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School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS)

Working Papers

The Hunt as security logic: New Reflections on the power and politics of hunting as secrecy practice through twenty years of the Global War on Terror

Dr. Elspeth Van Veeren1

Working Paper No. 02-21

Published: February 2021

Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Elspeth Van Veeren. Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder.

______1 Elspeth Van Veeren is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol, as well as the coordinator of the Secrecy, Power, and Ignorance research Network (SPIN, www.secrecyresearch.com). Her work on US security cultures, visual politics, secrecy and the Global War on Terror has been published in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including European Journal of International Security, International Political Sociology, and Review of International Studies. She can be contacted at [email protected]

Van Veeren

The Hunt as security logic: New reflections on the power and politics of hunting as secrecy practice through twenty years of the Global War on Terror

Dr. Elspeth Van Veeren

ABSTRACT

Existing work on the second decade of the Global War on Terror (GWoT) has focused predominantly on the politics of the drone. As this article contends, however, the United States’ targeted killing programme is better understood as fitting within a hunting security logic or social imaginary. Building on existing work, but with greater attention to longer-standing and wider cultural histories and set of practices of ‘hunting’ in US security discourses (from Indian and witch hunting to slave and communist hunting), this paper makes two interconnected arguments: First, that hunting is built on a number of intertexts that are gendered, raced, and sexed that continue to govern its subject positions, landscapes, practices, and narrative structure. Second, hunting relies on and reproduces secrecy as it draws on these intertexts. Recent scholarship within critical international relations and security studies has invited a reconsideration of the power of secrecy as knowledge (un)making. Hunting helps to make this power of secrecy more evident. Drawing these two points together and using Juliet Singh (2018) postcolonial reading of the concept of ‘mastery’, this article therefore argues that hunting is a neocolonial security logic that requires mastery of the domain of secrecy. Analysing key texts associated with US manhunts in the Global War on Terror – including memoirs, official documents, speeches, and media reports – and with reference to historical studies of hunting as a US cultural practice, this article therefore lays out hunting as a security logic and security imaginary of greater significance than currently recognised within security studies.

2 Hunt as security logic

No form of labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating or so excellent a training school for war. — Theodore Roosevelt (in Dray, 2018: 7)

Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. — Ernest Hemingway, On the Blue Water (1936)

INTRODUCTION

Since the Global War on Terror’s (GWoT) inception in September 2001 following President George W. Bush’s televised address (Bush, 2001), hunting has emerged as a central theme of the war. ⁠ At the level of senior political figures, policymakers, practitioners and within the US media and popular culture, hunting terrorists has functioned as both a structuring metaphor and a set of practices. While scholarly work studying the GWoT has used this language (e.g. ‘Predatory War’, McSorley, 2019) and studied some of its associated practices, most extensively drones (e.g. Shaw, 2013; Kaag and Krebs, 2014; Wilcox, 2016), to date the political work of hunting as part of the broader GWoT security discourse has been relatively underexamined or, where acknowledged, dominated by reference to the work of French cultural theorist Gregoire Chamayou (2011, 2015) and his ‘manhunting doctrine’, an analysis rooted predominantly in a historical analysis of French Caribbean and French policing practices that nonetheless singles out drones as today’s hunter. Ten years on, manhunting remains a cornerstone of US security policy and core element of its counter-terrorism efforts. I therefore argue it is worth returning to understand its power. Rooted in more than its predator-prey relations and drones (Chamayou, 2011, 2015), its connection to the ‘disappearing violence’ (Niva, 2011) and ‘clean warfare’ (Van Veeren, 2013), its wider network of actors and actants (Weber, 2015; Demmers and Gould, 2018), and in its work as a metaphor (Wills and Steuter, 2009), I argue that manhunting is a logic or social imaginary (Castoriadis, 1997; Weldes, 1999, James, 2019) that undergirds social and political relations on a far larger, more extensive and entangled way.

Part of this silence on hunting may be attributable to its emergence as US cultural ‘commonsense’ (Geertz, 1975; Herman, 2001) as embedded it is within US culture that erases its power; it just makes sense to hunt when something is hidden. Part of this may be due to the seductive power of the ‘American technological sublime’ (Nye, 1994) that drones tap into, overwriting and eliding the wider network of practices. Part of the argument may also be that hunting, as an official, formal and overt US military practice and strategy in modern war, is

3 Van Veeren commonly understood as a relatively ‘new’ phenomenon: until the Vietnam War and the emergence of US special operations, stalking and killing a ‘legitimate’ enemy in twentieth century conflict was more generally considered morally questionable and ‘savage’, for example as captured in the 1962 war film, War Hunt (dir. Denis Sanders). Since Vietnam, however, US American cultural relationship to manhunting by the US ‘self’ has emerged in increasingly morally acceptable ways: a norm has shifted. Manhunters can be celebrated culturally (think police procedurals, but also ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’, ‘The Mandalorian’) though they remain feared when positioned as associated with an outside ‘other’, including as a tool of an authoritarian state or alien other (‘Deep Space Nine’ (Ep.1.6, Captive Pursuit), Enemy of the State, Minority Report, ‘Black Mirror’ (Ep.4.5, Metalhead), The Hunger Games).

Either way, hunting as a structuring metaphor and set of practices has been underexamined in relation to this war, despite its widespread acceptance and in the ways in which it has come to dominate the language of policy-makers and US military practices in a number of world regions (North Africa and the Sahel region, the Afghanistan and Pakistan borders, Niger, most notably). For example, as President Bush declared on 11 September 2001, ‘Make no mistake. The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts’ (Bush, 2001). Similarly, key members of his cabinet used the language of hunting in the early years of the GWoT to describe the US response. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned that:

Soon we are going to ask [the US military] to take on a tremendous responsibility as they embark on one of the most difficult missions that the military has ever been given. It will require every bit of their courage, their intellect, and their warrior spirit to hunt down and destroy the groups that are the enemies of the civilized world (Rumsfeld, 2001).

On June 29th, 2005, General Stanley McCrystal, who would go on to lead US ‘manhunting efforts’ across the Shadow War as head of the Joint Special Operations Centre (JSOC), revolutionising US counterterrorism, briefed Bush and the National Security Council staff in the White House Situation Room on the ‘mechanics’ of the ‘hunt’ to find Zarqawi’ (SM:193). For McCrystal, ‘everyone was on the hunt’ (SM:110), and ‘the hunt would require us to be increasingly sophisticated in how we operated’ (SM:193).

For Obama, the hunt for terrorists remained a key national security priority. On assuming office in 2009, Obama declared to senior security staff including CIA Director Leon Panetta: ‘here’s the deal, I want this hunt for Osama bin Laden and [Ayman] al-Zawahiri to come to the front

4 Hunt as security logic of the line. I worry that the trail has done cold. This has to be our top priority and it needs leadership’ (in Bowden, 2012). Amongst Obama’s staff, the discourse of hunting was also pervasive: for CIA Director Leon Panetta, ‘It was our hunt’… and we would finish it’ (2014: 299).

The prevalence of this language, and as discussed here, the accompanying set of practices within this discourse therefore suggests two questions: why has hunting emerged as a set of dominant practices in the US GWoT, and what does it in turn legitimise? What is the security logic or social imaginary of hunting? In response to these questions, I argue that, like a nuclear deterrence logic or a risk logic, a hunting security logic entails a set of interconnected ideas, practices, relations and subjects – a set of social and economic relations – that are built on and reproduce insecurity. More specifically, a hunting security logic reproduces predator-prey subject positions, conceptions of dangerous space, promotes notions of mastery, as well as reproduces its own circulations, economies and pleasures, including relying on a satisfying narrative structure. And undergirding this is the power of secrecy. Hunting involves the navigation of an uncertain terrain with a fluid enemy who is fundamentally deceptive.

Hunting as a security logic is therefore also powerful by virtue of its mobilisation of a broader set of cultural entanglements. Hunting is intertextual (Van Veeren, 2009). Hunting in the context of US cultural ‘whiteness’, in which the GWoT discourse sits, or white settle hunting, always constructs its legitimacy in relation to hunting in other discourses: from game and trophy hunting, to scientific and conservation hunting, to romantic and sexual hunting.1 As Mark Neocleous (2013) argues, for example, manhunting as a form of pacification is tied to capitalist appropriation; it serves to police the social order of wage labour. But it is also tied to race and therefore settler colonial in commitment. This article therefore also argues for asking the ‘other question’ (Matsuda, 1991), or asking how does hunting ‘(re)produce gendered-sexualised-racialised power structures and discourses’ (Cooper-Cunningham, 2020; see also Gentry, 2020) as insecurity. As a discourse of mastery (Singh, 2018), as one that reproduces binaries and hierarchies, including animalisations, with its chains of signification and intertexts, its policing of boundaries (literal as well as figurative), as well as the historical origins of many of hunting’s practices (from bloodhoods to surveillance), in addition to its

1 I make this point about whiteness in order to draw a distinction between hunting in this context and hunting practices associated with other cultural contexts, see Loring (1996) and Nyamnjoh (2018) where the animal may be understood as ‘master’ or co-equal.

5 Van Veeren current use to (re)assert US American empire globally, hunting is inescapably neocolonial, racist and patriarchal. Within the US, hunting as a logic reproduces insecurity.

Using a discourse analytic approach, this article therefore uses a set of key memoirs written by US soldiers on the ‘frontlines’ of the GWoT (see Table 1) to trace how hunting is spoken of and practiced, with attention to its intertexts and its secrecy dimensions. A number of these memoirs have made best-sellers lists, while several have been made into successful award- winning Hollywood films, I would argue, partly based on their appeal as hunting stories. These include Lone Survivor (dir. Peter Berg, 2013) and American Sniper (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014). As I outline elsewhere (Van Veeren, 2019), military memoirs are ‘important sites of security meaning making. They help generate the commonsense of war’ (Van Veeren, 2019: 389, see also Dyvik, 2016; Woodward and Jenkings, 2018).2 Military memoirs are also especially useful in researching the public face of more secretive organisations and individuals, as while these memoirs are vetted and censored by the US Defense Office of Prepublication & Security Review, these memoirs still tell stories about secrecy, secrecy’s subjects and their legitimation (Van Veeren, 2019). These texts are then read alongside key documents, speeches, media reports, books by established investigative reporters and existing secondary literature.3

Table 1 - Memoirs Kyle, Chris with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History (New York: William Morrow, 2013). (CK) Luttrell, Marcus and Patrick Robinson, Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 (Boston: Little Brown, 2007). (ML) Mann, Don with Ralph Pezzullo, Inside SEAL Team Six (New York, Back Bay Books, 2011). (DM) Martin, Matt J. with Charles W. Sasser, Predator: The Remote-Control Air War over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot’s Story (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2010). (MM) McChrystal, Stanley, My Share of the Task: A Memoir (New York: Penguin, 2013) (SM) McCurley, Mark T. with Kevin Maurer, Hunter Killer: Inside the Lethal World of Drone Warfare (Allen & Unwin: London, 2015). (McM) O’Neill, Robert, The Operator: The Seal Team Operative and the Mission that Changed the World (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2017). (RO) Owens, Mark with Kevin Maurer, No Easy Day: The Navy Seal Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden (London: Penguin Books, 2012). (MO)

2 Military memoirs, like all memoirs, interviews, testimonials as evidence, are also not to be completely trusted, but treated as stories, as discourses for their truth-making and commonsense-making capacities. Catelijne Coopmans and Brian Rappert, ‘Believable Storytellers,’ manuscript in progress, held by the authors. 3 The one set of sources that I have not drawn on for this article has been the testimonials and reports associated with those hunted, but recentres dominant US voices. I have made this choice consciously for several reasons and as those voices are centred in the larger project.

6 Hunt as security logic

Velicovich, Brett and Christopher S. Stewart, Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldier’s Inside Account of the Hunt for America’s Most Dangerous Enemies (New York; Harper Collins, 2017). (BV) Wasdin, Howard E. and Stephen Templin, SEAL TEAM SIX: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2011). (HW) Webb, Brandon with John David Mann, The Killing School: Inside the World’s Deadliest Sniper Program (Sydney: Hachette, 2017). (BW)

To do so, this article therefore provides an overview of hunting as an intertextual security discourse within the dominant US culture more broadly. It then lays out a four-part framework for understanding how hunting functions before turning to the power of secrecy, using an analysis of the hunting logic within the GWoT to explain the production of hunting’s subjects, landscapes, expertise and narratives, and the way in which secrecy is central to this security logic.

HUNTING AS SECURITY DISCOURSE

Hunting remains a central way in which US national identity is constructed (Slotkin, 2000; Herman, 2001, 2003, 2014; Dizard, 2003; Jones, 2015a; Dray, 2018). This celebration of hunting as core to US national identity is however a relatively recent invention. Instead, the invention of hunting as American coincided with a number of important cultural and political developments in US domestic and international politics in the 19th century: the remasculinisation of America at a time of significant industrial and political transformation alongside new waves of migration (Testi, 1995; Kasson, 2001; Rico, 2013); the facilitation of a continued expansion, colonisation and expropriation of the land to the west along with the expansion of capitalism and the reduction of ‘the commons’, including the evolution of the gun (Herman, 2014; Dray, 2018); the massive expansion of popular fiction and emergence of ‘frontier’ tourism; the popularisation of US politics and the reemphasis on universal freedoms (for white men); and the beginning of the shift in US foreign policy from continent to other ‘frontiers’ (Turner, 2010[1920]; Williams, 1955); even the centralisation of power in the office of the President. Whereas hunters had been ‘savages’ or indolent (Herman, 2014: 55; Adas, 2006: 50-53), hunters have since emerged as ‘all American’ hunter-heroes (Slotkin, 2000; Jones, 2015a), despite its nominal take-up4, who embody the spirit of rugged masculine

4 Hunting in the US remains a predominantly white leisure activity, for example, in a culture that remains deeply suspicious, despite talks of the 2nd Amendment (the right to bear arms in organised militia), of black men (and women) going armed in any context. According to the latest US census, 11.5 million or 11% of the adult US population hunted in 2016, a segment significantly dominated by white male American (90%), most of which (97%) are white Americans (US Department of the Interior, 2016: 24-35).

7 Van Veeren individualism that made the US and the US’s place in the world possible.

More importantly, hunting can be understood as a much wider discourse, encompassing a number of intertexts (Van Veeren, 2009) that add to its power. Hunting was never only about the pursuit of animals, but involves the control of territory; the hunting of knowledge and scientific and technical discourses; and the hunting of people - whether ‘Indians’ (Ortiz, 2018), slaves (Chamayou, 2011), witches (Levack, 1987; Federici, 2018), communists and ‘queers’ (Dean, 2013; Beauchamp, 2018), terrorists, and sexual partners (Luke, 1998). Hunting is a gendered, raced and sexualised discourse, not only in terms of who is hunted, but who is permitted to hunt, how social, economic and geographical boundaries are policed, and where histories and practices are entangled and entwined through these structures of power.

When it comes to hunting and race, they are mutually constituted, working to undergird systems of social control, settler colonialism and capitalist expansion, but also economic exploitation, and knowledge and cultural appropriation. More specifically, beyond the political and racial work that constructing the landscape as terra nullis, wild and uncivilised does (Pateman, 2007: 36; Moreton-Robinson, 2015: xiii), hunting and race are present and intertwined through the repeated use of strategies of animalisation. This occurs through the construction of the colonised or enslaved ‘other’ as less than human, in particular as pest or ‘vermin’ (Wolfe, 2006; Mavhunga, 2011; Fanon, 2008[1952]) - and therefore colonisation as pest-control - but also through the construction of the ‘self’ as heroic ‘apex’ animal predator (Baker, 2001: 78-81).

This intertext between racial discourses and hunting ones is perhaps most evident in the US in its roots first in the role that hunting played in the conquest of the ‘new world’, which included ‘Indian-hunting’ and later, in slave patrol practices and their legacies. Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example, set bounties per Indian scalps, a practice that endured for almost a century (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014: 64). Later, slavery necessitated state-supported manhunting as an essential component of the system and the expansion of slave-based capitalism, particularly when overseas slavery was banned and slave values increased; from surveillance and pass systems to restrict the mobility of slaves, to an expansive tracking economy that covered a hemisphere with the exchange of tracking skills and technology - such as (?) the use of specially bred and trained dogs for manhunting (bloodhounds) (Chamayou, 2012: 66-67). And these associations have not disappeared. Within current US police manhunting discourses, which

8 Hunt as security logic intersect heavily with counterterrorism ones, urban terrains become the hunting landscape, and those criminalised become the hunted. The New York Police Department, for example, were found to have police officers wearing T-Shirts and producing commemorative coins bearing Ernest Hemmingway’s famous manhunt quote (quoted above) dating back at least 30 years (Coscorelli, 2013), drawing together racist tropes, with imagery of a slave manhunt (and a Hunger Games reference) (see Figure 1) fuelling longstanding arguments of abolitionist movements over the historical origins of armed police forces in slave patrols, and the excessive and racialised use of force by armed US police (Rousey, 1984; Ralph, 2019).

Figure 1 – NYPD ‘Challenge Coin’, From Robbins, 2013. Use tbc.

Hunting discourses however also have important and essential gendered and sexual components, ones under-explored in existing work on their security politics - both in terms of hunting’s origins and in the overlap between manhunting within overtly security-focused discourses and within dating/courtship-centred ones. Beginning with Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and later with chivalric codes within the European tradition (Cartmill, 1993; Tsaknaki, 2018), hunting for animals and hunting within courting rituals were considered intertwined and essential for cultured men. Men and masculinity, just as in animal hunting discourses, are judged based on their ability to court and conquer women; women’s femininity tied to their virtue and ability to resist, evade or appropriately be ‘caught’ in this hunt. Today’s dating rituals still reflect this interconnection, with men and women still encouraged to obey the rules of la chasse (Noble in Renwick, 2017; The Game), and romance novels reproducing these ideas of who hunts and who is hunted (Kamble 2014; Kitchen, 2018, Jarmakani, 2015), for example Eden Summer’s very popular ‘Hunting Her’ book series with storylines that rely heavily on

9 Van Veeren the structuring work of the hunt and of gendered predator-prey relations.5

Moreover, hunts also serve to police gender and sexuality. As Silvia Federici argues (2018), witch hunts were used not only to further extractive capitalist understandings of property and to exclude women as knowledge-makers, but also to police their sexuality outside the confines of legitimate marriage. More recently, the politics of gender, sexuality and the hunt were entangled through the ‘hunt’ for communists within the US State Department during the Cold War. Alongside the Red Scare and the hunt for communists, was the Lavender Scare and the hunt for easily subverted or ‘fellow traveller’ gay men and women (Dean, 1998:76). Most recently, the policing of bodies around gender and sexuality has included the targeting of trans men and women, who are considered more deceptive (Beauchamp, 2018).

Figure 2

5 With thanks to Veronica Kitchen for her generous help with this point.

10 Hunt as security logic

Finally, as Luke suggests, this ‘cross talk between hunting and heterosexuality reflects the fact that both institutions eroticise power difference’ in a way that is performative (Luke, 1998: 645; see also Baralt et al, 2004) (see Figure 2). The hunt eroticises through the feminisation and sexualisation of prey; animal hunts often use the language of sex, of tension and release, to describe its affects and justify its popularity (Luke, 1998). In turn, the pattern of men hunting women, la chasse, is replete with metaphors of the hunt and it possessive, accumulative logic: a woman is a ‘catch’, a ‘prize’, to ‘take’ or to ‘have’, or a ‘fox’ (sexually desirable because she is ‘independent and evasive, thus exciting to run down and conquer’ (Luke, 1998: 644) versus a ‘dog’, ‘tamed and ugly’). Women hunting men however are often constructed as deviant sexually: as cougars and man-eaters.6 This sexual and gendered dimension to hunting discourses are therefore an essential component of the insecurities reproduced by patriarchy.

Hunting as a security logic in relation to war therefore suggests a need for closer scrutiny in relation to these intertexts. At the heart of all these discourses, and therefore the security logic of the hunt, is the idea of conquest, possession, extraction and of domination: of, in short, mastery. Drawing on the work of postcolonial scholar Julietta Singh (2018, see also Said, 1979: 109; Cixous, 1986; Moreton-Robinson, 2015), hunting can be reinterpreted for its reproduction and commitment to relations of dominance and of mastery. Mastery, as Singh argues, ‘invariably and relentlessly reaches toward the indiscriminate control over something - whether human or inhuman, animate or inanimate. It aims for the full submission of an object - or something objectified’ (2018: 10). The ‘mastery of colonisation’ also simultaneously entails and entangles

two seemingly distinct registers: to “best” someone, to beat them and in so doing become master over them on the one hand, and to reach a level of competence in which one becomes rightfully pedagogical on the other hand. To put it crudely, a colonial master understands his superiority over others by virtue of his ability to have conquered them materially and by his insistence on the supremacy of his practices and worldview over there, which renders “legitimate” the forceful imposition of his worldview (Singh, 2018: 9).

Mastery, of which the hunt is an example, therefore remains ‘bound to structures of violence’ (Singh, 2018: 9) as much as this connection may be disavowed. It is also tied to consumption

6 Within more extreme kink communities, for example, what is sub-text is made explicit through the ways that hunting is played out in ‘primal’, ‘hunter kink and slave hunts’ (Cruz, 2016; Rock, 2017).

11 Van Veeren and to possessive, extractive logics: I see you, I name you, I consume you, I master you, I own you (Singh, 2018; Nyamnjoh, 2018). It is an inescapable ‘way of life’ (Singh, 2018: 7); it is ‘everywhere’ (Cixous, 1986: 78). This includes working to reproduce systems of knowledge in order to control (Federici, 2018; Doty, 1996). Therefore, as Singh proposed, and as studying the hunt suggests, to loosen the hold of mastery’ and its attendant power relations of domination ‘we must learn to read for it’ before we can imagine other ways of being (Singh, 2018: 6).

For example, the core relation within hunting, a dialectic of predator-prey, hunter-hunted (Chamayou, 2011:57), is one first of constituting these two subject positions, reinscribing boundaries but also hierarchies along raced, gendered and sexualised lines, with predators often conceived of as the dominant one, the master. These subjects are also constructed in a possessive way. i.e. the prey (as target) is something to be hunted with a view to collecting, owning, capturing and containing it. While both are animalised through hunting, the hunter- predator-hero-consumer-master is a masculine figure (and sometimes hyper-masculine) with the prey-victim-consumed-mastered constituted as feminine. Those that are constituted as prey (animalised, victim, vermin, consumed) are not able to or are not entitled to mastery (Baker, 2001).

Second, hunting reproduces mastery through possessive control of the landscapes as well as of the knowledges and expertises of hunting. For example, the knowledge that slaves were permitted was limited, reading and writing was forbidden, but this extended to laws and punishment to prevent access to maps in order to limit their escape and facilitate hunting them for punishment or death (Hawkins and Thomas, 2013). In the Jim Crow era, lynching hunts were used to police the behaviours of ‘free’ African Americans, to remind them of the behaviour expected of black men, to produce by force the colonial subject (Chamayou, 2011:9, 110). Mastery, domination and control - of land, of people, of ideas - are policed and reproduced through the hunt that interconnects landscapes and knowledge.

Finally, hunting as mastery operates through the narrative structures of the hunt, that celebrate its affects and its objects, and in turn reproduce its legitimacy. Hunting as a possessive, expansive and extractive activity involves an established narrative structure; the hunt is at its core a story, and, as others have argued (Inayatullah and Dauphinee, 2016), narrative structures are powerful within security discourses. Before any violent confrontation, there must be the identification of a target and a desire for pursuit (a missing slave, a Most Wanted advertisement,

12 Hunt as security logic a terrorist watchlist); the preparation for the hunt or the realisation that one is being hunted; the stalk and the evasion; the battle culminating in the kill/capture or escape; and then crucially the conclusion of the hunt through the triumphant display of any trophies of the hunt, bringing to a close the narrative. A ‘good hunt’ is therefore one that has an exciting story, a victor (master), and a trophy at the end (Brower, 2005; Linneman, 2017) to reinforce its possessive dimension. It is also one that is bounded by rules of ‘good conduct’ and timely (not to fast or too slow). The satisfactory resolution, especially for the hunter, helps to reassert dominance and mastery over the prey-subject. For Luke, the narrative of the hunt is based on ‘the desire to possess those creatures who interest or excite the hunter’ culminates in the possessive touching and display of ‘trophies’ of the hunt, often described by hunters as akin to a sexual release (Luke, 1998: 630). This display of trophies (including in deeply violent ways such as the punishment of runaway slaves, the postcard souvenirs of lynchings, as well as through the displays where the violence has been sanitised such as the display of police seizures (Linneman, 2017) is therefore also closely aligned with the collection of species and of samples, and with the mapping of territory (Dray, 2018). It is therefore the same narrative as that of scientific explorers and anthropologists, and why conservation, collection, and hunting (with their gendered, raced and sexed dimensions) are historically deeply intertwined (Ryan, 2000; Kalof, 2003; Mechling, 2004; Brower, 2005; Verbeek, 2016).

Understanding hunting as mastery therefore enables an understanding of the power of this discourse to extend beyond metaphors and subject positions and their relations, but to the control of landscape, to the (re)generation of expertise and systems of knowledge production, as well as to the (re)popularisation of affects, narratives and objects of the hunt as celebrations and (re)affirmations of mastery with its attendant racial, sexual and gendered elements which are at the heart of the hunting security logic. However, there is an additional, fundamental twist to the power of hunting as mastery: hunting works through secrecy.

SECRECY AND MANHUNTING IN THE GWoT

Hunting as a discourse therefore involves a set of subject positions, spaces, knowledges, and a narrative that are worth closer scrutiny. In particular, however, hunting deserves closer attention owing to the ways in which secrecy shapes hunting as a security logic. Secrecy is productive (of subject positions, of practices, of technologies) (Lochrie, 1999; Van Veeren 2019; Walters, 2020). The key to hunting however is knowledge, and sensory, (un)making. Moreover, with its

13 Van Veeren colonial, raced, sexed and gendered elements, hunting is suffused with secrecy: as the ‘other’, whether landscape, identity or idea, is exoticised (and eroticised) through articulations with mystery, unknowability and deceptive qualities. Special rules of the hunt therefore gain extra traction for the hunt to be ‘satisfying’, as well as special expertise to navigate the unknown, while trophies become a way to ‘reveal’ and show off mastery of this domain. This final section therefore explores these dimensions in more detail, using manhunting in the GWoT as illustrative. Hunting became, for many special operators and their wider networks, including the US newsmedia (see Figure 3) and popular culture (e.g. Zero Dark Thirty, ‘Homeland’, ‘Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan’), the defining logic: as a Predator squadron, ‘We were always hunting, day and night’ (MM:81); we had ‘become hunters’ (MMc:7); ‘our core responsibility was very straightforward: hunting down the world’s most dangerous terrorists (BV:66). For Special Operator Robert O’Neil, who took part in the Osama bin Laden raid, their role was ‘hunting down’ targets (RO:183). Moreover, ‘ordinary’ soldiers, such as infantryman Davie Bellavia used this language: ‘This is a hunt. We look for bad guys and move on’ (DB:132).

Figure 3

Secrecy subjects and the hunt

To begin, the Other within a hunting discourse, whether predator or prey, is often constructed as secretive, duplicitous, seditious, skulking, cowardly, and treacherous, as well as deviant and transgressive, and often in relation to their knowing or not knowing certain ‘secret’ or ‘forbidden knowledge’: witches in the Middle Ages (Federici, 2018), Native Americans during the colonial period (Adas, 2006: 56), slaves in the colonial period, African American Indians

14 Hunt as security logic in the Jim Crow era (Hadden, 2001), Japanese-Americans in World War II, Communists during the Cold War (Weldes, 1999: 129; Dean, 2001), and Viet-Cong in the US-Vietnam War. As is argued below, this extends today to terrorist. The self is then constructed as heroic and essential for containing a dangerous, transgressive and elusive threat.

While the constitution of the US citizens within the GWoT discourse is broadly as innocent victims (see Jackson, 2005) and as a feminised subject lacking agency (Shepherd, 2006) – its security services, and especially its military, are formulated as predators within the hunt, including quite obviously the naming of its most controversial drone, the MQ-1, the ‘Predator’. A squadron became a ‘wolf pack’ (MMc:2) and ‘bird of prey ready to strike’ (MM:236; MMc:335), ‘chasing down and killing the bad guys’ (MM:192) as they ‘unleashed predator’ (MM:128). Special Operators, in turn, act ‘like wolves on prey’ (RO:37).

More directly, there is an explicit and repeated connection made between being hunters and manhunting: For Robert O’Neil (RO), Chris Kyle (CK), Matt Bissonette (MO), Brandon Webb (BW), and Howard Wasdin (HW), all SEAL Team snipers, hunting animals as an experience not only shaped their early lives, but is drawn on to develop the skills and make sense of the affects of hunting people: Snipers a ‘born to shoot’ (BW:30); Wasdin, while deployed in Somalia and waiting for a mission, went sniper training on safari, ‘hunting wild pigs, gazelles, and impalas’ from military helicopters (HW:229); Bisonnette made annual trips to a ‘shooting, hunting, and outdoors trade show’ along with a fellow SEAL (MO:139). For O’Neil, whose introductory timeline marks significant moments of his life, situating his first deer kill alongside his first man kill:

My first kill was a mule deer, a big buck’ (RO:7) ‘now I was part of the club…any residual remorse fell away’ (RO:8). … [Later] ‘I had my first kill. I don’t want to compare it to my first buck, and yet there was some similarity. I’d envied the guys who’d already killed an enemy fighter and bragged about it. Now I was part of the club. I felt no remorse. Zero…. They’d created a cult of death (RO:169).

David Bellavia (DV), while ‘clearing’ areas of Fallujah as an infantryman, experiences the ‘euphoria’ of a close combat kill. As his account explains, drawing on deer hunting skills learned from watching videos with a fellow Sergeant, such as ‘how the best hunters will make a little noise just before they shoot a buck,’ he targets an insurgent, makes a noise, and when the man ‘looks up, just like the buck in the hunting video’ he squeezes the trigger, giving

15 Van Veeren him ‘a magnificent feeling’ while the target ‘howls’ and ‘keens in agony’ (DB:111). For Bellavia, moments like these were a ‘test of manhood’, ‘Are you man enough? Are you tough enough? Do you have the nuts for this? Can you pull the trigger? Can you all? Can you survive?’ (DB:112-113). Killing the enemy like this, made ‘us feel more alive, more powerful.’

Post-service life, for example, is also often marked by the specific reference to hunting and predatory mind-sets (see Figure 4). Clint Emerson, also a retired SEAL, advocates a ‘predator mindset’ in the civilian training packages he offers to corporate leaders as part of navigating the threats of everyday life.

Figure 4 - ‘In a future where every stranger poses a potential threat, knowing the predator mindset is the only safe haven.’ Screen Grab from Clint Emerson’s ‘100 Deadly Skills’ Website, part of the Wolf group.

As per all hunting discourses, this ‘predatory’ subject position for the US security ‘self’ was tied in particular to a set of layers of secret keeping (Van Veeren, 2019). These layers of secrecy were essential for hunting practices (see below) but they were also central in (re)producing identities tied up with gender, sex and race. As argued in ‘Secrecy’s subjects’ (Van Veeren 2019), special operators in particular and specifically in connection with hunting in the US ‘Shadow War’ represented themselves as ‘insider’, ‘stealthy’, ‘quiet’, and ‘alluring subjects each layer adding new dimensions to the ways in which they were constructed as racialised white subjects, masculine, and heterosexual. For example, through the ways in which their

16 Hunt as security logic operations relied on a secrecy culture of the stoic, masculine ‘quiet professional’ while simultaneously taking pride and celebrating how their access to secrets made them alluring sexually, ‘we called it ‘touching the magic’’ (BV:158). The predator is therefore a skilled navigator of secrecy, meaning it is not only the prey that hides as Marks et al (2005) and Chamayou (2011) suggest. This skill of hiding, or being stealthy, however is exclusively produced for a predator subject in ways that reproduce the legitimacy of these actions as well as hegemonic understandings of race, gender and sexuality.

In turn, the terrorist ‘other’ is constituted as the prey (MMc:335), animalised and with an illicit relationship to secrecy.7 Terrorists and insurgents are like a ‘caged animal (MO1:248) or their actions as animal like, such as ‘prowling’ (MM:284). They were ‘game’ for hunting (CK:238), military snipers are therefore ‘big-game hunters of the battlefield’ (BW:43; Bryant in Power, 2013). It also means repeatedly using metaphors normally associated with hunting for the act of finding terrorist suspects, including ‘hunting down’ (MM:109), ‘chasing down’ (MM:102), ‘rooting out’ (MM:141), or ‘flush out’ (MM:303; CK:284), being ‘hot on the trail’ (MMc:270) or ‘bagging a big target’ (MMc:136; CK:271) before they’ve ‘gone to ground’ (RO:162).

Importantly, as Mavhunga (201x) argues, there is an element of constructing the animalised prey as vermin, which are particularly associated with hiding (and being unclean amongst other associations). Whilst US security personnel as predators are animals (BV:102), wolves (MMc:327,342), lions (MM:125), and birds of prey (MM:67), the ‘other’ are ‘as slippery as river eels’ (MM:237), are ‘ants’ (MM:247), a ‘swarm’ (RO:115) or a ‘hornet’s nest’ (HW:54; RO:116,273), ‘dart in different directions like roaches caught in a light’ (MMc:159; BV:158), they are like ‘mice’ (MM:277) that play ‘a strange cat-and-mouse game’ (MM:255), even ‘silly rabbits’ (MM:251). Most often, however, they are like rats (CK:142) that live in ‘rat- infested slums’ (CK:234, 270), ‘rat nests’ (MM:304), or ‘ratholes’ (CK:133), or that ‘scattered like rats’ (HW:6) when found. For Martin, ‘Insurgents were like having a house infested with rats; the more of them you killed, it seemed, the more they bred’ (MM:2520).

7 Terrorists have also been ‘thingified’ through the discourse that routinely labels fleeing suspects ‘squirters’ (e.g. MMc:99; MO:185) and that constructs them as gender-queer and sexually deviant: Taliban targets are described as wearing ‘man-dresses’ (MM:73; RO:153), sexually assaulting sheep (MM:81, MM:247), and holding hands (MM:112).

17 Van Veeren

Their ‘hiding’ and evasion therefore necessitating this ‘flushing’ and ’rooting’ out, and their use of secrecy practices constructs them as a threat, but also as inferior, cowardly, dishonorouble and untrustworthy, not fighting fair or obeying the laws of civilised combat as well as feminised in relation to the masculine predator:

As time went on, the insurgents began to understand that they couldn’t conduct their plotting and other nefarious activities right out in the open or we would find them and kill them, although they didn’t understand how we did it. They thought they were being so clever about covering their tracks that they were invisible, like Mao’s fish in the sea (MM:81).

The Taliban had shown great resourcefulness in figuring out our rules of engagement. They stayed close to women and children and tried to move with civilians when possible. Some wore women’s clothing to avoid detection. They knew we’d honour the rules of civility and used them against us (MMc:159).

Finally, US forces engage in the construction of this predator-prey relation as creating a type of intimate relationship of the kind that hunters feel with their prey (Luke, 1998), what manifests even within this discourse as a sense of expertise, attraction, pleasure, obsession and transgression. In addition to watching their ‘prey’, including in sexual acts, US security personnel centre this intimacy and connection in their accounts of their work: ‘I was obsessed… I knew as much about this man, my nemesis, as I knew about my wife’ (MM:297); ‘There were hundreds of them out there and I had become addicted to finding them’ (BV:126), ‘it felt as if I knew more about my targets than their own families did’ (BV:211). For McCurley, the constant ‘stare’ demanded of Predator drone operators by the hunt meant:

there was an intimacy about following someone for months. We spent so much time with the family that I knew what the Captain’s kids looked like and what roads they took to school. I knew how his wife did the family laundry and where she shopped for dinner. (MMc:116).

For special operators, like O’Neill, the pinnacle of their skill at ‘hunting’ included being able to sneak into the bedrooms of their targets and touch them while they slept:

we became so good at entering targets silently that we started playing a game we called “counting coup” in honor of Native American warriors of the past. To demonstrate their courage and stealth, Native Americans would creep up to their sleeping enemy and touch him, even take items off his person without waking him.

18 Hunt as security logic

So we started doing that, too (RO:192).

For snipers, like Webb, ‘a sniper has to know the mind of his prey almost as well as the prey himself. Or better’ and to have what he calls ‘empathy’ for his prey (BW:43).

[T]he sniper’s kill in …more personal… when you sit concealed in a hide site for hours, even days, watching someone, noting his every move, getting to know his daily routine, his mannerisms, assembling an entire profile of his personality and intentions through exhaustive observations, it’s an entire different experience. A sniper may know his target intimately before the moment comes to squeeze the trigger’ (BW:4-5).

Both predator and prey as subjects are therefore constructed in relation to each other as well as in relation to secrecy. While both these constructions involve animalisations, the GWoT hunting discourse folds in long-standing colonial and racial languages of infestations and vermin, but also of intimacy and pleasure, using secrecy and hiding as part of this, as part of this construction of hunting as legitimate, and overall the act of domination and mastery as necessary.

Landscapes of the Hunt

Second, hunting involves the construction of space and spatial relations through secrecy. The landscape of hunting - whether forest, desert, ocean or urban terrain - shapes the predator-prey relation by virtue of how it shapes the skills required to track, surveil, evade, and capture/kill. The terrain - including space constructed as empty or a wasteland (terra nullius) or shadowy and therefore wild and lawless - is still one of secrecy where predator and prey need to identify cover and hiding places, decode signs on the landscape, navigate maze-like features (multiple choices of which direction to pursue, for example), cover territory at pace, all in pursuit of the control of the other through control of the space. Knowledge of the landscape therefore might become secret knowledge (as in the ability to read a map).

Alongside the construction of predators and prey, the hunting discourse of the GWoT therefore involves the construction of the landscape as ‘other’, as part of the secret and therefore as needing mastery. So, while the Bush administration in the early stages of the war, constructed the GWoT as ‘everywhere’ (’spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning’ (Bush, 14 September 2001), the landscapes of Afghanistan, Iraq and then the Sahel region were articulated more particularly with ‘savagery’ (CK:146, 244, 245, 284, 316),

19 Van Veeren

‘the Wild West’ (BW:15; RO:194,273, CK:4, 83, 120, 147, DM:190), ‘Indian’ (MO:134) and ‘injun country’ (CK:267, 291), the ’Stone Age’ (CK:253), the ‘10th’ (RO:137) and the ‘14th century’ (RO:156). It was also associated alternatively with being empty, dirty and full of vermin as a ‘snake pit’ (CK:133), full of ’slums’ (CK:330; MM:29) including ‘rat-infested slums’ (CK:133) and ‘rat-holes’ (CK:133). It was a ‘proving ground’ (MMc:283), an ‘ungoverned region’ (MMc:299), a land that had turned ‘into sand and dust, Now only acacia trees and shrubs grew’ (MMc:237), ‘a vast and empty land’ with ‘desolate highways’ (DB:2), a ‘rugged’ and sparsely populated ‘valley of death’ (RO:144), ‘the end of the world’ (HW:184), ‘garbage-strewn’ (MMc:151), ‘filthy’ (DM:189), filled with ‘that tangible smell of starvation, disease and hopelessness’ (HW:184), an ‘ass-crack’ (BW:14), and the ‘dirt circuit’ (DM:258).

The discourse of the GWOT therefore constructed not only the ‘other’ as animalistic, savage, backward, and dirty, but also its landscape this way. Correspondingly, the landscape of war therefore was also one filled with secret spaces and rendered unknowable and mysterious: it was a ‘jungle’ (and requiring napalm to clear it) (CK:232), with ‘tunnels’ (DM:223) where rats scurry (MM:129), it included a ‘maze of interlocking fortresses’ (DB:48; DM:110), ‘a mazes of alleyways’ (DB:10). For Velicovich, again combining animalisation with a mystification of the landscape: ‘Markets in the Middle East are like bees nests that have been kicked—people everywhere, crushed together, with the stall-lined paths winding this way and that like a honeycombed maze’ (BV:116). The landscape used by the ‘other’ are also like ‘bunker fortresses’ (CK:144), and holes (MM:278, 279) where terrorists and insurgents hide. It was overall often an ‘environment [that] provided too much cover, too much concealment, and too many escape routes for the enemy… In this environment, an enemy could appear from anywhere’, especially ‘dressed the same as a civilian’ (HW:6).

Technologies and techniques of the Hunt

Third, hunting is a power relation that centres around practices of stalking, surveillance and evasion, especially where the terrain is constituted as ‘wild, ‘savage’, unknown and why the frontiers remains such a powerful imaginary, opening the way for certain subjects to claim mastery, authenticity and to constitute the ‘self’ as expert in ways that are gendered, sexed and raced. These are secrecy practices as much as they are part of the constitution of secrecy subjects and the legitimation of a conflict and discourse. For example, in relation to war and current practices of manhunting, as Marks et al (2005) explain in comparison to ‘traditional’

20 Hunt as security logic military strategy:

a manhunt scenario differs in that each player’s strategy is different. The fugitive always wants to avoid capture, while the pursuer always wants to engage and capture the target – the pursuer must confront to win, whereas the fugitive must evade to win (Marks et al, 2005: 19).

Before the use of drones - a technology has been justified in part through the ways in which it has been promised to shift the balance of the hunt not only by introducing new sensory abilities but also by shortening the ‘find-fix-finish’ abilities (i.e. the ability to sense and kill) – dogs, and dog packs, have been used as an enduring technology of the hunt (Chamayou, 2012: 65; Jones, 2015b; Parry and Yinling, 2020; McSorley, 2020) bred and shaped by hunts including manhunting.8 Guns, similarly, have a complex history intertwined with war, hunting, including for example ‘Indian hunting’, and pacification as part of settler colonialism and expansive capitalism (Dray, 2018: 113-118; Kelly, 2004).

Beyond drones, dogs, and guns, technologies and associated techniques (or knowledges) of the hunt and its secrecies have expanded significantly for the use by (human) predator and prey in connection with tracking, surveillance, and evasion. In other words, hunting is constituted as requiring specialised skills and techniques, often tied to the use of advanced technologies, such as night vision, infrared sensors, ‘hides’, even choreographies of the hunt as trained hunting experts learn to move carefully through a landscape, moving without drawing attention whilst alert to the other. At the heart of this technology and these techniques is therefore the need to master, not just the landscape, but the domain of the senses, a ‘multi-sensorial milieu’ (Bourne, 2018) and therefore to control the possibility of detection and evasion. This means that in addition to the ways in which the hunt engages and reproduces important dimensions of visual cultures - from mapping and surveillance, ways of seeing that make visible and therefore knowable - it is also a process of making invisible (Van Veeren, 2019), of containing secrets, and of preventing others from seeing and knowing. The hunt is a multi-layered secrecy-keeping practice that works across sensory domains and forms of knowledge (un)making, what is called an arcanum (Van Veeren, 2019). Moreover, hierarchies and boundary-making equally become associated with these knowledges: some genders, races and sexualities deemed as more expert and entitled than others in keeping secrets. While certain technologies and techniques are not

8 For other security and military uses of dogs see Cudworth and Hobden (2015) and Kurowska (2020).

21 Van Veeren only used to hunt, but are used to keep the hunt itself secret, from the prey, as well as from others, particular in the case of manhunts. In turn, these secrecy-keeping technologies and techniques help to reproduce the subjects of the hunt and its justification.

The GWoT in particular has facilitated the development of a significant infrastructure for US global manhunting (Demmers and Gould, 2018). Consisting of far more than drones, which are only the ’tip of the spear’ or the most visible and discussed element, this infrastructure revolves around the emergence of a new military structure, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), especially to hunt for terrorist targets (Niva, 2013). With its extensive databases (Weber, 2016), near complete integration of US military and intelligence agencies, as well as its ability to direct both armed drones and special operators, JSOC became a ‘targeting machine’ (BV:xiii; Naylor, 2015) facilitating a sense that the US could now find anyone in the world at any time (BV:85), moving closer to a US strategic aim articulated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and later by President Barak Obama to ‘deny sanctuary’ anywhere in the world (Wolfowitz, 2002), so that they would ‘find no safe haven’… ‘wherever they are’ (Obama, 11 Sep 2014) and make ‘manhunting a foundation of U.S. national strategy’ (Crawford, 2009).9

In the first case, dogs remain an element of manhunting for their sensory abilities to detect (and attack) targets. First introduced in order to hunt runaway slaves in the Caribbean and later the US colonies, and whose war-time use included hunting Viet-Cong in the American-Vietnam War (Cudworth and Hobden, 2015; Hediger, 2013, Jones, 2015b), ‘combat assault dogs’ or more colloquially ‘hair missiles’ (MO:111) or ‘fur missile’ (RO:178), remain an integral element of manhunting as a part of the ‘predator’ pack (RO:178). As Owens and O’Neil describe, dogs were a key component of their assault teams: ‘We wanted to bring dogs whenever we could, so the dogs joined us 90 percent of the time. … They were incredible at going after military-age men and as a rule didn’t bite kids - though they could and did on some occasions’ (RO:178); ‘We launched the hair missile and he locked on to the scent of a fighter about fifty feet to my right. I could hear the fighter start screaming as the dog attacked’

9 Through the lens of its techniques and technologies, we can also understand modern forms of manhunting as intensely bureaucratised and technologically-linked processes. It is therefore not enough to think of hunting as a set of practices that are continuous with past practices of hunting, but to understand how hunting is now in part rationalised, even sanitised as part of a ‘clean warfare’ approach (Van Veeren, 2011) as much as they continue to reproduce and continue discourses of animalisation, for example.

22 Hunt as security logic

(MO:112)’; Two assaulters and the CAD (combat assault dog) would patrol the perimeter of the compound. The dog would be used to track squirters’ (MO:185); one of the many ways our dogs were useful; if the bad guys were out there, the dogs sniffed it out instantly’ (RO:177).

Alongside the use of this older ‘technology’, special operators are also skilled at stealth techniques, moving covertly to approach a target (‘infil’) and sometimes leave one covertly (‘exfil’) to do so via air, land and water, to use camouflage and covert tactics to set up sniper ‘hides’ and use sign language to quietly secure a position, and to clear rooms and buildings covertly as part of close quarter combat (CQB) techniques in ‘military operations in urban terrain’ (MOUT), all whilst hunting for hidden enemy. All of these hunting skills are therefore also part of the ‘micro techniques’ of hunting, the choreographies, almost literally dances, as operators learn how to place their feet, hands and eyes as they move through spaces that have become a key element of hunting in the GWoT. As explained in ‘Secrecy’s Subjects’ (Van Veeren, 2019:397), special operators ‘are trained to mask, silence, and invisibilise themselves while detecting the ‘traces’ of others; to manage and even ‘master’ the sensory-world and take violent control of a space. For the operators, being an expert, a ‘super soldier’, a ’shadow warrior’ means being: ‘big, fast, highly trained guys, armed to the teeth, expert in unarmed combat, so stealthy no one ever hears us coming’ (ML:9). They are taught ‘how to take down a house room by room and how to infiltrate an aircraft or a bus. We could secure a vessel compartment by compartment after boarding by sea or air’ (DM:127), ‘SEALS are expert at sneaking in and out of an area undetected’ (DM:152), ‘we don’t leave tracks’ (DM:153), they train to control their bodies so that ‘slow is fast’, learning to ‘constantly scan the area using all of your senses, looking in people’s eyes ad at their hands. Hands hold things that can kill you’ (DM:252), training ‘repeatedly until our muscles can react automatically’ (HW:87). More specifically, of snipers, as ‘master trackers’ (BW:3; DM:208), ‘It is the sniper’s job to compose, choreograph, and execute a death’ (BW:4). In other words, special operators as hunters become ‘masters’ of the microscales of the hunt, training in such a way as to master their environment and the senses.

More recently, however, manhunting has evolved to include the greater use of more global scale technologies. If dogs, stealthy ‘infil’ and ‘exfil’, snipers, and house to house searching are techniques and technologies on a more micro-scale, the new manhunting is also macro- scale in its practices, technologies and conception, after all the goal was to ‘deny sanctuary’ on a complete and global scale. The significant expansion of US surveillance practices,

23 Van Veeren particularly those of the National Security Agency (NSA) as revealed by Edward Snowden, as well as the ‘rise of the drone’ for manhunting and its associated infrastructures are consistent with this ‘everywhere war’ (Gregory, 2011) ideal. And as with the smaller, localised hunting practices, these ones also entail tracking skills, including ones that are covert: ‘My job was to hunt down the most dangerous terrorists in the world. If I was chasing you, you never saw me’ (BV:14). Drone operators therefore contributed to manhunting through their surveillance functions, collecting signals intelligence (modern ‘trail sign’) and often mapping a ‘pattern of life’ in an area of operations (MMc:52) to facilitate an assault, and like an evolution of combat dogs, as sensors. JSOC and the expanding Special Operations Command (SOCOM, established 1987) then converted this into a global operation. In this regard, armed drones represent a scale- change in the evolution of hunting, rather than its radical transformation.

Narratives and pleasures of the Hunt

Finally, the narrative structure of the hunt is founded on secrecy, and more specifically on a second structuring binary, beyond that of the predator-prey, that of conceal-reveal and of the pleasures or affective registers of this dialectic: an uncertainty as to who or what will emerge ‘on top’. In other words, rooted in the secrecy binary of conceal-reveal, like a burlesque show, the pleasure of the hunt is also in this tension. The trophy then becomes an element to reveal the secret and a reassertion of dominance and mastery of this secrecy domain, an extractive logic and possession that reproduces the justification and logic of the hunt itself.

Hunts within the GWoT therefore follow the conventional narrative structure beginning with the identification of a target before a dramatic chase and violent confrontation. Terrorist watch- lists, as well as the infamous Iraq playing cards of targets and the drone ‘kill list’ are therefore ways in which the hunt begins. Velicovich for example structures several sections as hunts for key targets in Iraq, beginning with discussions of how targets are chosen: ‘One question is at the heart of every targeter: where do you begin the hunt?’ (BV:85). Throughout his memoir, he detailed the hunts for al-Masri, Zarqawi, and al-Baghdadi, major figures in the conflict in Iraq (BV:108), just as Seal Team 6 members detail the hunt for Bin Laden (RO, MO), and drone operators, their specific hunts (MM, MMc).

And no hunt is complete without its narrative coming to a conclusion, usually with a celebration, story-telling and the production and circulation of trophies - an essential part of

24 Hunt as security logic the pleasures and economies of the hunt. ‘Successful’ manhunts in the GWoT reflect this pattern as retold across media, including these memoirs, however with the added inflection of the revelation of a secret: a (semi)secret hunt (bin Laden, for example), a (semi)secret organisation SEAL Team-6), for example. More specifically, hunts in the GWoT conclude in a number of ways, including through ‘battle damage estimate’ reports, the conversion of these deaths into statistics including kill counts for ‘bragging rights’ (CK:264; RO:164; MO:264), as well as updating the ‘kill list’ of most wanted men (BV:159,258) to demonstrate success. For example, a successful hunt ‘meant a possible kill for my logbook’ (MM:74). It also meant small and large celebrations, private and sometimes very public: from special and drone operators gathering for private retellings of the hunt (DM:188; MMc:136) or to receive medals, usually in private ceremonies. Or, for these retellings to happen in quieter moments: upon ‘bagging a big target’ McCurley recounts in his memoir, itself a storytelling of the hunt, ’Savoring a cigar and a freshly mixed martini’ he talked post-flight with a fellow operator ‘about the mission for a while. It felt better to tell the story [where] I made a toast to the man I killed’ (MMc:136).

More publicly, press briefings are held in which photographs of killed targets or of the hunt are displayed or medals awarded. In 2019, Conan, the combat assault dog who worked with Delta force to locate ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq, chasing him down a tunnel alone before being injured, was awarded a medal in a very public ceremony by President Donald Trump and Vice President Michael Pence at the White House, with details of the hunt being retold (Chokshi and Zraick, 2019), though the ‘secret’ identity of the dog only being revealed afterwards. On an even larger scale, very public celebrations and re-tellings followed the hunt and killing of Osama bin Laden where members of the US public gathered in the streets when the news broke, President Obama made a public statement and the Pete Souza image of the Situation Room was released (see Figure 5), a new display was added to the 9/11 Memorial on the raid, commemorative mugs and T-shirts went on sale across the US marking the date, private medal ceremonies were held, and the narrative of the hunt was retold in news reports, documentaries, the memoirs discussed and analysed here, and in Hollywood films such as Zero Dark Thirty (dir Kathryne Bigelow, 2012).

25 Van Veeren

Figure 5 - The Situation Room. U.S. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, along with members of the national security team, receive an update on Operation Neptune's Spear, Pete Souza, May 1, 2011.

Trophies are therefore an important element of drawing a GWoT hunt to a close, of the pleasures and economies of the hunt and again, these can be private trophies just as they can be very public ones, varying in practice from taking personal commemorative photographs at the conclusion of a hunt (MO:264) and keeping mementos for personal use. Beyond the GWoT, operators have collected, shared and displayed trophies including a wild pig’s tusk when sniper training (HW:229); a shaving kit taken from a captured Panamanian general (DM:188), an American flag shot at by insurgents whilst in a sniper’s hide (CK:241), a tattoo to mark a hunt (CK:219). Seal Team members in particular describe their Team Rooms in part as decorated like trophy rooms, with the memorabilia of past missions (RO:130). Alongside the mementos to lost teammates (including a dog), ‘the wall space was filled with plaques from other units like the Australian SAS and mementos from past missions. A bloody hood and flex-cuffs were mounted on a plaque on the wall after the squadron captured a Bosnian war criminal in the 1990s’ (DM:42; RO:273).

26 Hunt as security logic

CONCLUSION

Hunting is an important and to date still underexamined security logic that deserves closer scrutiny. Within the US, white settler hunting discourses pervasive and present in conversations between officials, in memoirs, in speeches and in journalistic coverage, as well as in popular culture continue to dominate a broad range of US hunting practices, including those associated with manhunting in the US GWoT. Beyond producing predator-prey subject positions, hunting entangles race, gender and sexuality, colonialism and extractive capitalism through a discourse of ‘mastery’ (Singh, 2018). Within this cultural context, hunting is ‘mastery’ of the landscape and terrain, of the techniques and technologies, of the subjects and knowledges involved.

Hunting is also a security logic that works through the power of secrecy; and secrecy as productive. Predator and prey must navigate and become ‘masters’ of a dangerous and unknown terrain using specialist skills in order to ‘triumph’. The dialectic of predator-prey therefore also relies on a second important one, that of conceal-reveal. This interaction fuels the expertise and narrative of the hunt and its ‘pleasures’, generating an allure and a legitimacy that helps to reproduce and circulate this logic. As this study of manhunting in the GWoT suggests, hunting remains central practice of US security forces, fuelling developments not only in drone technology and US intelligence agencies such as the NSA, but US military special operators and its global impact.

In other words, hunting is a social imaginary (James, 2019; see also Castoriadis, 1997) that organises, in profound ways, the social, political and economic through subjects, practices and knowledges, including in relation to security discourses (Weldes, 1999). Drawing together sex, race, gender, and colonial and capitalist structures of power, hunting through its roots in secrecy and in the binaries of predator prey, conceal and reveal, is generative of circulations, practices, subjects and knowledges. Hunting, whether as structuring metaphor or practice, is an epistemological orientation and used literarily and figuratively to police the social order in ways that continue today - from colonial conquest (Indian and game hunting), as part of maintaining an economic order (slave and witch hunting) based on race and gender, to today’s targeted killing practices amongst others. The secrecy-security elements of the hunt are central to its function as a (neo)colonial security logic rooted in notions of mastery and that continue to reproduce structures of power around race, gender, sexuality and colonial extraction today, empowering those that can construct themselves as legitimate ‘masters of the hunt’.

27 Van Veeren

Above all, hunting discourses therefore have a final secrecy element and that is the political work they do in concealing their own work: the ideological work of hunting as a social imaginary. Structured as a hunt metaphorically as well as in practice, the GWoT, like any hunting narrative helps to make the kill and capture, as opposed to a legal process, seem more rational and less remarkable, less see- of speak-able, ‘unseen and unspoken within security discourses’ (Ali, 2020). It therefore renders accountability and boundaries around this practice harder to oppose. As manhunting continues in the GWoT, we must therefore be attendant to the ways in which this discourse, in its language and practice, also infuses and shapes encounters across a number of other interconnected security areas, from ‘pirate’ and ‘migrant’ hunting, to modern day ‘witch’ hunting. Hunting remains a deeply powerful discourse within the US and beyond and is worth closer scrutiny alongside nuclear and risk logics.

28 Hunt as security logic

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