MMIB Class 2020

The Everywhere War by Derek Gregory

Critical Review by: Andra Mecu, Elena Gabriela and Marwa Mohammed Abdullah AL-Murisi

The article starts off with ‘War Time’ where the author went on highlighting a tragic event that
has happened in the US; 9/11. The conflict that started between the United States and the Middle
East. The terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and the pentagon has started the long war
between the United States and the Middle East.

The United States military has since expanded, where forces has been all over the Middle East, the
claim was that it is meant to fight terror – war on terror. It was meant to establish demolishment
mission that escalated into an unending war. It is then moved towards a concentrated area in the
United States, Washington and according to Engelhardt it was the states “conveyor” of rules and
acting as a “war capital”. It is an important part which truly provokes the idea of war being meant
only to be an assistant to struggling countries, rather it is, in reality, a war that has played a role of
strategically placing the United States into global sites – taking their military presence onto the
next level.

The second part of the article “Borderlands and blurred boundaries”, it discusses Borderlands as
'an imaginary geographical area where the characteristics of violence, corruption and breakdown
predominate in the minds of metropolitan actors and agencies. this is not only a matter of
transcending the geopolitical, connecting it to the biopolitical and the geo-economic, but also of
tracking space as a ‘doing’, precarious, partially open, and never complete. Bauman defined
borderlands as ‘planetary frontier lands’ which is enacting the grounds of existing wars, where
efforts to ‘pin the divisions and mutual hostilities to the ground that infrequently bring
consequences.

The third part highlights Af-Pak created by Obama administration where the troops were sent to
fight the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also highlighted the Bush-
Cheney program that has completely dismissed the law and have been “ignorant” to it. Af-Pak has
highlighted the movement of Taliban and their cooperation with Al-Qaeda, and they are all in the
pursuit of what is a “foreign” which has triggered the US – or so happens to be one of the reasons
why the US felt that it was threatening to the public which was enough to commit an unlawful act.
The movement undertaken by the US has stirred negative views on their Air force for “Over

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killing” and abusing the laws using unmanned aerial vehicles. It also discusses the legal views for
the movements that was in result considered to be a form of manipulation– It started intrastate war
between the two nations.

Each part of the article shows that geography truly highlights the intention of the power for a
country and where it wishes to stand politically. Despite the US has made a name for itself with
taking part in proxy wars it shows their motive and their palpable portrayal of making powerful
moves and marking militant territory. Although the law was meant to protect all rights; law and
war have always been intertwined, and international law is always re-made by war – in fact
working on the margins of law is one of the most effective ways to alter it – and the unmanned
aerial vehicle strikes in Pakistan are clearly no exception. They try to extend the battlespace at
once, and to contract the legal armature governing its constitution.

In Amexica, the issue of the borderline between United States and Mexico is a “post political war”
as Vulliamy (2010, 12) calls it, the war of 21st century, masking actually the drug war. In 1980 the
routes from the Colombian Cartel changed and started to be developed via Mexico, where the
trafficants worked close with the borderline troops, so they saw as enemy would remain the US
agents. Despite the effort of destroying marijuana and poppy fields, new plantations would appear
immediately on locals. Over 35000 people were killed in the last 4 years during these actions, more
people than in Afghanistan. But these deaths are not only the people who actually are caught in
the drug trafficking, but also collateral victims as activists, farmers etc. The Mexican president
addresses to this situation as war, as the drug traffikants are trying to replace the current state and
impose their own laws. The US had their own narcotics war, which President Nixon started to
declare it and act on it. Three moments index the emergence of a military–security nexus along
the border. From 1978 the US Army’s doctrine for ‘low-intensity conflict’ was repatriated to the
United States; in 1982 federal law restricting the role of the military in domestic policing was
relaxed; and in 1989 President George H.W. Bush committed the Pentagon to the ‘war on drugs’
with the formation of Joint Task Force 6 (JTF-6) to support law enforcement along the border and,
eventually, within the continental United States. The initial collaboration between the Border
Patrol and the military targeted not only drug traffickers but also undocumented migrants from
Mexico. There were several operations to capture undocumented immigrants, held responsible for
the high criminal rate in US and deported in the dessert, exposed intentionally to death. 9/11

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prompted and permitted the formation of a still more intensive military–security nexus that
rendered undocumented migrants even more vulnerable, placing them in a warzone where they
become, in effect, unlawful combatants. Bush started the initiative of the most technologically
advanced border security in America. They developed so much the technology, that they want to
take it back to Afghanistan. There are 2 categories that are affected the insurgents and the cartels.
The cartels seek to increase profits and consolidate power by controlling from the shadow the
politics and mercenary aims, becoming a threat to Mexico state, and thus US state as well. The
biggest fear for US is that Mexico will become a staging ground for terrorists. In 2010 the Center
for a New American Security (CNAS) issued a report arguing that ‘criminal networks linking
cartels and gangs are no longer simply a crime problem and is no longer simply a problem for law
enforcement but a ‘strategic threat’. This estates that some has to die in order others to live. The
US started working closely with the Mexico armed forces, as they saw similarities between the
drug trafficants and how they operate with the terrorist from Al Qaeda, making the US state to
suspect a link between these two forces. Obama is seeking to establish a ‘security corridor’ from
Colombia through Central America to Mexico, presided over by a ‘unified, supra-national
counterinsurgent infrastructure’ and sees it as experimental laboratory for the construction of ‘a
perfect machine of perpetual war’.

The Mexico border line is a sensitive subject for all the parties involved, US for the security and
trying to keep the security of the state stable and Mexico state as they seem to be overpowered by
the Traficant’s. I believe a more collaborative work could have been done between the states
countries to protect the collateral victims made around the drug war and at the frontier. Also,
having the experimented troops from the Afghanistan dealing with the southern frontier is wise in
the battle with the drug cartels, but seems a little bit extreme in regard to the families with kids
trying to protect themselves from the war. Unfortunately, it does not seem that the situation will
come to an end soon, and the Trump administration only seemed to cause more tensions.

The academic paper called „ The everywhere war” by Derek Gregory argue that nowadays the
battlefields are becoming more of a battlespace and that the limitations of borders are changing
due to technology development and new warfare methods.

Based on an existing body of literature, Gregory claims that Cyberspace is an elusive environment
in which the online overlaps with the offline, making possible for the late modern war to take

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advantage of it. He draws our attention to the DDS (the distributed denial of services) which is a
malicious attempt to disrupt normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by
overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure, giving the example of the Cyberattacks
during the Russo-Georgian War. In 2008, Georgia government servers was taken down due to a
cyber campaign consisted of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and website defacements.
This represents the first instance of a large-scale computer network attack conducted in tandem
with major ground military operations.

This article outlines that the main advantage of the cyber warfare is that the identity of the
aggressor is most of the times unknown. A strong example he gaves us is the Stuxnet worm - it
was the first known virus to be capable of crippling hardware and it appeared to have been created
by the U.S. National Security Agency, the CIA, and Israeli intelligence. Stuxnet reportedly
destroyed numerous centrifuges in Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment facility by causing them to
burn themselves out. After finding a PLC computer, the malware attack updated its code over the
internet and began sending damage-inducing instructions to the electro-mechanical equipment the
PC controlled. At the same time, the virus sent false feedback to the main controller. Anyone
monitoring the equipment would have had no indication of a problem until the equipment began
to self-destruct.

More than this, we can now understand why the United States has develop alternative modes of
cyber defence like US Cyber Command, to protect the computer devices and networks the US
military operates with and also the Pentagon computer systems.

I would like to disuss about the Hersh question Gregory refers to as „If the military is operating in
cyberspace, does this include civilian computers in American homes? „(page 247). This quote
made me think about another question: Is the internet a military space or a civilian one? In
cyberspace, the military does not have the same advantage they have on the battlefield. In
cyberspace, a teenager can hack NASA servers from his bedroom, so he exercises more power
than the largest organizations. So that make me question, are we all (citizens) potential threats and
targets for the military?
One concrete argument is that „the American way of war has changed since 9/11”(page 247). He
explores three cases: US drone attacks in Pakistan, the drug war between US an Mexico and

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cyberwars. Now it is clear that the boundaries of war and violence are blurring and that the question
of legality features proeminently in each case.

My favourite quote of the article was: „ ... the new wars of the twenty-first century would
be distinguished by a radical uncertainty: it will not even be clear whether it is a war or
not”(Deichmann et al. 2002). Right after the 9/11 incident, the Iraq war has began, a war that was
initially seen as any other war, but with the passage of time, people started to doubt about the real
reasons of this war and the motives of those who coordinated the military forces. Gradually, there
has been an information war in which the one who has more information has more power, but for
citizens it is difficult to distinguish real information from false information. The new type of war
might be called a news war. Hence, the power who manage to manipulate the people will be the
one who will recieve the population support. Furthermore, right as we speak, coronavirus
pandemic brings the global economy to an astonishing halt, the entire world has stopped, we live
in fear and uncertainty. Could this be a type of war that Deichmann et al. warned us? Is the entire
world the battlefield and our enemy is a bio-chemical weapon?

To sum up what Gregory argues for, the war is no longer „over there” or defined by a geographical
area, the new type of war is everywhere. This idea reflects not only the perpetual essence of today
war but also its spatial scale. It become increasingly complicated to distinguish places of war from
places of peace. In everywhere war, violence can happen anywhwere, at any time.