the coun- thousands of U.S. and Vietnamese personnel try. Many were reluctant draftees, catapulted into an Ofrom across Saigon in chaotic scenes that were amorphous conflict with shifting objectives. Indeed, broadcast on television screens around the world. the Vietnam War is difficult to contain to a single Operation Frequent Wind, as it was called, marked time or space: Its history stretches back to French colo- the unofficial end of the Vietnam War, which had nialism and its geography bleeds into insurgencies continued for two years after President Nixon with- fought in Laos and Cambodia. Yet despite being one drew U.S. troops. At its peak in 1968, there were more of the longest wars in U.S. history, second only to the Ó Ian G. R. Shaw This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author have been asserted. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2016, pp. 1–17 Initial submission, March 2015; revised submissions, June and September 2015; final acceptance, September 2015 Published with license by Taylor & Francis, LLC. 2 Shaw unyielding war on terror, the violent geographies engi- Of course, although U.S. troops might well have left neered in the Vietnam War have remained relatively behind a bloody legacy, many carried home their own unexamined in political geography (exceptions personal hell, returning to a war-weary public in the include Power 2001; Gregory 2011b; Bowd and Clay- throes of the civil rights movement and a tectonic ton 2013; Clayton 2013). However, the conflict trig- shift in social mores. For all of these reasons, any anal- gered a series of important evolutions in the conduct ysis of the Vietnam War must excavate incomplete of U.S. state violence that this article investigates. ruins and contradictory stories. Yet several important The Vietnam War, or the Second Indochina War, geographies emerge from the rubble of America’s lost was part of a wider campaign of U.S. proxy wars, black war. These are important for understanding the prac- ops, and direct military conflicts pursued during the tice of contemporary state power, which has become Cold War. Motivated by the flawed domino theory, increasingly atmospheric (Elden 2013; Adey 2014). President Kennedy committed the United States on a An obvious example today is the securing of national crusade to contain Ho Chi Minh’s brand of nationalist airspace with military satellites, planes, drones, and communism in the early 1960s, when he sent special even blimps (Williams 2010). These aerial technolo- advisers to Saigon. Over the next decade, a total of gies allow the state to access—and render transpar- 58,200 U.S. soldiers and 2 million Vietnamese died in ent—the material and electronic circulations of life, the conflict. In neighboring Laos and Cambodia, an which curl together in hybrid, more-than-human ecol- additional 2 million people were killed in insurgencies ogies. U.S. national security has not only inherited but bound to the U.S. conflict. By 1975, 879,000 orphans also intensified various forms of atmospheric warfare and 1 million war widows dwelt in overcrowded urban deployed in Vietnam. slums, and a further 1.5 million fled the country alto- The first form of atmospheric warfare this article gether (Wiest 2002). Thousands of former South Viet- investigates is the use of ecological weapons—such as namese military personnel were also disappeared or Agent Orange and napalm—to poison, burn, and confined to reeducation camps after Saigon fell. The destroy the lived environment. This is important for violent geographies of U.S. military intervention thus establishing the centrality of geography to the conduct endured long after U.S. troops left Southeast Asia of U.S. military strategy in Vietnam. The second proj- (Figure 1). Beneath the shadows of returning Huey ect is the U.S. military’s so-called electronic battlefield helicopters lay a wounded landscape, a scarred society, (Dickson 2012). This was a sophisticated network of and the geopolitical conditions for decades of electronic sensors, airplanes, and computers that “blowback” in the region (Johnson 2002), particularly detected enemy movements in the forest and auto- in the killing fields of Cambodia. mated the military’s kill chain. Unlike the scorched earth strategy of defoliation, the electronic battlefield enclosed the enemy’s lifeworld inside a simulated, cybernetic environment. Related to this was the U.S.– South Vietnamese counterinsurgency project called the Phoenix Program (Valentine 2000). This appara- Downloaded by [University of Glasgow] at 03:26 02 February 2016 tus placed insurgents inside a bureaucratic world of manhunting and pacification. The entrenchment of targeted killing within the war on terror marks a cru- cial line of descent. The final form of atmospheric war- fare investigated is the deployment of Lightning Bug drones across North Vietnam. These unprecedented surveillance missions were a formative period in the emerging “dronification of state violence” (Shaw and Akhter 2014). Rather than present a military history of these proj- ects, this article explores how they each produced a Figure 1. U.S. soldiers are airlifted by UH-1D helicopters on 16 mode of atmospheric warfare that sought to enclose, May 1966. Source: U.S. National Archives, Identifier Number 530610. High-resolution image taken from Wikimedia Commons police, and pacify hostile forms of life. As such, it brings (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UH-1D_helicopters_in_ our attention to the immersive, ecological, and at times Vietnam_1966.jpg). (Color figure available online.) suffocating apparatuses of state power. By combining The Violent Geographies of the Vietnam War and the Rise of Drone Warfare 3 the historical and the theoretical, the article not only longer the body, but the enemy’s environment” (Slo- recognizes the importance of “the temporal and spatial terdijk 2009, 14).
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