ABSTRACT
To understand what drones do to the law and the practice of armed conflict, we need to understand the warring context of counterinsurgency. As such, this chapter moves on to examine the targeting practices of the US military in its contemporary counterinsurgency operations. What are the history and political objectives of counterinsurgencies? And how, in the absence of the military uniform, do the counterinsurgent forces reproduce the knowledge–vision composite needed for the mobilisation of laws' visuality? This chapter will answer these questions by tracing the colonial origins of the US counterinsurgency doctrine along with a detailed analysis of various US military manuals and technological practices of population surveillance such as biometrics identification technologies. In insurgencies, where the insurgent forces abandon wearing the military uniform, the counterinsurgent targeting is primarily focused on reconstructing its own mode of wartime visuality. This has, on the one hand, amounted to an expansion of knowledge of targetability from hostility to political irreconcilability and, on the other hand, to visual identification of enemy both at the individual level – through biometric tracing of the population – as well as collectivising irreconcilability – through population support overlays.
