ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the multifaceted practical, societal, and legal functions of military uniform as it distinguishes civilian values, lives, and bodies from those of the combatants. To do that this chapter provides an account of the military uniform as a politically and legally significant garment that combines the knowledge and vision requirements of targetability in one distinct instrument. Military uniform organises the social imaginaries of the battlefield, and it also enacts a visual regime of discernability that identifies adversarial willpower. This chapter enriches the materialist focus and argument of the book by detailing the ways in which social, political, and visual qualities of the military uniform have historically formed the practice of war logistically as well as legally. After establishing the social, disciplinary, and visual affordances of the military uniform, this chapter redescribes the international law and customs of targeting as a derivative of the various modes of (in)visibility that this technology produces in a battlefield. Describing military uniform as a legal material is to unpack the constitutive function of (visual) technologies for production categories of targetable and protected humans and subsequently the legitimation of lethal targeting.
