Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 23, No. 1, February 2009, 7791

Bare life of the virtuous shadow warrior: The use of silhouette in military
training advertisements

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Ian Roderick*
Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

a silhouette suffices to express a physiognomy.

Edouard Dujardin (1888)

and the care of life coincides with the fight against the enemy.
Gio`rgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 147

Introduction
Napoleon is reported to have once declared that Soldiers are made to be killed and on another
occasion that I do not care a fig for the lives of a million men (see Walzer 1977, 136). Such is
the value of military (and civilian) bodies in total war. This dispassionate if not contemptuous
attitude towards those under his charge did not go without criticism at the time but, nonetheless,
subsequent wars of attrition have indeed made citizens into soldiers for much the same purposes.
However, such an attitude is highly unlikely to be glamorized in the leadership training
programs of contemporary militaries. Instead, following Martin Shaw (2005), I would contend
that there has been a kind of revaluation of the value of the soldiers body such that war is
increasingly re-legitimized by seeking to fight wars in a manner intended to minimize the risks
faced by Western military forces. This is not to say that war is now fought compassionately and
humanely but rather under a biopolitical regime in which the preservation of life functions
discursively to mitigate the political risks of sending citizens into battle.
The connection between military training and disciplinary forms of control (cf. Foucault 1979)
are, of course, well established. Through training and discipline, administrators hope to make
soldiers embody the values and needs of the military institution and, by extension, the state. Through
proper training, the soldiers body is to be literally the esprit de corps made flesh. Following
from this, however, military training is not simply concerned with disciplining the individual body
but also with preserving the greater body of soldiers. Accordingly, it will be argued that
contemporary military training needs to be understood as both biopolitical and disciplinary. To this
effect, I will argue that a new strategic discourse attending to the care of the soldiers body has
become central to contemporary military planning and procurement and that this is reflected in the
use of the silhouette images of soldiers within the promotional material of military training
contractors.
Using four advertisements as examples, the analysis to be presented here draws upon social
semiotic approaches to visual and social actor analysis to address how the silhouette is adopted

*Email: iroderick@wlu.ca
ISSN 1030-4312 print/ISSN 1469-3666 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10304310802596325
http://www.informaworld.com

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I. Roderick

as a semiotic resource in order to convey certain specifically desirable qualities of the

well-trained soldier through what is essentially a generalized form of representation. Of
particular interest is the ways in which the ads draw upon magazine advertising layout
conventions to positively orient readers towards an idealized representation of the virtually
trained warfighter. Presented in the form of a shadow warrior, this representation heralds the
coming of a virtuous/virtual warfighter which applies actualized experience and acumen gained
through immersion in virtual environments. Having demonstrated the ways in which the ad
images all share in espousing a new martial body becoming, the paper then argues that what is
being venerated within the ads is the image of a shadow warrior that finds its virtuosity in its
virtuality. Finally, it will be concluded that the meaningfulness of the shadow warrior, as evoked
by the silhouette form, is constituted within a discursive regime that subjects the soldiers body
to biopolitical as well as disciplinary forces.
Promoting the well-trained soldier
The ads in question are taken from the trade magazine Training and Simulation Journal (TSJ) and
appeared irregularly over a 24-month period. The articles and advertisements contained within the
magazine focus upon the hardware and software being used by the militaries of Western
democracies to train their personnel in virtual and mixed-reality environments. While the majority
of advertisements published in the magazine tend to visually foreground the training equipment
either alone or in use, a small group of ads instead foreground the finished results of training with
the product being offered namely, a well-trained soldier. Interestingly, when the attributes of the
trained soldier rather than the training is the focus of the ad images, a silhouette image was typically
adopted. As such, the ad images to be discussed were chosen precisely because their pitch is based
upon strong claims being made about the soldier as trained rather than the training system itself.
Published by DefenseNews Media Group, which describes itself as the largest commercial
publisher of military industry periodicals, TSJ is a highly specialized trade magazine that in 2007
had a qualified circulation of more than 18,000 readers of which 99.6% were non-paid
subscribers (BPA Worldwide 2007). The bulk of the readership is made up of members of the
US military (31.7%) and the international defence industry (27.6%) (BPA Worldwide 2007).
TSJ has little to offer the lay reader, with the bulk of the articles addressed to industry insiders
and documenting corporate activity and emergent technical standards. Comprised of command,
program, procurement, information technology and industry decision-makers involved with
military training and simulation this would include:
Senior military and government leaders responsible for military and defense preparedness;
Specialized military training, simulation and modeling commands, departments, agencies and staff;
Top executives in the training and simulation industries; Government and military R&D commands,
departments and agencies; and Research, press and advocacy organizations. (DefenseNews Media
Group 2006)

The readership for TSJ therefore primarily consists of those who would be involved in the
decision-making processes relating to the procurement and contracting for goods and services
pertaining to the training of military personnel. Advertising space is therefore sold on the
assumption that subscribers are in a position to somehow influence the decision-making process
in the tendering of military training contracts.
The defence contractors that commissioned the silhouette image advertisements represent
key corporate members of the military industrial complex. All are included are in the
DefenseNews 2007 annual Top 100 Report on the Global Defense Industry with the exception
of Anteon, which ranked 39th in 2006 before it was acquired by General Dynamics (see Table 1).
In their own study of armament advertising, Schornig and Lembcke (2006, 211) suppose that

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Table 1.

79

Advertiser ranking by 2007 revenues.

Rank

Company

1
4
6
13
23
39 (2006)
82

Lockheed Martin
Northrop Grumman
General Dynamics
SAIC
Saab
Anteon
Megget (FATS Inc.)

Military revenue (US$ million)

% total revenue

36,090
23,649
18,769
5800
2,461.9
1298.3
511.9

91
78.4
78
69.9
80
87.1
39

since companies such as these, with their close ties to Western militaries, have considerable
resources to invest in marketing and promotion, it is highly likely that the ads will be based upon a
closely aligned range of shared expectations. Furthermore, since the military-industrial complex
is largely organized as a monopsony, with the United States being the principal purchaser, it is all
the more probable that the concepts being communicated in the ads will be tailored to a specific
kind of reader. Additionally, Schoring and Lembcke (212) demonstrate that owing to restrictions
in international arms sales, democratic states form a much larger market for Western arms
manufacturers than autocratic states. Citing the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, they note that in 2002, OECD countries accounted for 75.1% of the worlds military
expenditure. Furthermore, in the most recent edition of its yearbook, SIRPRI (2008) observes that
the USAs military spending accounted for 45 per cent of the world total in 2007, followed by the
UK, China, France and Japan, with 4 5 per cent each.
Accordingly, the advertising that appears in TSJ is understood as a form of communication
between interactants that are closely aligned in terms of shared interpretations and values. Both
readers and advertisers obviously belong to the highly integrated military-industrial complex
that is historically the outcome of close partnerships between Western world governments,
military and corporate elites. Furthermore, there is considerable traffic in bodies between the
partners as military contractors frequently recruit retiring senior military personnel for their
networks as much as their knowledge. As such, it is expected that both the producers and the
readers of the ads will be able to draw upon overlapping discourses of martial embodiment and
therefore make sense of the images in very similar ways. It will be argued then that the silhouette
is used in the ad images as a semiotic resource to further realize what will be referred to,
following Der Derian (2000), as the discourse of military virtual/virtuosity.

The social semiotics of the shadow warrior

Social semiotics employs the concept of semiotic resource in contrast to that of the sign of
mainstream semiotics because it affords greater consideration of the diachronic features of
signifying practices. Rather than assuming that the silhouette refers to some predetermined
referent independent of use, the notion of semiotic resource supposes that the meaning potential
of the silhouette is derived from both previous conventionalized uses and those possible uses
afforded to users within the specific social context in which communication takes place (see van
Leeuwen 2005, 3 6). In this case, the use of the silhouette to symbolize the physiognomy of the
well-trained soldier in part draws upon the semiotic potential of a long-standing and wellestablished visual convention of treating the human shadow as a virtual index for the inner
qualities or essence of the individual.
Nancy Forgione (1999) has argued that in Paris, during the 1880s to 1890s period, this
metaphoric convention gained new significance within aesthetic discourse as the shadow began

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to function as both an abstract concept and a concrete device such that it provided a technique
for visualizing that helped dislodge old habits of seeing that relied too much on superficial
appearances; moreover, it was believed to facilitate access to the intrinsic nature of things (492).
By drawing upon this convention, using the backlit profile, rather than the fully exposed frontlit
figure to stand for the well-trained warfighter, the advertisers have opted to utilize the
traditional equation of shadow with the inner self rather than the external descriptive
appearance of an individual so as to realize the Mallarmean ambition of many late nineteenth
century artists to suggest rather than to describe their subjects (491 2). In this way, it can be
argued that the convention of the autonomous shadow is being adopted so as to suggest to the
reader the special qualities of the warfighter to be internalized by the individual soldier through
virtual training. Convention, therefore, allows the silhouette to be used as a convenient visual
metaphor for suggesting the vital qualities of the figure being profiled. The full meaning of the
metaphor, however, does not rest solely with convention but rather is fully realized in the ways
in which the silhouette forms are incorporated into the actual advertisements. Thus rather than
expressing an inner essence of an individual, it will be argued that the silhouette form is
now being called upon instead to suggest a virtual soldier whose essence is its non-essence
(cf. Shields 2003, 43), its intrinsic capacity for becoming.
Adopting Michael Hallidays functionalist approach, social semiotics presumes that all
semiotic resources are socially organized to accomplish specific communication tasks. Halliday
proposes that these tasks are realized through what he has termed metafunctions. There are three
primary metafunctions that are implicated in any communication act: the ideational, the
interpersonal, and the textual. Accordingly, each communication act draws upon semiotic
resources to do three things simultaneously: (1) produce representations, (2) create interactions
between social actors, and (3) synthesize those representations and interactions into specific
kinds of texts. Every act of semiosis, therefore, must accomplish each of these functions which
are in turn realized by three corresponding types of meaning: representational, interactional and
compositional, respectively. By consistently representing the warfighter as silhouette,
constructing very specific attitudinal orientations for the viewer, and combining verbal and
visual elements to produce clear messages about the virtues of virtual training, each of these
three types of meaning in turn contributes to the production of the discourse of military
virtue/virtuality that the shadow warrior is to embody.
Representing the warfighter as concept
Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) propose that most, if not all, representations can be divided
into either narrative or conceptual types of processes. Every act of semiosis therefore has
specific ways of representing participants according to the process being realized. While
narrative processes represent social actors and action, conceptual processes represent social
actors in terms of attributes. Narrative processes would therefore tend to include participants
undergoing or performing some sort of action, whilst conceptual processes tend to offer
analytical representations of participants. Thus, while narrative visual representations serve to
present unfolding actions and events, processes of change, [and/or] transitory spatial
arrangements, conceptual visual representations instead depict participants in terms of their
class, structure or meaning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 59). In the case of the silhouette
images of the warfighters, despite their obvious associations with very specific types of social
action, the advertisements realize primarily conceptual visual representation structures rather
than narrative ones.
In Figure 1, the use of backlighting denies any specificity to the individual participant and
instead, in keeping with convention, connotes for the viewer a generalized essence that the

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silhouette, as corporeal trace, embodies. Furthermore, by foregrounding the backlit figure, the
background is rendered as a relatively neutral, if picturesque, skyline in which any action that
might be represented is muted in significance.1 In effect, the neutral backgrounds literally
remove all explanatory contextual information from the photographs. Accordingly, the adoption
of the silhouette convention supersedes the actions in which the participants might actually be
engaged. In Arnheims (1982) lexicon, the attention of the viewer is directed to the volumes
rather than the vectors. In this way, it can be argued that the primary ideational function of the
images is with the symbolic representation of the participants (the soldiers) rather than their
actions (soldiering). Therefore, the images function to symbolically suggest the attributes
associated with the virtually trained warfighter (see Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 105 6).

Orienting the viewer

Images, like other social semiotics, must be understood not only as acts of representation but also
as acts of exchange. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006, 48) note, every text entails two types of
participant: the represented participants within the image-act and the interactive participants
actually engaged in the act of communication. The image therefore semiotizes the social
relationships between the represented participants, between the interactive participants and the
represented participants, and between the interactive participants themselves. Of particular
interest is the way in which the TSJ advertisements orient the reader so as to produce a point of
view that is presumably shared between interactional participants (advertisers and readers).
These interpersonal meanings are realized through three primary interactional features of the
image: contact, distance, and point of view (Jewitt and Oyama 2004, 145 7). Contact refers to
the kind of interaction between represented and interactive participants that is realized in the
image. Depending upon whether or not the represented participant(s) gazes at the viewer, the
image is said either to demand (gaze) or offer (gaze absent). Distance refers to the social distance
between the participant(s) and the viewer. Distance is largely realized through the size of the
framing of the participant(s). Finally, point of view realizes relations of involvement and power
and is largely accomplished through the angle of perspective. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006,
148) remind us that these features are part of a simultaneous system and so function together to
produce the interpersonal meanings of the text.
Since the represented participants are depicted in silhouette form and often in profile rather
than, say, face-on and frontlit, there is no explicit interaction between represented and interactive
participants being realized in these images. In Figures 1 and 2, the soldiers direct their gaze
elsewhere typically out of frame rather than returning the gaze of the viewer. Figure 3 does
include silhouette figures running towards the viewer, but looking at their helmet profiles their
line of gaze is clearly directed to the side rather than face on. Instead, in each of the ads, the
warfighters are being offered to the viewer as objects for consideration or contemplation. In this
way, it could be argued that the warfighters as represented participants are presented as relatively
passive and therefore as props in the more active relationship between the advertisers and
readers.
All but two of the ad images present the participants through long shots, thus further
connoting an impersonal relationship between participants and viewer. Figure 2 uses a medium
shot which could suggest a more familiar social distance between viewer and participants but
this is also mediated by the other two features of interpersonal meanings. This general use of the
long shot suggests an overall relationship of social distance on the part of the viewers from the
represented participants. This further contributes to an objective orientation on the part of
interactive participants towards the silhouetted forms.

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Figure 1.

. . . the worlds best-trained soldiers even better. Photo image courtesy of US Army.

Finally, examining the construction of point of view within the images, the figures are
typically presented at an oblique angle, as mentioned above, and from a low vertical angle.
The use of the oblique angle is suggestive of detachment rather than involvement on the part of
the viewer. This might suggest reduced identification with the participants on the part of the
viewer but it also contributes to the sense that the participants are there to receive the gaze of the
viewer, thus objectifying the soldier. It is the use of the slight vertical angle, however, that
seems to contradict the implied passivity of the oblique angle.
By convention, high camera angles are thought to convey power over the represented
participant whereas low camera angles conversely suggest greater power on the part of the
represented participant. The images of the warfighters consistently adopt a lower angle point of
view such that the viewer is looking up, if only slightly, at the silhouetted figures. The one
exception to this is Figure 3, where the stock photo has been taken from inside what is likely a
Chinook helicopter as it is boarded. While it might be interpreted that the silhouetted figures

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Figure 2. Though the soldier is depicted in a simulation suite, the primacy is still placed upon the qualities
of the virtually trained soldier rather than the activity itself.

do not deign to interact with the viewers, this is unlikely since the point of view is only slightly
lowered for the most part and, furthermore, it would ignore the conceptual processes that
characterize the representational dimension of semiosis described above. This is arguably
because it is not the represented participants themselves that are elevated in esteem so much as it
is the concepts that they represent.
What is being represented in the images therefore is a relationship between interactive
participants that is based upon a common attitudinal orientation to the warfighter as symbolic
concept. It is not so much the soldiers that are elevated in status, since they come from a world of
rank and hierarchy, but rather the qualities they have come to possess as virtually trained
warfighters. Thus the advertisements semiotize a high degree of social cohesion between readers
and advertisers by assuming a shared positive valuation of the virtues of the virtually trained
soldier on the part of all interactive participants.

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Figure 3.

The precession of experience.

Composing the shadow warrior

The third element of visual meaning is realized through what are termed compositional
meanings. Here the concern is with how the image functions as a message by integrating the
previous two dimensions of meaning through the distribution and emphasis placed upon the
elements within the image. As Kress and van Leeuwen (2006, 177) propose, compositional
meaning relates the representational and interactive meanings of the image to each other
through three interrelated systems: informational value, salience, and framing.
Information value refers to the relative significance attributed to the elements of a
composition through their placement. Degrees of informational value are therefore assigned to
the various regions (left and right, top or bottom, and centre or margin) of the image and in turn
give the viewer cues as to the import or significance of the individual element based upon its
placement. In those cultures that use Roman script, the tradition of reading left to right and from

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top to bottom has led to different cultural values being awarded to the left and right (Jewitt and
Oyama 2004, 148). Kress and van Leeuwen propose that left right compositional relations
largely determine given new information structures while top bottom relationships tend to
determine ideal real information structures. This can be seen quite clearly in the division
between verbal and visual elements in Figure 1 which produces Ideal-Real relations
(the idealized well-trained soldier-textual elaboration and corporate logo). The third type of
information structure is, in turn, realized through centre margin relationships. Those elements
that occupy a central position within an image tend also to be central to the composition as a
whole. Generalizing somewhat, centrally placed components relate to but also hold together the
marginal elements of the visual composition. Images do not necessarily always employ all three
information structures, but in contemporary Western forms of visualization the given new and
ideal real structures are regularly and reliably utilized. Furthermore, when all three forms are
used, they function together such that marginal elements will be endowed with given new and
ideal real values (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006, 194 200).
Salience refers to the ways in which certain elements will be positioned hierarchically within
a composition in terms of prominence. Those elements which are positioned so as to be more
attention grabbing will accordingly be treated as more important or of greater visual weight.
Salience, Kress and van Leeuwen (202) suggest, is not objectively measurable but results from
complex interaction, a complex trading-off relationship between a number of factors: size,
sharpness of focus, tonal contrast, colour contrasts, placement in the visual field, perspective
and other quite specific cultural factors . . . . In this way, salience or visual weight is not strictly
a spatial feature of compositional meaning but instead suggests that there is a balance between
elements that the viewer must be able to judge. In the case of TSJ ads, while the silhouettes may
not always occupy a central position or occupy the majority of the ad space, they nonetheless
carry the greatest visual weight. Thus, in judging the balance between elements, the viewer will
tend to find what Arnheim (1982) terms the power of the centre even when, as Kress and van
Leeuwen (2006, 202) observe, there is no literal organizing centre of the image-text.
Finally, framing is the third system in compositional meaning. The notion of framing
highlights the ways in which the individual elements of visual compositions are presented in
varying degrees of connectedness to the other components. The stronger the framing, the more
isolated or disconnected the element is and therefore the closer it is to being presented as a
separate and distinct element within the composition. The greater the degree of connectedness
between elements, the more they will function together as one informational unit. Kress and van
Leeuwen (2006, 204) identify a number of ways in which the connectedness of elements can be
realized, including the use of vectors and the use of visually rhyming abstract graphic elements
so as to direct the viewers attention from the most salient element to lesser elements within the
composition. For example, a series of ads commissioned by SAIC that could not be reproduced
employ tonal panels that segregate informational units but the colour palate actually works to
weaken the framing, establishing a kind of overall cohesion of the elements.
Figure 3, for example, demonstrates well how the composition of visual and verbal elements
works to realize representational and interpersonal meanings endowed to the shadow warrior.
The image is strongly framed by the high contrast of the over-exposed backdrop to the boarding
soldiers. The ad page itself has a dominant top-down structure, with the image itself placed
centrally and highly symmetrical. Given also the bright high-contrast background of the image
exterior against the black of the helicopter interior and the ad background, the image itself would
have highest salience value. As such, the image functions to mediate between and organize the
ideal experience aphorism and the real of the description of goods and services offered by FATS.
The text GET READY appears at the top of the page but is very low contrast and so tends to
blend into the background. The next block of text, EXPERIENCE. THE ONE THING YOU

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NEED BEFORE YOU GET IT. is likely the second most salient region of the ad. The word
experience appears in red bold block letters and so clearly stands out from the rest of the image.
Being situated between the command GET READY and the image of the boarding warfighters
suggests that experience is playing a secondary mediating role. The readiness of the warfighters
is thus made possible through their virtual experience. The corporate logo also appears in large
sans serif type but at the bottom of the page. This location would make the logo much less salient
but at the same time it is worth noting that the repetition of the colour red serves to visually
rhyme fats with EXPERIENCE as the viewer draws to the bottom of the ad. Thus the ad is
designed so as to convey not only the readiness of the soldiers who are able to draw upon
experience gained virtually through FATS but also to celebrate the virtues of those soldiers.
Clearly, it is in the composition of the visual and verbal elements that we find the greatest
variance between ad images, despite their obvious commonalities in terms of ideational and
interpersonal meanings. This should not be surprising since the differences do not necessarily
mean differences in the thematic meaning of the images but rather that there are always multiple
paths to the same meaning formations. At the same time, the ads do all share in certain
conventions of magazine advertisements such as the use of a top-bottom structure coinciding
with a pictorial ideal promise of the product and the real of the product.
What I wish to propose, therefore, is that the consistent utilization of the soldier as silhouette
in advertisements for virtual training systems needs to be understood in the context of what
Michael Dillon (2003, 129) has characterized as a new military corporeality founded upon a
strategic virtuosity in the employment of information in order to refashion (military) bodies-information such that the contemporary military body is no longer a mere formation. It frankly
recognizes itself to be in-formation. This notion of the body-in-formation that Dillon
proposes highlights not only the way in which, in current strategic discourse, information has
been elevated to the status of prime mover and robust military forces are expected to be fully
mutable, able to seamlessly transform themselves in real time as the information itself changes
but also the ways in which the body itself has become increasingly understood purely expressible
as information or code (see Hayles 1999; Thacker 2004). The virtuosity of the military body-information is accordingly derived from its virtuality.

Military training as biopolitics: The virtues of the shadow warrior

Of course, there have been a number of commentators (Haraway, Der Derian, Shields) who have
noted the etymological link between the virtuous and the virtual. Haraway (1992, 325), for
example, reminds us that an obsolete meaning of virtual was having virtue, i.e., the inherent
power to produce effects. Virtu, after all, is excellence or merit, and it is still a common
meaning of virtue to refer to having efficacy. The virtue of something is its capacity. What
Haraway is reminding us of is the materiality of the virtual, its capacity to effect the real such
that it cannot be treated simply as immaterial or purely symbolic. Indeed, Der Derian (2000, 772)
has argued that the virtual is again losing its morally neutral, technical connotations, as military
technologies are increasingly inscribed with the capacity to produce morally good ends,
constituting instead what he terms virtuous war. At the same time, however, Herman (1998,
104) offers a detailed exploration of the relationship between virtu` and fortuna and how, to
Machiavelli and the Renaissance Florentines, the autonomy of the individual is derived through
the ability to master the feminine wiles of fortune with the disciplined, masculine will to power
of virtu`. It is through ones virtue that one is able to offset what unpredictables fortune might
bring, and ultimately to garner a sense of autonomy from and sovereignty over the material
world. Thus the presentation of the autonomous shadow, the shadow warrior, heralds the coming

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of a military virtue, this new martial body in-formation, through the efficacy of what we might
call, following Der Derian (2000), virtual/virtuous training.
For Der Derian (772), the technical innovations of network-centric warfare make possible
the virtualization of violence such that military operations are to be conducted in the same
manner as they are represented, by real-time surveillance and TV live-feeds. Experienced
only through the screen as battlespace visualization, virtual war is rendered as largely
bloodless, humanitarian, and hygienic (772). At the same time, this faith in the technical
possibility of fighting wars in a manner that minimizes casualties and suffering leads to the
emergence of what Der Derian (772) calls virtuous war, whereby war becomes a rational
option in order to effect ethical change through technological and martial means. Drawing
from Deleuze, Der Derian (784) theorizes the virtual as having a constitutive reality of its
own, creative of rather than dependent upon the actual. The virtuality of virtuous war is
therefore based upon its capacity to appropriate rather than simply displace reality by overcoding it (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 210) so as to make death and suffering disappear into
the pixels on the screen.
Like virtual/virtuous war then, virtual/virtuous training also represents a joining of the
technical capacities of new media with the imperative to conduct warfare in a manner that is
more humane or somehow safer for those immediately concerned. The text accompanying
the advertisements shown in Figure 3 demonstrate precisely the way in which defence
contractors promise the preservation of life through training in virtual environments. If the
virtually trained warfighter is battlefield tested before deployment and is always already
battle-ready, then it is because virtual training does not simply produce an imitation of
battlespace to be experienced. The fidelity of virtual battlespace is not simply premised upon a
relationship of resemblance. Instead, virtual/virtuous training creates what Massumi (1987) calls
a realer-than-real that is able to effect real battle-seasoned troops without being actual battle.
It is in becoming virtual, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract (Deleuze 1990,
96), whilst still remaining fully amenable, that the soldier finds its virtue.
The connection between discipline and military training is an obvious one. In Discipline and
Punish Michel Foucault takes the soldiers body as the exemplary docile figure under
disciplinary power. Referring to the numerous manuals produced through the rise of military
science in the eighteenth century, Foucault (1979, 135) observes that the soldier becomes
something that can be made; out of formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be
constructed . . . . The making of the early modern soldier becomes, for Foucault, the expression
of a new disciplinary regime that is exercised upon the body.
It is to the individual body that discipline is addressed and so realizes the sovereign right to
take life or let live. Discipline further refines the subjection of the body from that of the classical
period by producing a new political anatomy (Foucault 1979, 138). Subject to discipline, the
capacities of the body are simultaneously enhanced, making it more useful, and diminished,
making it more obedient. As such discipline is exercised upon the individual body, subjecting it
to the project of docility by joining the analysable body to the manipulable body (136), thus
ushering in a new micro-physics of power founded upon what Foucault (139) characterizes
as a political anatomy of detail. Through the right measure of training and surveillance, the
body of each individual soldier can be made to conduct itself reliably and efficiently. But
military training, I would argue, is also biopolitical as well as disciplinary.
For Foucault, commencing in the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a
new form of political power comes to be introduced. It does not replace but rather complements
the right of sovereignty. In addition to the right to take life and let live, the power to make live
and let die is established as a new political right (Foucault 2003, 241). This new right is traced
by Foucault to the very level of the mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of power (241)

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and in this way is not a power outside of disciplinary power but rather emerges from within and
is dovetailed (242) to disciplinary power through the further problematization of life:

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To be more specific, I would say that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that
their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under
surveillance, trained, used, and if need be, punished. And that the new technology that is being
established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than
their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected
by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on. (242 3)

Disciplinary power constitutes a first seizure of power over the body but this second seizure,
rather than being accomplished through individuation, is instead accomplished at the level of the
mass (243). Foucault characterizes this new massifying form of power as biopower that is
exercised over populations rather than individual bodies.
Modern military training has increasingly entailed the subjugation and organization of
individuals into more dispersed fighting formations but it is not just about producing soldiers to
deadly effect. Military training is also about managing and preserving the lives of a fighting
force. While discipline individuates and exercises power through the body, biopolitics, as Katia
Genel (2006, 46) has suggested, no longer addresses itself to the body, but to living man . . . In
short, the object of biopolitics is the population, conceived as a scientific and political problem.
In effect, military training is not only about enhancing the lethality of individuals but also
increasingly about preserving or saving lives.
The survivability of Western troops has increasingly become a fundamental scientific and
political problem for Western states as they seek to conduct warfare whilst minimizing the
domestic political risks of waging war. With the goal of making war acceptable to domestic
audiences, Western powers are transferring risk away from their own military personnel and thus
foregoing the problem of body bags appearing in the mainstream (Shaw 2005). At the same time,
the promotion of life-saving weapon and training systems by defence contractors equally has
the effect of speeding up the procurement cycle. So, for example, the development of the US
Future Combat Systems, with its embedded training systems, is described as soldier-centric and
is said to enable Soldiers to fight better, faster and most importantly, safer (Hames 2008).
Indeed, it is through the interlocking of biopolitics with the agenda of risk aversion that the very
lethality of the fighting force comes to be the key to its survivability.2
This contradiction between saving lives by being better at taking them was not lost upon
Foucault (1980, 137) who wrote that [i]t is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the
race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men [sic ] to
be killed. Thus we see in military training the exercise of pastoral power as soldiers are trained
to kill in order to preserve their own lives kill or be killed. In this way, training becomes a
kind of indirect decision on life and death on the part of the state as the decision is made, at the
expense of the citizens of the rival state(s), to preserve the lives of its own forces by enhancing
their lethality.
The decision upon what constitutes life and, by extension, what must be treated as an
exception to or outside of the definition of valued life is, according to Agamben (1998, 131), an
essential characteristic of modern biopolitics. Each society, Agamben asserts, sets its own limit
and decides what lives within the confines of the definition and what falls outside of it. However,
biopolitics is not simply the exercise of sovereignty over a juridico-institutional subject. Instead,
it encroaches upon natural or what Agamben has termed bare life. Thus, bare life is the meeting
point between juridico-institutional models of sovereignty and biopolitical models of power (see
Enns 2004, paras. 19 21).
Bare life, then, is a kind of limit concept (see Agamben 1998, 122), most readily associated
with the category of homo sacer the (non-)being who, under Roman law, may be killed with

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impunity and yet cannot be sacrificed since its life holds no sacrifical value. The significance of
homo sacer is, for Agamben (8), how human life is included in the juridical order . . . solely in
the form of its exclusion. Homo sacer illustrates the paradoxical process of modern biopolitics
to define the political realm by the creation of categories of exception. Every society, Agamben
(193) writes, sets this limit; every society even the most modern decides who its sacred
men will be. At the same time, however, the exercise of power over bare life is not limited
solely to categories of exception:
It is even possible that this limit, on which the politicization and the exception of natural life in the
juridical order of the state depends, has done nothing but extend itself in the history of the West and
has now in the new biopolitical horizon of states with national sovereignty moved inside every
human life and every citizen. Bare life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite
category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being. (139 40)

While juridico-institutional subjects such as that of homo sacer serve to make visible the
processes by which politics becomes a matter of life itself, homo sacer is nonetheless a limit
concept, and within modern democracies neither bare nor sacred life is always to be found in
such pure embodied forms. Instead, sacred life is increasingly distributed throughout
biopolitical forms of governance to the broader body politic: modern democracy does not
abolish sacred life but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it
into what is at stake in political conflict (124). Modern biopolitics therefore entails the
management of our collective as well as individual bare lives, and military training is no
different in this respect. By training its soldiers to be better warfighters, the state, contracting
with multinational defence industries, seeks not only to discipline individual soldiers into a
fighting force but also to administer the collective lives of its own forces. The shadow warrior,
then, is symbolically suggestive of both a new martial body to come and the virtual care that a
state capital partnership has endowed upon it.
Conclusion
This essay began by positing that in opting to use silhouette image of soldiers, the producers of
the advertisements in question draw upon the silhouette as a semiotic resource in order to realize
a dominant disciplinary-biopolitical discourse on warfare. Visual elements such as the nonnarrative symbolic process being represented, the combination of detachment with
representation power and the use of ideal real and given new compositional information
values all contribute to the realization of a set of discourses on martial virtue and virtuality.
If in attritional forms of warfare the figure of the soldier is that of the proverbial pawn, in
contemporary militaries the soldier is more apt to be represented as that of the professional the
product of and embedded within intensive and ongoing systems of training. As such, the visual
presence of the shadow warrior heralds the coming of a virtuous/virtual warfighter, able to apply
actualized experience and acumen gained through immersion in virtual environments. The virtue
of the shadow warrior is its ability to embody these pre-programmed experiences and seamlessly
carry them forth from the virtual training environments to operational environments (which are
themselves increasingly mixed or augmented environments). The shadow warrior marks the
site of embodiment of a new set of martial ideals one which instructs the soldier to recognize
itself as a subject always in the process of becoming and truly contingent.
This care (which is obviously intended to have real material consequences for both the
trainees and those who would oppose them in combat) being given to soldiers through virtual
training points to the biopolitical as well as the disciplinary programs of military training.
The point is not simply to re-order civilian bodies into martial forms of (deadly) organization
but to save lives at a time when corporate, military and political leaders perceive their publics

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to be particularly casualty sensitive. As such, the shadow warrior is symbolically suggestive of

two fundamental aspects of biopolitics: the new martial body-in-process subject to the biopower
of virtuous/virtual warfare and the state capital partnership of care under which the soldier is
subjected in the name of preserving a population.

Notes

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1.
2.

This is particularly apparent in the case of Figure 3, where the background has been over-exposed, thus
rendering the mobilizing force secondary to the silhouetted figures in the foreground.
Of course it is also worth noting that we are increasingly witness to other practices to reduce the
political risks of waging war such as the outsourcing of risk to private military contractors and noncitizen soldiers with promises of citizenship.

Notes on contributor
Ian Roderick is an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada.
His research interests include cultural studies, technology and culture, and social semiotics. Currently, he is
developing a broader research project entitled Engineered for Life: The Politics of Life and Death in
Battlespace. He can be reached at telespectator@gmail.com.

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