DEREK GREGORY
KILLING SPACE: TARGETING, TECHNOCULTURE AND THE
ART OF BOMBING
Derek Gregory
‘Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise, and eventually,
inhabit.’
Tom McCarthy, International Necronautical Society at the Royal Geographical Society,
London, 2002
Note: The INS was founded by Tom McCarthy in 1999 and, as Wikipedia notes, is
‘closely modeled on European avant-gardes of the early 20th century. It replays,
not without parody, the politically-inflected structures of these avant-gardes, with
their manifestoes, committees, splinter groups and purges. At the same time the
INS makes use of these structures to generate artistic projects that explore the
relations between death and representation.’
Summary
Bombing has always attracted passionate responses – and not only from its victims. But
contemporary public debate is largely uninformed about the transformations in air war
since its inception in the early twentieth century. This program seeks to provide just such
a critical understanding of bombing by locating it in the transition from modern to late
modern war. This has progressively produced the world as target through the construction
of an abstract visual space that hollows out places and reduces them to co-ordinates,
traces and pixels on display screens from which all signs of broken bodies are erased.
This supposed ‘re-enchantment’ of war, with its lexicon of ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘smart
bombs’, feeds on and feeds back into the mediatization of war: war made scientific,
mundane and acceptable through its visual contraction of the world to a series of targets.
The desire to bring the victims of bombing back into the frame is an important one, but
this program takes a different tack and asks how the trick is done in the first place. A
primary objective of the program is to analyze the changing techno-cultural production of
targets. The project tracks the mutations of military air power theory and its targeting
protocols and procedures (‘operational art’) from the modern strategic bombing offensive
against Germany in World War II through the US bombing of Vietnam to the late modern
air wars over Afghanistan/Pakistan. Its focus is on the changing cartographic and visual
technologies that convert places into targets. It examines developments in intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance that have compressed the time between detection and
destruction, and developments in precision weapons that have contracted the target area.
It traces the transition from ‘deliberative targeting’ (in which targets are assigned to
DEREK GREGORY
aircrews before takeoff) to ‘dynamic targeting’ (in which cruising aircraft are assigned to
emergent ‘targets of opportunity’). It maps the networked spaces within which these
visualizations are produced to show that what seems to be a purely logical-scientific
process of abstraction has always involved a series of embodied, profoundly cultural
practices that are shot through with emotion (‘affect’) as well as calculation. And it traces
the development of a political and legal armature and its incorporation into the nominally
scientific targeting process, and shows how public concerns about bombing have come to
be mediated by NGOs like Human Rights Watch that also bring in to view the logic of
the targeting process.
The second objective is to analyze the convergences between visual technologies in the
military and civilian spheres, and the effects these have had on public representations of
bombing. Film and television are of central importance. Dramatizations and newsreels
of bombing played a crucial legitimating role in World War II, for example, while the
Vietnam War has often been called the first ‘television war’ or ‘the living room war’.
Through a critical interrogation of multiple visual archives for all three bombing
campaigns, the program examines the extent to which advances in photography, film,
television and video have (or have not) allowed the public a more intimate view of
bombing. It may be that these visual images produce not empathy but indifference – that
the abstractions of the targeting process are repeated in the imaginative geographies of
war imaging and reporting – and so a final objective of the program is to analyze the
work of visual artists who have deliberately drawn on those abstractions to reveal the
‘violence of representation’ that is necessary for targeting long before the first bombs fall.
Objectives
This program investigates three episodes in the developing geography of bombing to
identify the ways in which visualizations have made bombing (technically) possible and
(culturally) permissible, and to examine critical responses to them by visual artists.
Context
(1) The Great Divide: Histories of bombing Apart from general surveys (Grosscup
2006; Lindqvist 2001; Tanaka and Young 2009), the history of bombing has taken two
main approaches: (A) A political history concerned with the strategy of bombing: debates
over ‘area bombing’ versus ‘precision bombing’ in World War II (e.g. Biddle 2002;
Crane 1993; Davis 2006; Overy 2005; Sherry 1997); debates over Operations Rolling
Thunder and Linebacker I/II in North Vietnam (e.g. Clodfelter 1989; Parks 1982, 1983;
Smith 1994, 1998; Thompson 1980); debates over the relation between intensified US air
strikes and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (Exxum and others 2009); and (B) A social
history concerned with the experience of being bombed: vivid accounts of air raids on
cities in Spain, Britain, Germany and Japan in the 1930s and 40s (e.g. Friedrich 2006;
Gaskin 2005; Hewitt 1983, 1987, 1994, 2009; Lowe 2007; Paterson 2007; Stansky 2007).
Friedrich (2006) identifies these twin approaches with ‘the strategy from above’ and ‘the
strategy from below’, Hewitt (1983) with the view from the war room and the ‘civilian
DEREK GREGORY
view’, and there are affinities with O’Tuathail’s (1996) contrast between the high-level,
distanced ‘geopolitical eye’ and the grounded, embodied ‘anti-geopolitical eye’. These
all provide important insights – not least through their common accent on visualization –
but they install a problematic opposition between ‘inhuman technology’ and ‘the human
face’ (Hüppauf 1983). In contrast, this program explores the space between political
histories and social histories through a techno-cultural history of destruction. It is
inspired by Sebald’s (2004) questions about ‘a natural history of destruction’. He found
the phrase in a memoir by Zuckerman (1978), who was involved in planning the Allied
bombing campaign. As the war ended, he ‘wanted to get as quickly as possible to the
places that suffered’: and yet he confessed that none of his scientific analyses prepared
him for the enormity of what he saw at Aachen in December 1944. It is that gap between
the abstract space of targeting and the concrete place of destruction that I want to close.
Some exceptional writers have brought the two together: in fiction, Deighton’s (1970)
Bomber, which traces the arc of an air raid from Britain to Germany, and in non-fiction
Taylor’s (2004) magisterial reconstruction of the raid on Dresden or Hansen’s (2008)
Fire and fury, which opens and closes its strategic narrative with compelling vignettes of
the experience of being bombed. But Sebald’s ‘natural history’ was as much a theoretical
as a concrete construction, which can be traced back to Benjamin, Adorno and their joint
interest in spaces of constructed visibility (Gregory 2009). This is the theoretical ground
of this program. Others have made general epistemological claims about the ‘cosmic
view’ of air power (Adey 2998; Kaplan 2006a) but the devil is in the details, which is
why I analyze the visual technologies that have made bombing possible and – eventually
– watchable by viewing publics.
(2) Techno-cultural histories of destruction Deighton explains that the genesis of his
novel was his interest in technology: ‘suppose I wrote a story in which the machines of
one nation battled against the machines of another?’ My own interest is less in the aircraft
than in the techno-cultural apparatus that leads from the identification of targets to their
destruction: a complex assemblage that generate images, maps and sensors to produce
targets, guide aircraft and release weapons (cf. Wakelam 2009). The targeting process is
itself a moving target – it has been restructured multiple times (Glock 1994) – but its
epicenter is a series of visual technologies that enframe a target. And yet war cannot be
reduced to technology, and so I want to incorporate the role of embodiment and affect
within the targeting process. Deighton showed that the Allied bombing offensive was no
algorithmic war but one that constantly demanded decisions that could not be delegated
to machines (even though they were mediated by them). Bomber was written at the
height of the Vietnam War when bombing was seen as the advancing edge of a new
‘techno-war’ (Gibson 1986), and as such remote from the terrible physicality of the
ground war: but it was no less dependent on human subjects whose actions were as much
corporeal as they were calculative. The digital revolution of the twenty-first century
promises ‘immaculate warfare’ (Wrage, 2003) and ‘virtuous war’ (Der Derian, 2009) –
wherein aerial sensors, advanced information systems and smart bombs virtually erase
the body from the battle space – but it has not erased the fleshiness of the human in the
loop: even the Nevada-based operators of drones over Afghanistan suffer from PostTraumatic Stress Disorder from viewing the high-resolution images of destruction. In
DEREK GREGORY
short, the chain that links the identification of a target to its ultimate destruction is
typically represented as a technical one but there is no purely technical division of labour,
and memoirs by flight crews, forward air controllers and others demonstrate the
importance of visceral forms of affect (e.g. Bishop 2008; Flanagan 1992; see also Miller
2006).
(3) Spatial science: the targeting process In his classic account of air war Douhet
(1921: 57) noted that ‘the choice of enemy targets … is the most delicate operation of
aerial warfare.’ Modern targeting has been dominated by deliberative targeting, which
involves the assignment of targets to aircrews before takeoff, but it has been increasingly
supplemented by dynamic targeting, which involves cruising aircraft being directed to
emergent ‘targets of opportunity’ by ground forces. I have selected three diagnostic
campaigns to chart the transition from one to the other:



The combined bombing offensive against Germany (1940-45) involved an
extended process of deliberative targeting against fixed targets.
The air war in Vietnam (1965-1973) involved a mix of deliberative targeting,
controlled by the Johnson administration whose restrictions on fixed targets in
Hanoi-Haiphong were relaxed by Nixon for Linebacker II (Clodfelter 1989), and
dynamic targeting against mobile targets along the Ho Chi Minh Trail triggered
by automated sensors (Deitchman 2008; Rosenau, 2001: 8-27).
The US-led invasion of Afghanistan opened in 2001 with deliberative targeting
(Gregory 2004; Herold 2003), but since 2005 dynamic targeting has become
steadily more important (Dadkah 2008; Cordesman 2008).
DEREK GREGORY
I will draw on studies of imagery and targeting during the first Gulf War (1990-91) to
bring these changes into still sharper relief (Harris, 2006; Knights, 2002)
The first objective of this program is to map the targeting process. I say ‘map’ because
targeting is not only about the transformation of a place into a target; it is also a process
that takes place through the mobilization of a network of specific sites that is not
incidental to its outcome (cf. Livingstone, 2003). Targeting is thus a doubly spatial
science: it involves a spatial analytic and is itself a spatially distributed process. Over the
last fifty years it has been transformed by advances in compression and contraction that I
will chart in detail.
DEREK GREGORY
(a) Compression involves shortening the time between target identification and
execution, which is supposed to provide for more efficient (and at the limit pre-emptive)
action (Hebert 2003). During what Deptula (2008) calls ‘industrial-age warfare’ this
assumed a ‘factory-like, assembly line form’ that, for RAF Bomber Command, included
the production and analysis of aerial photographs and the collation of target books; the
assignment of numerical/graphical key point ratings to establish a hierarchy of targets;
the production of zone maps of target cities to calibrate firestorms; and the production of
target maps, supplemented by real-time images of the target outline produced by H2S
radar. The kill-chain was thus a concatenation of aerial views produced through a
process of calculation that was also a process of abstraction. None of the images was
stable; they were all subject to constant revision and interpretation at each of the points
through which the chain extended. In this case a minimum mapping would include the
Central Interpretation Unit (responsible for the analysis of aerial photographs), the
Ministry of Economic Warfare and the Air Ministry in London (which identified
potential targets), the Air Ministry’s Air Intelligence section AI 3 (c) near High
Wycombe (responsible for producing descriptions of targets for operational planners, and
target maps, illustrations and files for briefing officers and aircrew), Bomber Command
HQ, six to eight Bomber Command Groups and their airfields in eastern England, and
individual flight crews. The kill-chain was rationalized by subdividing its production and
regulating its practices through standard operating procedures. This entailed not only an
abstraction of the target but also an abstraction of the process through which the target
was produced, which was made to appear inevitable – target as telos – and its destruction
the terminus of a more or less ‘natural’ history. In Graham Greene’s review of Target for
Tonight (1941), a dramatized account of a mission, he admired how everyone carried out
DEREK GREGORY
‘their difficult and dangerous job in daily routine just like shop or office workers’ so that
‘what we see is no more than a technical exercise’ (Short 1997).
After the Second World War the USAF streamlined its targeting process through the
establishment of a Directorate of Targets responsible for the compilation of the ‘Bombing
Encyclopedia of the World.’ Work started in January 1946 on potential targets in the
USSR and in six months IBM cards had been punched for 5,594 targets; the database
quickly became global, and by 1960 contained 80,000 entries (Eden 2003: 99-109).
Machine processing was in its infancy, and the USAF faced formidable problems of
information management (Clinard 1959). Ten years later these had not been
satisfactorily resolved, and while Deptula and Brown (2008) locate the ‘cultural divide’
that inaugurated ‘information-age warfare’ in the 1970s, the air war in Vietnam retained
many of the sequential, assembly-line characteristics of conventional warfare (Gibson,
1986). In addition, the technical possibilities of enhanced compression were modulated
by a developing political and legal armature that had surrounded bombing since 1945. In
consequence, for much of the Vietnam war the kill-chain was an even more extended
process. During Operation Rolling Thunder, targets were proposed and reviewed by a
succession of Army and Air Force committees, by the Pentagon and the State
Department, and then decided at the White House Tuesday lunch. The constant target
checking was the product of acute political and legal sensitivity (Clodfelter 1989; Parks
1982; Parks 1983; Smith 1994; Smith 1998; Thompson, 1980). Since then the technical
prospects for what Cullather (2003) calls ‘bombing at the speed of thought’ have
increased spectacularly, but in the early stages of dynamic targeting in Afghanistan there
were still complaints that Pentagon micro-management and the involvement of Air Force
lawyers in every stage of the targeting process was reducing its effectiveness (Ricks
2002; cf. Westhusing 2002). Those legal protocols are an important part of this study, as
is the scrutiny of NGOs like Human Rights Watch; law regulates the conduct of war but
is also reconfigured through political-military actions that establish what is/not acceptable
(Canestaro 2004; Gregory 2006; Roblyer 2004; Roscini 2005; Schmitt 2005). The use of
drones and automated video/firing systems has introduced new ethical and legal issues
(Beier 2003, 2006), but it has also radically compressed the kill-chain: UAVs can
maintain a persistent presence over the war-zone, supplying continuous video feeds and
firing missiles and bombs, and since this means that a mission can be executed from a
single platform, the USAF now envisages an ‘optimized’ kill-chain of under two minutes
(Deptula, 2008).
DEREK GREGORY
(b) Contraction involves reducing the Circular Error Probable (CEP) of weapon delivery
systems. This is measured by the radius of a circle centred on the aiming point within
which 50 per cent of the strikes ought to fall. Under ideal test conditions and using the
latest technologies, the CEP fell from 3300 ft over Germany to 400 ft over Vietnam, and
is now estimated at 10-40 ft (Deptula 2001; see also Conetta 2004). But these raw
figures conceal two crucial analytical issues. First, the sequence implies the progressively
more successful isolation of a target, but deliberative targeting is based on the location of
a target within a network whose geometries displace the co-ordinates of precision
weapons so that their destructive effects knowingly surge far beyond any immediate point
of impact (cascading, for example, from a power station to hospitals, sewage plants and
pumping stations). Second, dynamic targeting does not allow for careful modelling of the
likely effects: ‘every [emergent] target is inscribed in a network or chain of events that
inevitably exceeds the opportunity that can be seized or the horizon that can be seen’
(Weber 2005). Most civilian casualties in Afghanistan thus now occur when troops are
suddenly ‘in contact’ and call in close air support (Human Rights Watch, 2008).
(4) Media geographies: representation and rationalization Zehfuss (forthcoming)
argues that precision bombing is used rhetorically to ‘produce us and only us as ethical’,
but I doubt that publics are persuaded of the acceptability (or otherwise) of air strikes by
abstract arguments about ethics (cf. Garrett 1993; Grayling, 2006). For the media play a
central role in mediating the official view of air war, and the transformation of the
Military-Industrial complex into a Military-Industry-Media-Entertainment network (Der
Derian 2009) has promoted a rapid convergence between military and civilian visual
technologies. Military violence is now so intimately entangled with visualization that
Butler (2009) insists ‘there is no way to separate, under present historical conditions, the
DEREK GREGORY
material reality of war from those representational regimes through which it operates and
which rationalize its own operation.’ These rationalities extend from those who conduct
air war to those who watch it. The second objective of this program is therefore to
analyze images of bombing transmitted to British and American publics.
McLuhan (1968: 134) famously described Vietnam as ‘our first television war’, while
Arlen (1969: 6) called it ‘the living room war’. But I seek to recalibrate these metaphors
because WWII was also a ‘living room war’ of sorts. Print media were immensely
powerful here, yet existing studies all but ignore the images and graphics they deployed
(Connelly 2002): when Marwick (1982: 146) described war photography as ‘neutered’ he
was referring to images of bomb damage in Britain not bombing raids over Berlin. Film
played a vital role in bringing those raids to British audiences (Cumings 1992: 85), and I
will pay particular attention to newsreel footage (Fox 2007; McKernan 2002). Its images
of bombing were episodic, but Arlen’s description of the television coverage of the
Vietnam War emphasized its seamlessness: he argued that the war was little more than
moving wallpaper and that, as Mandelbaum (1982: 162) put it, the images were ‘no more
urgent or alarming than all the others regularly paraded across the small grey screen.’ In
fact, few television reports included images of casualties (Paterson 1984), and Hallin
(1984; 1986) shows that TV presented a highly idealized view during the early years and
remained assiduously close to the ‘official’ view throughout the conflict. Perhaps the
same is true today: Harris (2006) suggests that military violence is now ‘rendered
everyday, bureaucratic and even mundane by the technologies and practices of image
production’ (Harris 2006: 102). This happens not only because its ‘panorama of bombing
operations minimizes emotional identification with sufferers’ by even more effectively
rendering it as a technical accomplishment, but also because it substitutes ‘the aesthetic
register of Hollywood cinematography’ (Chouliaraki 2006: 42). I want to know if this is
borne out by visual representations of air wars in Afghanistan.
(5) Visual arts and counter-geographies There is a long tradition of ‘official’ war art,
now reinforced by video and digital forms that often also reproduce the military view
(Brandon 2007; Kaplan 2008). Jabri (2006) emphasizes the contrary capacity of art to
reinstate the corporeality of late modern war. She praises Rebecca Horn’s Painpaper
(2004) because it aims ‘to disrupt and interrupt sanitized renditions of the aerial
bombardment’ in which we are otherwise ‘removed, at temporal and spatial distance,
from those on the ground and in the event.’ But it does so not by showing broken bodies
but by re-presenting an expressive, abstract geometry. My own focus is to focus instead
on critical responses to the visualization practices that make targeting possible.
Targeting involves a disjuncture between ‘our’ space and ‘their’ space – between what
Chow (2006) calls the eye and the target – that can be interrupted in several ways. The
most common response is simple transposition. Thus Paula Levine’s ‘Shadows from
another place’ superimposes the sites and sounds of the initial aerial attack on Baghdad in
2003 over San Francisco, while Alyssa Wright’s ‘Cherry Blossoms’ does the same for
Boston. Interventions like these enact what Ingram (2009) calls ‘a re-twisting and refolding of our space and their space into a space where a kind of simultaneity is possible
that is otherwise foreclosed by material geography and hegemonic performances of
space.’
DEREK GREGORY
These artworks are all tied to performances on the ground, however, whereas some of the
most effective interventions remain suspended in the air, forcing the viewer to re-cognize
the abstracted violence of targeting: it is the critical analysis of these productions that
forms the third objective of the program. Thus Kaplan’s (2006b) ‘Dead Reckoning’
invites the online viewer to perform a series of interactive tasks that bring the process of
targeting during WWII into sharper focus. Slavick’s (2007) ‘Violent cartography’
extends the historical range through Vietnam to Afghanistan. Her strategy is one of
deliberate abstraction, layering the ghosts of maps and air photographs over the bomb
bursts on the ground, and composing beneath and around them a spectral, almost
subliminal cellular imagery that ‘conjures up the buried dead’, to topple the assumption
of aerial mastery from within the aerial view itself (Gregory, 2009). Other artists have
brutalized the bomber’s view of the city: Raquel Maulwurf (2006-7) reproduces aerial
photographs and radar traces of bombing raids over Germany and then scores the surface
to ‘materialize destruction in both subject and process’, while Hanna Mal Allah breaches
the vertical separation between bomber and bombed in a series of aerial views that are
slashed, burned and blackened, and the geometric orders of Islamic art that form their
ground perforated by what Rashad Selim calls ‘modern warfare’s vicious trigonometry’.
All of these artworks are chilling reminders of the violence of visualization that is
constitutive of the targeting process.
Maulwurf: Markierungsfeuer uber Hamburg 1943 charcoal/paste on mat board 2007
DEREK GREGORY
slavick: Afghanistan I
Methodology
(a) Targeting [Years 1/2]: Targeting is an iterative process, and so it is essential to
recover the geography of bombing to which it contributes and responds. There are maps
of the combined bombing offensive, but the targeting books have been subject to little
spatial analysis beyond mapping (cf. Hohn 1994). I will also analyze the Raid Reports
held by the RAF Historical Branch, the targeting files held in PRO AIR/14, and the files
of the British Bombing Survey and the US Strategic Bombing Survey. These have been
mined by other scholars but with different questions. Similar cartographic-spatial
analyses will be conducted on the database held at the US National Archives in Record
Group 218 that locates all ordnance dropped in Vietnam 1965-1975; I will also examine
the Linebacker II Briefing Books and the Linebacker USAF Bombing Survey including
the Air Operations Summary and Target Damage Files at the USAF Historical Research
Agency. Comparable data on air operations over Afghanistan will be accessed via the
USAAF and the daily airpower summaries issued by CENTCOM. I will use these
archives to reconstruct the changing operational chain of command and the organization
of the targeting process and to analyze sample visual images produced through the chain.
I will conduct a close reading of evolving air force doctrine (RAF and USAF) that
codified and regulated targeting in relation to the development of air power theory (e.g.
RAF Manual - Operations, successive editions; USAF Intelligence Targeting Guide
(1998); Targeting (AF Doctrine Document 2-1.9, 2006); Joint Doctrine for Targeting
DEREK GREGORY
(2007). Finally, I will conduct a critical reading of published memoirs of aircrew (I have
a short list of 22) to flesh out the technical processes involved.
(b) Media geographies [Years 2/3]: The focus will be on visual images of bombing and
so (for print media) I will use the major image banks (AP, Corbis, Getty, Life). For
World War II, I will concentrate on successive raids on Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin,
for which I will conduct ancillary research at the British Library Newspaper Reading
Room; British newsreels will be accessed online via www.movietone.com and
www.britishpathe.com. For Vietnam, I will concentrate on operations against the Ho Chi
Minh Trail and on Linebacker II, for which I will also analyze select US newspapers and
news magazines via Pro-Quest; TV coverage will be accessed via the Vanderbilt
Television News Archive. For Afghanistan/Pakistan I have maintained a detailed e-file
of media coverage of the air wars since 2004. I will undertake standard content analysis
of all these materials, but I will concentrate on qualitative visual analysis (see Rose 2007)
with a particular emphasis on framing, perspective, composition and resolution.
(c) Visual arts and counter-geographies [Year 3]: I will focus my initial analysis on
the artworks of Raquel Maulwurf, elin o’Hara slavick and Hannah Mal Allah.
References
Adey, P. (2008) ‘Aeromobilities: geographies, subjects and visions’, Geography
compass 2: 1318-1336.
Arlen, M. (1969) Living room war. New York: Viking Press.
Beier, J.M. (2003) ‘Discriminating tastes: ‘smart’ bombs, non-combatants and notions of
legitimacy in warfare’, Security dialogue 34: 411-25.
Beier, J.M. (2006) ‘Outsmarting technologies: rhetoric, revolutions in military affairs and
the social depth of warfare’, International Politics 43: 266-80.
Biddle, T.D. (2002) Rhetoric and reality in air warfare: the evolution of British and
American ideas about strategic bombing, 1914-1945. Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press.
Bishop, B. (2008) Bomber boys. London: Harper.
Brandon, L. (2007) War and Art. London: I.B. Tauris.
Butler, J. (2009) Frames of war: when is life grievable? London: Verso.
Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The spectatorship of suffering. London: Sage.
Canestaro, N. (2004) ‘Legal and policy constraints on the conduct of aerial precision
warfare’, Vanderbilt journal of transnational law 37: 431-484.
Chow, R. The age of the world target: self-referentiality in war, theory and comparative
work. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Clinard, O. (1959) ‘Developments in air targeting: data handling techniques’, Studies in
Intelligence 3 (2) : 95-104.
Clodfelter, M. (1989) The limits of air power: the American bombing of Vietnam. New
York: Free Press.
Conetta, C. (2004) ‘Disappearing the Dead: Iraq, Afghanistan and the idea of a “New
Warfare”’, Project on Defense Alternatives, Research Monograph 9. Cambridge MA:
Commonwealth Institute.
DEREK GREGORY
Connelly, M. (2002) ‘The British people, the press and the strategic air campaign against
Germany, 1939-45’, Contemporary British History 16 (2): 39-48
Cordesman, A. (2008) ‘Air combat trends in the Afghan and Iraq Wars’. Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Washington, March, 2008.
Crane, C. (1993) Bombs, cities and civilians: American airpower strategy in World War
II. Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas.
Cullather, N. (2003) ‘Bombing at the speed of thought: intelligence in the coming age of
cyberwar’, Intelligence and National Security 18: 141-154.
Cumings, B. (1992) War and television. London: Verso.
Dadkah, L. (2008) ‘Close air support and civilian casualties in Afghanistan’, Small Wars
Journal at http://www.smallwarsjournal.com
Davis, R.G. (2006) Bombing the European Axis powers: a historical digest of the
combined bomber offensive 1939-1945. Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University Press.
Deitchman, S.J. (2008) ‘The “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam War’, Journal of
military history 72: 869-887.
Deptula, D. (2001) Effects-Based Operations: change in the nature of warfare.
Arlington VA: Aerospace Education Foundation.
Deptula, D. and Brown, G. (2008) ‘A house divided: the indivisibility of intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance’, Air and Space Power Journal, Summer.
Deptula, D. (2008) ‘ISR – Precision strike capabilities and technology improvements’,
Keynote address, Precision strike technology Symposium on ‘Compressing and
integrating the kill chain’, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, October
Der Derian, J. (2009) Virtuous War: mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network. New York: Routledge (second edition).
Eden, L. (2003) Whole world on fire: organizations, knowledge and nuclear weapons
devastation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Exxum, A., Fick, N., Humayun, A., Kilcullen, D. (2009) Triage: the next twelve months
in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington DC: Center for a New American Security.
Flanagan, J. (1992) Vietnam above the treetops: a forward air controller reports.
Westport CT: Greenwood.
Fox, J. (2007) Film propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II cinema.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Friedrich, J. (2006) The Fire: the bombing of Germany 1940-1945 (trans. Allison
Brown). New York: Columbia University Press.
Garrett, S. (1993) Ethics and airpower in World War II: the British bombing of German
cities. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Gaskin, M.J. (2005) Blitz: the story of 29th December 1940. London: Faber.
Gibson, J. W. (1986) The perfect war: technowar in Vietnam. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press.
Gilster, H. (1993) The air war in Southeast Asia: case studies of selected campaigns.
Maxwell AFB, Montgomery ALA: Air University Press.
Glock, J. (1994) ‘The evolution of Air Force targeting’, Airpower journal, Fall.
Grayling, A.C. (2006) Among the dead cities: the history and moral legacy of the WWII
bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan. New York: Walker and Company.
Gregory, D. (2004) The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Oxford:
Blackwell.
DEREK GREGORY
Gregory, D. (2006) ‘“In another time zone, the bombs fall unsafely”: Targets, civilians
and late modern war’, Arab World Geographer 9 (2) pp. 88-111.
Gregory, D. (2009) “Doors into nowhere”: Dead cities and the natural history of
destruction.’ In P. Meusburger, M. Heffernan, E. Wunder (eds.), Cultural memories.
Heidelberg: Springer, in press.
Grosscup, B. (2006) Strategic terror: the politics and ethics of aerial bombardment.
London: Zed Books.
Hallin, D. (1984) ‘The media, the war in Vietnam, and political support: a critique of the
thesis of an oppositional media’, Journal of politics 46: 2-24.
Hallin, D. (1986) The ‘uncensored’ war: the media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hansen, R. (2008) Fire and fury: the Allied bombing of Germany 1942-1945. Toronto:
Doubleday Canada.
Harris, C. (2006) The omniscient eye: satellite imagery, ‘battlespace awareness’ and the
structures of the imperial gaze. Surveillance and society, 4: 101-122.
Hebert, A. (2003) ‘Compressing the Kill Chain’, Air Force Magazine, March, 50-54.
Herold, M. (2003) Blown away: the myth and reality of “precision bombing” in
Afghanistan. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.
Hewitt, K. (1983) ‘Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places,’ Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 73: 257-84.
Hewitt K. (1987) ‘The social space of terror: Towards a civil interpretation of total war’,
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 5: 445–474.
Hewitt, K. (1994) ‘“When the great planes came and made ashes of our city”: towards an
oral geography of the disasters of war’, Antipode 26: 1-34.
Hewitt, K. (2009) ‘Proving grounds of urbicide: civil an urban perspectives on the
bombing of capital cities’, ACME: an international e-journal for critical geographies 8:
340-75.
Hohn, U. (1994) ‘The Bomber’s Baedeker: target book for strategic bombing in the
economic warfare against German towns, 1943-1945’, Geojournal, 34: 213-30.
Human Rights Watch (2008) “Troops in contact”: airstrikes and civilian deaths in
Afghanistan.
Hüppauf, B. (1993) ‘Experiences of western warfare and the crisis of representation’,
New German Critique, 59: 41-76.
Ingram, A. (2009) ‘Art and the geopolitical: remapping security at Green Zone/Red
Zone.’ In Alan Ingram and Klaus Dodds (eds), Spaces of security and insecurity:
geographies of the war on terror. Farnham UK: Ashgate, pp. 257-278.
Jabri, V. (2006) ‘Shock and Awe: power and the resistance of art’, Millennium: journal
of international studies 34: 819-839.
Kaplan, C. (2006a) ‘Mobility and war: the cosmic view of US “air power”’, Environment
and Planning D: Society & Space 36: 395-407.
Kaplan, C. (2006b) ‘Dead reckoning: aerial perception and the social construction of
targets’, Vectors 2.2 at http://www.vectorsjournal.org
Kaplan, C. (2008) “Everything is connected”: aerial perspectives, the Revolution in
Military Affairs and digital culture’. In Proceedings, Electronic Techtonics: thinking at
the interface, pp. 141-150.
DEREK GREGORY
Knights, M. (2002) Bombing Iraq: influence and decision-making in the targeting,
phasing and weaponeering of modern air campaigns. Unpublished PhD thesis,
Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
Leonard, R.W. (1994) ‘Learning from History: Linebacker II and US Air Force doctrine’,
Journal of military history 58: 267-303.
Lindqvist, S. (2001) A history of bombing (trans. Linda Ruff). New York: New Press.
Livingstone, D. (2003) Putting science in its place: geographies of scientific knowledge.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lowe, K. (2007) Inferno: the devastation of Hamburg. London and New York:
Viking/Penguin.
Mandelbaum, M. ‘Vietnam: the television war’, Daedalus 111 (4) 157-69.
Marwick, A. (1982) ‘Print, pictures and sound: the Second World War and the British
experience’, Daedalus 111: 135-155.
McKernan, L. (ed) (2002) Yesterday's news: The British cinema newsreel reader.
London: British Universities Film & Video Council.
McLuhan, M. (1968) War and peace in the global village. New York: Bantam.
Miguel, E. and Roland, G. (2006) ‘The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam’, NBER
Working Paper W11954.
Miller, Donald L. (2006) Masters of the air: America’s bomber boys who fought the air
war against Nazi Germany. New York: Simon & Schuster.
O’Tuathail, G. (1996) Critical geopolitics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Overy, R.J. (2005) The air war 1939-1945. Dulles VA: Potomac Books.
Parks, W.H. (1982) ‘Rolling Thunder and the law of war’, Air University Review,
January-February.
Parks, W.H. (1983) ‘Linebacker and the law of war’, Air University Review, JanuaryFebruary.
Paterson, I. (2007) Guernica and total war. London: profile Books.
Paterson, O. (1984) ‘An analysis of television coverage of the Vietnam War’, Journal of
Broadcasting 28 (4) 397-404.
Ricks, T. (2002) ‘Target approval delays cost Air Force key hits’, Journal of military
ethics 1: 109-112 [reprinted from Washington Post, 18 November 2001].
Roblyer, D.A. (2004) ‘Beyond Precision: issues of morality and decision-making in
minimizing collateral casualties’, Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and
International Security, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Occasional Paper.
Rose, G. (2007) Visual methodologies: an introduction to the interpretation of visual
materials. London: Sage (second edition).
Rosenau, W. (2001) Special Operations Forces and elusive enemy targets: lessons from
Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War. Santa Monica CA: RAND Project Air Force.
Roscini, M. (2005) ‘Targeting and contemporary aerial bombardment’, International and
comparative law quarterly 54: 411-444.
Sebald, W.G. (2004) On the natural history of destruction (trans. Anthea Bell). New
York: Vintage.
Schmitt, M. (2005) ‘Precision attack and international humanitarian law’, International
Review of the Red Cross 87 (859): 445-466.
Sherry, M. (1997) The rise of American air power: the creation of Armageddon. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
DEREK GREGORY
Short, K.R.M. (1997) ‘Bomber Command’s ‘Target for Tonight’ (1941)’, Historical
journal of film, radio and television, 17, 181-218.
Short, K.R.M. (1998) Screening the propaganda of British air power (Trowbridge:
Flicks Books).
slavick, e. o’Hara (2007) Bomb after bomb: a violent cartography. Milan: Charta.
Smith, J.T. (1994) Rolling Thunder: the strategic bombing campaign, North Vietnam
1965-1968. Walton-on-Thames UK: Air Research Publications.
Smith, J. T. (1998) The Linebacker raids: the bombing of North Vietnam, 1972. London:
Arms and Armour/Cassell.
Smith, M. (1977) ‘The strategic bombing debate: the Second World War and Vietnam’.
Jnl. contemporary history 12: 175-191.
Stansky, P. (2007) The first day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Tanaka, Y. and Young, M. (eds) (2009) Bombing civilians: a twentieth-century history.
New York: The New Press.
Taylor, F. (2004) Dresden: Tuesday February 13 1945. London and New York:
HarperCollins.
Thompson, J.C. (1980) Rolling Thunder: understanding policy and program failure.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
United States Air Force, Intelligence Targeting Guide [AF 14-210] (1 February 1998).
United States Air Force, Targeting [Air Force Doctrine Document 2-1.9) (8 June 2006)
Wakelam, R. (2009) The science of bombing: Operational Research in RAF Bomber
Command. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Weber, S. (2005) Targets of opportunity: on the militarization of thinking. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Westhusing, T. (2002) ‘“Target approval delays cost Air Force key hits”: Targeting terror
– killing al Qaeda the right way’, Journal of military ethics 1: 128-135.
Wrage, S. (ed) (2003) Immaculate warfare: participants reflect on the air campaigns
over Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. Westport CT: Praeger.
Zehfuss, M. (forthcoming) ‘Targeting: precision and the production of ethics’, European
journal of international relations
Zuckerman, S. (1978) From apes to warlords. London: Hamish Hamilton.