Geopolitics of Technological Futures: Warfare Technologies and Future Battlefields in German Security Debates

ABSTRACT

Germany’s role in global geopolitics is being renegotiated within current debates about future security architecture, weapons technology capabilities, and the spatiality of future battlefields. This paper introduces a critical geopolitics of technological futures approach and analyses weapons technology discourses through poststructuralist discourse theory and scholarship on technological expectations. It investigates German security policy documents’ construction of future threat scenarios, technological visions, battlefields, and the material-technological consequences associated with these futures. It identifies how the geopolitical scenario of ‘Westlessness’ discursively shifted after Russia’s war in Ukraine. It also considers the socio-technical imagination of ‘hyperwar’, which justifies the development of artificial intelligence-based weapons technologies. Such socio-technical imaginations construct desirable weapons and influence geopolitical leitmotifs. In turn, geopolitical imaginaries affect expectations of future weapons technologies and legitimate the acquisition of specific technologies. Therefore, this paper offers an approach to examining geopolitical power-knowledge constructions in relation to (new) technologies of killing.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Annika Mattissek, Paul Reuber, Thilo Wiertz and Katherine Hall for reading earlier drafts and offering helpful comments. Additional thanks go to my working group and Jason Dittmer for early brainstorming and feedback on the first drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

The data set associated with the paper is not publicly available for security and secrecy reasons.

Notes

1. My translation and analysis of mostly German-language documents into English entails some interpretation (Stengel 2020). Likewise, the coding and interpretation process is shaped by my positionality as a critical social sciences researcher.

2. ‘The territory of the Federal Republic is narrow (480 kilometres at the widest point between the eastern and western borders, 225 kilometres at the narrowest)’ (Federal Ministry of Defence, White Book, 1970, 40); ‘NATO must conduct its defence along a wide-stretched arc-shaped line, some 6000 kilometres long, extending from northern Norway to eastern Turkey’ (Federal Ministry of Defence, White Book, 1983, 43).

3. ‘[…] the space of NATO is separated by the Atlantic […]. The connection, from the USA to Europe across the Atlantic, at 6,000 km, is incomparably longer than the land route from the Soviet Union to the inner-German border, at 650 km’ (Defence policy guideline 1979, 39).

4. ‘[The Atlantic Alliance] has 21 years of peace in Europe to thank. […] It remained indispensable to our security in the ‘70s and, at the same time, the necessary basis of any détente policy. The Alliance must continue […] in such a way that any potential adversary remains deterred from the threat or use of force and, if attacked, successfully provides military protection to those attacked’ (Federal Ministry of Defence, White Book, 1970, 35); ‘As a member of the European Union and the North Atlantic Alliance, Germany is a reliable partner and ally. There, as in the United Nations […], Germany is committed to safeguarding peace, defending against global threats, promoting democracy, and supporting the international community’ (Federal Ministry of Defence, White Book 2006, 16).

5. Available at: https://securityconference.org/assets/02_Dokumente/01_Publikationen/MunichSecurityReport2019.pdf.

6. Currently, 60 PESCO projects have been adopted (Bundeswehr-Journal 2021).

7. ‘China’s response to the war has further amplified concerns that democracies have to brace for growing headwinds as the world enters a new stage of systemic competition’ (Munich Security Brief 2022b, 25); ‘Moscow and Beijing’s shared ambition to push international norms into compatibility with their authoritarian rule and establish spheres of influence increasingly poses a joint challenge’ (Munich Security Brief 2022a, 8).

8. ‘Perhaps, it is even time to move beyond debates about the future of “the West”, as the term still conveys geographical baggage, even though most supporters of the West as an idea argue that it is a political concept, based on liberal-democratic values rather than a position on the map’ (Munich Security Report 2021, 25).

9. ‘In this highly confrontational system, the EU and its member states must invest more in their security and defence in order to be a strong political and security actor. […] Therefore, we need a quantum leap forward to develop […] a stronger and more capable European Union that acts as a provider of security’ (Council of the European Union 2022, 6).

10. While this paper analyses recent and current debates on hyperwar, it conceptualises such narratives as socio-technological futures and imaginations of future battlefields and warfare. The future is constructed in the present through the process of prediction. As Borup et al. explain, ‘expectations and visions refer to images of the future, where technical and social aspects are tightly intertwined‘ (2006, 286).

11. This supports the vertical geopolitics call to establish a ‘volumetric vertical geopolitics’ in response to the ‘volumetric turn’ (Elden 2013; Jackman and Squire 2021; Squire and Dodds 2020; Virilio 2002; Williams 2013) and ‘include aerial views as generated from below as well as from above’ (Williams 2013, 225).

12. ‘Today, we can make long-term forecasts for individual world regions and issues, but we cannot predict with absolute certainty which of these developments will ultimately be decisive in geopolitical terms’ (Airbus Defence and Fraunhofer 2020); ‘The threat spectrum has become more diverse and unpredictable. […] [We find ourselves in] an uncertain world full of rapidly changing threats and geopolitical dynamics’ (Council of the European Union 2022, 5).

13. Hyperwar expectations demand that MGCS and the Panther be AI capable so that some human tasks can be replaced by decision support systems (e.g., fire control, target selection, munitions and a combination of so-called ‘effectors’ (weapons)) (Office for Army Development 2019, 24; Rheinmetall Defence 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a doctoral scholarship from the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation.