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Military-Age Males in
Counterinsurgency and
Drone Warfare
Sarah Shoker
Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency
and Drone Warfare
Sarah Shoker
Military-Age Males
in Counterinsurgency
and Drone Warfare
Sarah Shoker
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-52473-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52474-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52474-6
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It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could,
by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a
hundred, that it would—to a large extent—supersede the necessity of large
armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly
diminished.
—Richard Jordan Gatling, 1818–1903
This book is dedicated to the civilian dead.
Acknowledgments
Academics are supported by a large network of people who are often invis-
ible to readers but are nevertheless an indispensable part of the research
journey. I did not expect a project that began as a Ph.D. dissertation
would eventually materialize into a book, but my committee members at
McMaster University in the Department of Political Science were confi-
dent that this research project’s impact lay beyond the digital walls of the
university library’s dissertation repository. Your kind encouragement lay
the foundation for pursuing this book project.
Specifically, I want to thank my supervisor, Dr. Marshall Beier and my
committee members, Dr. Lana Wylie and Dr. Peter Nyers. Your support
and knowledge made it clear that academia had room for one more.
Marshall, I feel extremely lucky that you were my supervisor and that
I had the opportunity to grow as a scholar with the help of your kind
mentorship. That is not always the case for scholars pursuing research
projects that focus on gender. So to my entire committee: thank you for
viewing International Relations as an expansive and inclusive discipline. I
hope that I can one day provide the same kind of support to someone
else.
I would also like to thank the Institute on Globalization and the
Human Condition at McMaster University. Sections of this book, espe-
cially in Chapter 4, were first workshopped at the IGHC Digital Democ-
racy workshop in Fall 2019. Special thanks go to Dr. Tony Porter and
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dr. Netina Tan for their constructive editorial comments and for granting
me permission to reuse my working paper for this book.
There are many others who helped me along my journey—many of
you were not involved in Political Science at all, but you always had time
to ask me questions about my research. You helped me recognize that
I could write in a way that appealed to different audiences. You looked
over my papers for typos. You consoled me when I felt stressed. You made
me food. You were compassionate. To all those who witnessed me on the
high of a research finding or on the low of a burnout: I see you and I am
grateful. And now, to sleep.
Contents
1 Introduction: Who Counts? 1

1 Counting the Dead 12
2 Data Is the New Oil? 14
3 A Few Notes on Feminist Methods 17
References 25
2 Producing the Not-Civilian: Military-Age Males

as Visual Identifier 31
1 Introduction 31
2 The History of Civilian Protection 34
3 Lawfare: Bureaucratic Procedure and the Making of War 42
4 At the Center Is Gender 53
5 Conclusion: The Military-Age Male as Mode of Thought 58
References 61
3 Risk-Management and Humanitarian War 67

1 Introduction 67
2 What War Are We Fighting? 71
3 International Relations Comes Home: Expanding
the Liberal Project 81
4 Civilian Death in the Human Terrain 96
5 Rebuilding the Liberal State 102
6 Gendering the Terrain 105
xi
xii CONTENTS
7 Conclusion: Moving Away from Counterinsurgency? 118

References 122
4 Learning to See Data: Military-Age Males and Drone

Warfare 131
1 Introduction 131
2 A Brief History of Signature Strikes 133
3 Technology and Gender in the War on Terror 138
4 Drowning in Data: How Drone Crews Use Data to Issue
Strikes 153
5 The Future of Intelligence 164
6 Conclusion: Behavioral Profiles as Predictive Technology 182
References 184
5 Conclusion: The Future of Warfare 195

References 207
References 211
Index 241
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Who Counts?
In a 2012 investigation conducted by The New York Times , reporters

revealed that the Obama Administration made the decision to exclude
boys and men who were killed in drone strikes from the collateral damage
count. These boys and men were referred to as military-age males, an
identifier that covers those between the ages of sixteen and sixty but, in
practice, was used on boys younger than sixteen. In doing so, the Obama
Administration used gender as a shortcut to assign combatant status to
boys and men who were near a drone target. On closer inspection, The
New York Times revelation was foreshadowed by a trickle of news stories
that preceded the Obama Administration and which casually mentioned
military-age males without much scrutiny. These media stories point to
a post-9/11 security culture where defense and intelligence practitioners
used assumptions about gender to interpret the battlespace.
We already knew that gender mattered when the CIA targeted Abu
Ali Al-Harithi. On November 3rd, 2002, Abu Ali Al-Harithi, who helped
plan the 2000 attack on the USS Navy Cole, was hit with a drone strike
while leaving a compound in Yemen. Two SUVs left the compound; Abu
Ali Al-Harithi and six other men sat in one SUV while the women were
in a separate SUV. The CIA killed Al-Harithi and five other men with
a Hellfire missile deployed from a Predator drone that launched from
a US base in Djibouti. (One man escaped.) According to one official,
“if the women hadn’t gotten into another car, we wouldn’t have fired”
(McManus 2003). We also knew that women, children, and “men of
© The Author(s) 2021 1

S. Shoker, Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52474-6_1
2 S. SHOKER
nonmilitary age” were allowed to flee Fallujah during Operation Vigi-

lant Resolve in 2006, while military-age males were not allowed to flee
the firefight that had killed more than 450 civilians in 6 days (Entman
2006, 220). We knew that at least one colonel had instructed his platoon
to “kill all military-age males that were not actively surrendering,” an
order that led to a court case and a formal reprimand for the colonel (von
Zielbauer 2006). The examples proliferate throughout the book and we
could conceivably search for references to military-age males in newspaper
archives spanning the last few generations. The military-age male identi-
fier is entrenched in US warfighting, was used extensively by the Bush
Administration, and goes back to at least the Vietnam War. Not coinci-
dentally, the military-age male is a figure who appears most prominently
in so-called irregular wars and former Western colonies.
The New York Times investigation fuelled a burst of surprise and
outrage that centered on some variation of the following criticism: gender
shouldn’t be used to assign guilt during wartime. An important note
to readers: combatants and military-age males (or MAMs, as they are
often called) are not synonymous categories even if both terms refer
to violence. The MAM identifier, however, does institutionalize the link
between masculinity and violence. This distinction is important. On initial
inspection at least, the decision to exclude boys and men from the
collateral damage count violates a fundamental liberal democratic prin-
ciple and smacks of hypocrisy. The just war theorist Michael Walzer, for
example, writes that terrorism is deplorable specifically because civilians
cannot choose their national or ethnic identities, nor have not chosen
to enter public life and so they cannot be morally culpable like politi-
cians. “Ordinary civilians are killed and no defense is offered in terms of
their individual activity” (Walzer 2007, 37). Terrorists and nondemocratic
states target civilians because of who they are, not because of what they
have done. Liberal democracies are supposed to do better.
The idea that there is a difference between those who choose to fight
and those who do not fight is based on the widespread acceptance of
liberal social contract theory and is known as the principle of distinc-
tion under international humanitarian law. The principle of distinction
has been described as “perhaps the greatest triumph of international law”
due to its success at “mitigating the evils of war…Indeed, the purpose of
those rules is to specify for each individual a single identity; [the person]
must be either a [combatant] or a civilian” (Jones 2006, 262). But if
1 INTRODUCTION: WHO COUNTS? 3
the principle of distinction represents liberalism’s promise to fight civi-

lized wars, then the military-age male category reveals that this promise
comes with caveats and disclaimers that carve exceptions into liberalism’s
architecture based on identity traits like gender, age, race, and religion.
In Chapter 2, I speak more on Geneva III, Protocol I, which contains
the article that elaborates on the types of behavior that turn individuals
into combatants. For now, it is enough to say that the military-age male is
not a legal category, nor will you find this term used in any international
or US convention that governs war. Combatant and civilian identities
are designed to guarantee a set of rights and treatment afforded during
wartime (e.g., civilians cannot be intentionally targeted and combatants
must be afforded prisoner of war status if captured by enemy forces).
With the exception of additional rights granted to children under sixteen,
who are understood to be exceptionally vulnerable during wartime, age is
not used to determine combatant status. Gender is also not legally used to
determine combatant status, though, as we will see throughout this book,
military lawyers, counterinsurgents, and drone crews routinely considered
gender in their targeting decisions. The military-age male category is not
a legal category, but a technocratic creation that is used to identify and
manage risky bodies in irregular wars.
The United States often highlights its own superior conduct during
wartime, juxtaposing the behavior of norm-violating actors against US
attempts to protect civilians. The United States has institutionalized crit-
icism against norm-violating actors through, for example, congressional
resolutions condemning militant organizations for their use of civilians
as human shields (H.Con. Res 107, 113th Cong. 2014). Pentagon offi-
cials have similarly criticized ISIS for forcing civilians to act as human
shields (BBC News 2016). US Central Command (CENTCOM) has
criticized Taliban fighters for forcing civilians to remain in villages that
were at risk of being bombed by Coalition Forces. While US and Afghan
military forces were “committed to protecting the lives of Afghan citi-
zens” the Taliban was “deliberately [placing] civilians in harm’s way”
(Garamone 2009). Considering these foreign policy stances, the decision
made by both the Bush and Obama Administrations to direct military
action against civilian boys and men during counterinsurgency operations
and then to omit them from the collateral damage count is especially
perplexing and distressing.
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sought to reassure
domestic and international audiences that reducing civilian deaths is an
4 S. SHOKER
American imperative. Bush, referring to the ground war in Afghanistan,

stated that the Principle of Distinction, the principle under international
law that differentiates between combatants and civilians, still applied
(Kinsella 2005, 163). In his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Obama stated
that: “I believe that the United States of America must remain a stan-
dard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from
those whom we fight” (Obama 2009). This regard for civilian life gives
the United States its moral authority (or so its officials claim) and facili-
tates the language of condemnation that is directed at militants and other
nondemocratic states.
This research journey began by establishing an empirical puzzle.
The US Army/ Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (2007),
a document that emerged from the US interventions in Iraq and
Afghanistan, emphasizes that militants vie for the civilian population’s
support as a way to win the war against a stronger and better-resourced
military force. Prominent counterinsurgents like David Petraeus state that
the United States cannot rely on military prowess alone and that, in
fact, “some of the best weapons do not shoot” (Sewall 2007b). Foreign
policy documents like the Counterinsurgency Joint Publication 3-24 state
that counterinsurgents are involved in competing for the civilian popula-
tion’s support (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2009). These statements are deeply
perplexing in the context of the US decision to remove military-age males
from the collateral damage count, a decision that increased bodily risk for
civilian boys and men. This puzzle intensifies upon examining how the
Bush and Obama Administrations subjected boys and men to differenti-
ated and burdensome treatment—sometimes described as “non-kinetic”
activity—during wartime, a decision that would seemingly cause resent-
ment from a large segment of the population and undermine the success
of American foreign policy.
I had identified this puzzle by exercising what Cynthia Enloe calls
“feminist curiosity” (Enloe 2004, 3). The existence of the military-age
male category indicated that security practitioners used gender in the prac-
tice of foreign policy. US foreign policy officials signaled that gender was
an influential category in the practice of war. Though, when I first asked
this question, I did not anticipate the extent that gender mattered to
US foreign policymakers and in what ways. I did not know that I had
stumbled on a question that was as much about big data and emerging
technology as international law and civilian protection. From the begin-
ning of the project, however, there was convincing evidence that US
officials used gender to inform “normative judgments about effective and

appropriate policies” (Bleich 2002, 1063). The existence of the military-
age male category hinted that gender was a socially meaningful category
in foreign policy circles, potentially operating as a kind of perverse gender
mainstreaming in the practice of war.
An International Relations scholar who writes on gender often has to
justify her decision to do so. As noted by several feminist scholars, gender
is often shunted to the boundaries of the International Relations disci-
pline because its origins were conditioned by debates about sovereignty
(Chowdhry and Rai 2009). I hope that this book can convince some of
my IR colleagues to adopt some feminist curiosity when researching their
own work, if they had not done so before. (I am tempted to say that the
Trump Administration’s blusterous comments about women have meant
that feminist scholars have had an easier time defending their work’s rele-
vance to international security. You may recall that H.R. McMaster, acting
as national security advisor, showed President Trump historical photos of
Afghan women in mini skirts to persuade him that Afghanistan was not
a “lost cause” and to keep US troops in Afghanistan [Robin Eberhardt
2017].)
Most IR scholars, regardless of theoretical orientation, agree that
research traditions establish boundaries “by insisting on strong consensus
on enduring and irreconcilable foundational,” which as a result privilege
and reward certain concepts while also ignoring large swaths of social
reality (Sil and Katzenstein 2010, 413). While IR’s theoretical pluralism
should be applauded, it also gives rise to another question. Given the
plethora of competing theoretical traditions, why should IR scholars care
about gender?
There are several reasons, but two will be highlighted for the purposes
of this project. First, foreign policy, security, and defense officials care.
As this project developed, the reams of collected data pointed to an over-
whelming social fact: the state uses gender to understand and practice war.
Ignoring gender analysis means adding an additional layer of abstraction
between IR scholarship and decision-making within foreign policy circles.
Second, IR has a poor record for predicting world events for the simple
reason that most scholarship, as Enloe notes, underestimates the amount
and varieties of power required to sustain international relations which,
in turn, “exaggerates the simplicity of the entire political system” (Enloe
2004, 23). Christine Sylvester elaborates on this theme and notes that
6 S. SHOKER
[m]uch of IR actually seems unprepared for the presence, let alone the
power of ordinary people in international relations, whether those people
walk through the Berlin Wall and help shift the Cold War polarity, or
toss out autocrats in the Arab Spring Revolutions. Ordinary people are
overwhelmingly absent in IR because they are not seen as key stakeholders
in IR’s version of international relations. (Sylvester 2012, 485)
Very simply, taking gender seriously can be a corrective for a disci-

pline that routinely fails to predict shifts in the global order because
of its focus on large-scale actors. My methods reflected this theoretical
commitment: I decided to interview individuals who had first-hand expe-
rience working in counterinsurgency and drone operations, a decision
that did not come without serious challenges. From the beginning of
this project, I recognized that interviewing a large pool of participants
was not possible for a project of this character. The biggest challenge was
locating participants, since most veterans of the drone program do not
publicly self-identify. Once I had someone else vouch for my character,
I was able to use the snowball method to interview other participants.
My fieldwork consisted of telephone calls using the Signal application,
which uses end-to-end encryption for both text and phone conversations.
The interview times ranged from 1.5 hours to 3 hours. There were two
exceptions: I conducted one face-to-face interview and one phone inter-
view where the participant did not want to use an encrypted application.
In total, I interviewed six participants, some of whom self-identified as
whistle-blowers and others who were more supportive of US or coali-
tion foreign policy goals. While those I interviewed had a diversity of
viewpoints on the moral justice of US intervention abroad, the empir-
ical observations they offered never contradicted one another or other
accounts found in journalistic media. Here I make a distinction (that I
recognize might be viewed as problematic by some, but is necessary for
the sake of this section) between normative statements and positive state-
ments. While participants disagreed on what the direction of US foreign
policy should be, they did not disagree about what happened “on the
ground.” Given that my interview sample was small, I cross-referenced
participant answers with statements made in the press by other veterans
that I did not interview.
I was clear that I did not expect participants to break their nondis-
closure agreements or place themselves in legally precarious positions.
Most of my participants agreed that they would not divulge information
that would jeopardize their legal standing while others were comfortable
ignoring these restrictions. A few of my participants also did not see the
need for pseudonyms. However, given that I used the snowball method
to find interview participants, using real names for some participants may
have revealed the identities of those who wanted to remain anonymous.
I provided everyone with a unisex pseudonym and have opted to use the
word “they” in replacement for “he” or “she” as a further barrier against
identification.
Some readers may question my decision to interview low-ranking mili-
tary personnel, given that they were not responsible for crafting foreign
policy or military doctrine. In Foreign Policy, one author argued that “just
because you’ve worn a uniform doesn’t make you uniquely qualified to
offer political judgment on matters of state” (Brooks 2016). The author’s
main point was that while veterans may have a “personal stake” in foreign
policy, their time spent in the military did not make them foreign policy
experts.
This position returns to IR’s methodological clash: who matters in
international relations? To repeat Cynthia Enloe’s point, IR has routinely
underestimated the “myriad strains of power” required to sustain inter-
national relations. I prefer Swati Parashar’s approach to validating knowl-
edge: “Ordinary people are repositories of knowledge about wars and
their memories are crucial log-books in constructing a war narrative”
(Parashar 2013, 626). Contemporary warfare and military practice is
sustained by individuals operating at all levels in and outside the chain
of command. These individuals engage in routine, mundane, and often
boring practices. (Boredom is a sensation that many drone crew members
report experiencing.) Similarly, the decision to conduct drone strikes is
negotiated across various geographical locations. Defense and intelligence
communities rely on labor diffused across complicated bureaucratic struc-
tures, where tasks include developing machine vision APIs, writing legally
sanctioned bombing lists, generating social rapport with local communi-
ties under occupation, analyzing visual data collected by drone sensors,
and pulling the trigger.
There were practical considerations for opting to interview individuals
who had been involved in counterinsurgency and/or drone operations. In
contrast to elite foreign policy officials who are bound to “toe the party
line,” I expected greater frankness from individuals who had honorably
discharged and were not bound by contract to remain silent. Addi-
tionally, the majority of persons I interviewed were retired. Compared
8 S. SHOKER
with personnel who are actively enlisted in a military apparatus, retired

personnel do not face the same regulatory obstacles if they want to speak
with a researcher. Most, though not all, of those who agreed to be
interviewed had left military service in part because they were critical of
counterinsurgency or drone operations. Some may argue that the size of
my interview pool places me at risk of selection bias, since my sample size
mostly contains individuals who are critical of US drone warfare. While
I explain how I controlled for this risk below, I would also counter by
saying that most of the individuals who provide statements to the media
are policy officials; statements about drone warfare and counterinsurgency
are already filtered through a lens decided by the Department of Defense
and the White House’s communications strategy. As feminist scholars are
keenly aware, some voices in foreign policy are amplified, while others
are excluded; the production of knowledge, viewpoints, and dominant
narratives are often dependent on the social and material resources that
are available to actors. Interviewing persons who were critical of coun-
terinsurgency and drone warfare, therefore, could act as a corrective to
what is often a heavily edited view of foreign policy. Moreover, given that
the drone program has been demonstrably sold to the public in rather
generous and euphemistic terms, the inclusion of critical voices adds,
rather than detracts, to the rigor of what we know about US foreign
policy.
Most scholars aim to research timely, relevant problems that are
connected to the way the world works. This project aims to solve an
empirical puzzle on a topic that has been shielded away from public
scrutiny. If scholars are dedicated, as Muller says, to “showing the working
of power” (Muller 2015, 33) then decentralized networks of soldiers,
bureaucrats, NGO staff, and local people all become worthy subjects of
analysis. Moreover, academics who place arbitrary restrictions on their
research by excluding the experiences of everyday people (code for “non-
elite”) from IR contribute to the problem of imperfect information. The
discipline risks producing knowledge dedicated to spreading misinforma-
tion, in hiding more than revealing international relations. What, then,
can the military-age male tell us about the way war was practiced after
September 2001?
I followed the military-age male from military manuals, participant
interviews, journalistic pieces, and history tracts with the goal of finding
if any justification had been given for its use and how the term was
deployed to make sense of security and defense practices. There were a few
constraints with this approach. On one hand, having a technocratic cate-

gory made certain bodies visible when tracing bureaucratic documents
and journalists accounts. On the other hand, technocratic categories
highlight certain characteristics that are important to policymakers while
rendering other traits invisible. The politics surrounding data production
is a main thematic concern of this project, so I turned a similarly critical
eye at how my methods risked highlighting certain variables for analysis
while obscuring other factors. As Andrew Bennett writes, there is “no
guarantee that researchers will include in their analyses the variable(s) that
actually caused [the phenomenon], but process tracing backward from
observed outcomes to potential causes…allows researchers to uncover
variables they have not previously considered” (Bennett 2010, 209). The
military-age male category highlights age and gender (and its connection
to military service) but omits race and religion, two factors that were the
focus of media coverage after September 11, 2001. The MAM category
also contains no mention that this term was used by coalition forces in
countries that were also former Western colonies. Focusing exclusively on
gender and age could have potentially resulted in a project that uncriti-
cally reproduced what the US defense and intelligence communities found
important.
Yet scholars who trace the history of the military-age male will find
themselves in countries with a history of colonial policing, like French
Algeria and British Kenya. US forces in Vietnam also used the term
military-age male to describe Vietnamese boys and men they encoun-
tered during counterinsurgency operations. In Chapter 4, a participant
reveals that the military views military-age males as persons of interest
by using (inaccurate) anthropological knowledge about Muslim culture
and Islamic practice that governs the age of majority. These factors are
not self-evidently portrayed by the words military-age male. Part of this
project’s aim was to recover data about drone operations, most of which
remain shielded from public and scholarly scrutiny. Since the program was
shrouded in secrecy, the best method for solving this problem required
flexibility and the ability to explore variables that may have, at first glance,
appeared tangential.
My methods are drawn from the qualitative tradition since the research
question first established a consequence, an outcome of a policy decision.
We know that the Obama Administration removed military-age males
from the collateral damage count (CDC). We know that the military-
age male category was used by US foreign policy officials to make sense
10 S. SHOKER
of the security terrain. As James Mahoney and Gary Goertz explain,

qualitative scholars often “start with cases and their outcomes and then
[by] moving backwards toward the causes, qualitative analysts adopt a
‘causes-of-effects’ approach to explanations” (Mahoney and Goertz 2006,
230). This approach is not unique to the social sciences and constitutive
relationships are also used in natural science communities.
Qualitative research also encompasses two branches of inquiry: posi-
tivist and interpretivist approaches. Causal relationships fall under the
purview of the positivist qualitative tradition, while scholars who engage
with the interpretivist tradition try to establish constitutive relationships
(Lin 1998, 162). Positivist qualitative traditions seek to “identify qualita-
tive data with propositions that can then be tested or identified in other
cases, while interpretive work seeks to combine those data into systems of
belief whose manifestations are specific to a case” (Lin 1998, 162). Statis-
tical approaches usually use controlled experiments to gather data and
are often held as the archetypal method for studying causal relationships
in the social sciences, though this approach falls under the quantitative
and not qualitative label. The outcome of controlled experiments are not
known prior to being tested and the goal of a controlled experiment is
to observe the outcome or effect of the test. In contrast to the quantita-
tive model, Mahoney and Goertz describe the statistical paradigm as an
“effects of causes” approach (Mahoney and Goertz 2006, 231).
Instead of using a qualitative or quantitative positivist model, this
project uses the qualitative, interpretivist approach. This approach uses
a “context-specific setting,” sometimes described as a small-n case study,
“where the researcher does not attempt to manipulate the phenomenon
of interest,” (Patton 2001, quoted in Golafshani 2003, 600). Said
otherwise, causal relationships try to determine what will happen, while
constitutive relationships seek to explain what has happened. One can,
quite literally, imagine this process as a detective encountering a (state-
sanctioned) murder scene and then trying to determine how the dead
bodies appeared. The activity of examining evidence “that contributes to
supporting or overturning alternative explanatory hypotheses” is some-
times known as process tracing, and authors like Andrew Bennett have
also used the analogy of a detective “attempting to solve a crime
by looking at clues and… piecing together a convincing explanation”
(Bennett 2010, 209).
Scholars who use constitutive approaches are committed to uncov-
ering rich detail in small cases, but this process should not be mistaken
for “description.” Constitutive relationships do not describe events or

conflicts, but seek to explain “how things [that] are put together makes
possible, or even probable, certain kinds of political behavior and effects”
(Finnemore and Sikkink 2001, 394). Most scholars, regardless of method-
ological commitments, try to ensure that their work is an accurate
reflection of how the world functions. As Alexander Wendt notes, most
scholars are “‘tacit realists’ in their empirical research” (Wendt 1998, 17).
While scholars who work in the interpretivist approach may make claims
that rely on pointing at a “cause” or “consequence,” this is different
from a capital-C “Causal relationship.” Constitutive scholars will use
the word “because” or “influence” or “effect.” The manner of reaching
these conclusions, however, is different than those found in the posi-
tivist tradition. Said otherwise, there is a difference between a cause and
a Cause.
Since constitutive explanations have sometimes been charged with
being insufficiently rigorous (see Kurki 2006; Thies 2002), this project
uses multiple safeguards to strengthen the integrity of its conclusions.
Scholars who seek to establish constitutive relationships can ensure that
their conclusions are accurate by using counterfactual hypotheses (alter-
native explanations that answer the empirical puzzle, which I address in
the conclusion of the next chapter) and by using data triangulation. After
all, “for qualitative researchers, a theory is usually only one critical obser-
vation away from being falsified” (Mahoney and Goertz 2006, 241).
In addition to considering counterfactual explanations for my empirical
puzzle, and in order to ensure that this project’s findings were rigorous,
I relied on multiple theoretical tools and on varied sources of data. This
process is known as data and theoretical triangulation. Triangulation is
a process by which scholars use “multiple methods of data collection
[and/or] multiple methods of data analysis…to test the validity and reli-
ability” of their research (Lauri 2011, 35). Scholars can use different
methods to interpret a phenomenon, multiple investigators to fix for
personal bias, or multiple theories to help interpret data (ibid.).
The decision to use data triangulation was informed by the project’s
commitment to unite discourse analysis with object-oriented analysis. This
combination may initially appear counterintuitive, but foreign policy is
the combination of both ideational and material factors, an interaction
so entangled that these factors cannot be separated (Hansen 2006, 15).
A theory that focuses solely on discourse risks obfuscating that these
ideas are rendered coercive through the physical instruments of power.
12 S. SHOKER
A theory that focuses only on objects ignores that “war alters relation-
ships…[N]ew relationships are fostered between bombs and guerrillas,
and bodies take on a variety of new meanings; the martyr, the terrorist,
the hero(ine), the collateral” (Parashar 2013, 619). Added to this list: the
military-age male. Combining these two theoretical approaches required
an expanded methods toolbox that went beyond one school of thought.
1 Counting the Dead

The United States does not want to appear as though its drone and coun-
terinsurgency (COIN) programs impact civilian life. The CIA argued that
no civilians died from drone strikes in 2011 and, in 2012, US government
officials stated that civilian deaths that resulted from drone strikes were in
the “single digits” (Becker and Shane 2012). Though counting the dead
is notoriously tricky, a number of organizations have sought to quantify
the number of civilian deaths in some, if not all, war theaters. These orga-
nizations include the Long War Journal, the New America Foundation,
the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, and the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism. All sources indicate that the United States severely underesti-
mates its collateral damage count. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
(TBIJ), the organization referenced most frequently in this book, found
that between 2004 and 2014, civilian deaths ranged from 416 to 957,
of which between 168 to 202 were children. TBIJ categorizes all persons
under the age of 18 as children and all those who do not wield arms as
civilians (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism 2017).
In 2016, after intense legal pressure from advocacy groups like
the American Civil Liberties Union, the United States admitted to
between 64 and 116 civilian deaths from 2009 to 2015 in Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia, and Libya—countries “outside areas of active hostilities”
(Monaco 2016). These numbers were released because of “the presi-
dent’s commitment to transparency,” according to a White House official
(ibid.). Yet, TBIJ estimates that the civilian death count was still six times
higher than the US claims: between 380 to 801 civilians. The minimum
total number of dead—meaning the combined total of combatants and
civilian deaths—provided by the Government and the Bureau were “strik-
ingly similar,” with the White House counting 2436 dead individuals and
TBIJ recording 2753. As I have written elsewhere, the decision to count
boys and men as civilians is a “little definitional difference [that] translates
to a big difference in the numbers” (Shoker 2017).
Some authors claim that drone strikes were thirty-five times more
deadly in the nonconventional battlefields of Yemen, Pakistan, and
Somalia when compared to conventional airstrikes that took place in
Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan (Zenko and Wolf 2016). Other researchers
dispute these findings for methodological reasons, but still argue that
the precision of drone strikes has been exaggerated (Barela and Plaw
2016). Finally, in an in-depth report that covers all security theaters, The
Roosevelt Institute at Columbia University estimates that approximately
1300 civilians were killed out of a total of 8000 dead (Davis 2017, 1).
Steven Barela and Avery Plaw note that the quantitative data for civilian
deaths caused by drone strikes remains poor, and go so far as to state
that “the administration’s case for the relative precision of drones has
always relied more on an intuitive appreciation of drones’ unique capabili-
ties—a fixed visual target for the crew, extended loitering times, combined
with small laser-guided munitions—than the statistical evidence available”
(Barela and Plaw 2016).
Why do these numbers matter? Given the secrecy surrounding drone
warfare, the quest for accuracy—by counting the dead and debating who
counts—becomes a substitute for gauging the legitimacy, character, and
methods that are used to wage war. The numbers act as evidence that
either confirm or deny the claim that precision and other smart weapons
encourage civilian protection.
The gap between the United States and NGO reporting on civilian
casualties was finally acknowledged in 2017 by the Pentagon, when the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff created an independent body to
investigate civilian casualties. The report, classified as secret and released
with numerous retractions, acknowledged that NGOs were “frustrated
with what they see as decreased transparency in US government report-
ing” (Joint Chiefs of Staff 2018, 9). Still, when the Pentagon released its
2018 report to Congress, stating that US military operations had killed
120 civilians that year, the claim was met with skepticism (Kheel 2019).
Yet another New York Times investigation revealed that the Pentagon
dismisses most allegations of civilian deaths that come from external
monitors (Khan and Gopal 2017). In response to claims that Pentagon
officials were undercounting civilians killed during Operation Inherent
Resolve, the coalition responsible for fighting ISIS, Lieutenant General
Stephen J. Townsend, the former top commander for the coalition,
argued that “[o]ur critics are unable to conduct the detailed assessments
the coalition does. They arguably often rely on scant information phoned
14 S. SHOKER
in or posted by questionable sources” (Townsend 2017). However, the

New York Times investigation on civilian casualties reported that the
coalition does not consistently send teams to investigate civilian death
allegations because of security concerns in the field and that the last “rig-
orous investigation” of a US air war was conducted by Human Rights
Watch after the NATO bombing in Kosovo ended in 1999 (Khan and
Gopal 2017). One of my sources summarized the problem succinctly:
“We consider local sources unreliable and there’s no one on the ground
counting the bodies” (Taylor, interview with author, October 2016).
Proponents argue that counterinsurgency tactics, drone strikes, and,
now, autonomous weapons are designed to minimize civilian casual-
ties. This, combined with lengthy bureaucratic and legal constraints are
supposed to ensure that civilian deaths do not outweigh military gains.
But how can we assess this claim if we routinely misidentify civilians
based on characteristics like gender? The answer I give in this book is
simple: When US officials routinely underestimate civilian deaths by using
stereotypes associated with gender, religion, and race as proxies to iden-
tify combatants, then they cannot reliably claim that counterinsurgency
and precision weapons are reducing civilian casualties. Investigating the
criteria that inform a quantified civilian death count can reveal the norms
that were used for civilian protection and explain how defense and intelli-
gence practitioners made this decision seem reasonable. This investigation
can also serve as a guide for future defense and intelligence practitioners
who genuinely want to decrease civilian death in violent conflict.
2 Data Is the New Oil?

Counterinsurgency and drone warfare have highlighted the crucial role
of data production and surveillance in the exercise of US military
power. Like any other bureaucracy, defense and intelligence institutions
create categories in order to measure and act on populations. These
categories highlight certain traits as important for managerial purposes
while rendering other traits invisible. While increased media attention
on issues like big data may create a temptation to associate data collec-
tion exclusively with drone warfare, the push toward more sophisticated
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) technologies were
also crucial to US COIN tactics. According to the US Air Force, coun-
terinsurgency required three to four times more ISR than major combat
operations (Gregory 2011, 193). Indeed, Michael Flynn, writing as
Director of Intelligence at CENTCOM and who would then later serve

briefly as Donald Trump’s national security advisor, stated that “intel-
ligence is operations” because the “enemy is a low-contrast foe easily
camouflaged among civilian clutter, unlike high-contrast targets such
as airfields and warships…the insurgent’s ability to hide in plain sight
demands persistent collection in order to detect his presence” (Flynn et al.
2008, 56–57). While some commentators have stated that the transition
from counterinsurgency to drone warfare marks a paradigmatic shift, this
book illustrates that security practices under the Bush and Obama Admin-
istrations were connected by a commitment to identifying the enemy
through programs designed to socially sort insurgents from the larger
population.
Importantly, Maja Zehfuss notes that “[t]he promise of reducing harm
to people caught up in warfare through particular capabilities is familiar
not least from the discourse on smart weapons” (ibid., 176). Advocates
position the development of these weapons capabilities as a response to
taking seriously the protection of civilians in a climate where combatants
refuse to self-identify. Whether discussing counterinsurgency or drone
warfare, US policy officials cite the current climate of transnational insur-
gency to justify persistent surveillance at home and abroad in order to
create actionable intelligence. Like other data-driven weapons platforms,
US officials have similarly positioned autonomous weapons as liberal
democratic technologies that are crucial for civilian protection and which
would abide by international humanitarian law, including the principle of
distinction.
In military parlance, the transition from efficient and precise recon-
naissance to deploying violent action through weapons systems is known
as the “sensor to shooter” sequence (Chizek 2003). These maneuvers
may begin with human intelligence (HUMINT) via on-the-ground inter-
actions with the local population, but they extend to aerial surveillance
platforms like drones. The volume and speed by which drones can collect
data has prompted an explosion of big data management techniques,
including automation, within US security institutions. In 2009 alone, the
Air Force collected about twenty-four years worth of video footage, three
times the amount that was collected in 2007 (Drew 2010). In 2011, the
Air Force amassed about three hundred and twenty-five thousand hours
or thirty-seven years of footage (Johnson and Wald 2017). Within the
sensor-to-shooter sequence, human presence has been identified as the
bottleneck of the data analysis process and, increasingly, the targeting
16 S. SHOKER
process. Humans cannot analyze data at the pace of its collection, a

physiological limitation that has prompted a move toward autonomy
in weapons systems. But just as the unmanned aerial vehicle hides the
human in the machine, so too does the word autonomous. Authors have
used the term “ghost work” to highlight the invisible human supply
chain that is necessary for artificial intelligence to function (Gray and
Suri 2019). Drones that hovered over populations for forty-two hours
transformed populations into unwilling cyborgs perpetually connected to
an appendage that placed them under surveillance. Drones, therefore, do
not necessarily translate into a smaller military footprint (Cloud 2011),
nor are they asocial technologies. They are staffed by soldiers and contrac-
tors who are required to interpret the data collected by the drone (which
is still the norm in 2019, though there are some machine vision applica-
tions that automatically tags visual data, with more machine vision APIs
that are in development by private companies). The data analysis process
is not value neutral. The military-age male functioned as a code that
instructed individuals where to look when conducting these operations.
Not only did individuals routinely bring their social values to the tech-
nical pipeline, but these social values were institutionally sanctioned and
historically embedded.
Audiences are told that drones like the Predator B ER can monitor
targets for forty-two hours before refueling (General Atomics Aeronau-
tical 2018) and that some drones have an “Unblinking Eye” (Flynn
et al. 2008, 59) that can spot a milk carton from 60,000 feet (Haddal
and Gertler 2010). The weapon’s performance connects its technical
features with the normative commitments of liberal democratic states.
Notably, by positioning precision and smart weapons as technologies
that can promote liberal democratic norms, proponents link democratic
norms with increased surveillance and personal data collection. This
data collection takes place during violent conflict and is overwhelmingly
nonconsensual. Despite the weapon’s sophisticated technology, US secu-
rity practitioners still could not correctly sort between friends and foes,
often returning to gendered ideas about violence that stretch back to
Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist credited for laying the foundations for
international law and who ascribed civilian status exclusively to women
because he believed them to be intellectually deficient (Kinsella 2006).
The post-9/11 security moment shifted government investment
toward ISR technologies. These norms redirected security practice away
from traditional air bombing campaigns and toward counterinsurgency
and drone warfare. The military-age male is emblematic of a “future-

oriented power” (Gao 2007, quoted in Guzik 2009, 6), where liberal
democratic countries use surveillance to monitor at-risk groups in order
to identify behavioral patterns that predict future social disorder. For
counterinsurgency and drone warfare, data about Muslim-majority popu-
lations were mined in order to regulate and manage these groups with the
hopes of preempting insurgent violence. The drone’s technological capa-
bilities may have been powerful, but the unmanned aerial vehicle hides the
lengthy human chain of command that uses gender norms and bureau-
cratic procedure to choose so-called legitimate targets. The attempt to
root out adversaries from a civilian population or, in other words, the
practice of interrogating data in order to precisely target combatants,
also meant that entire populations were imbued with risk and became
sites worth monitoring. Being monitored, being “called out” as suspi-
cious, was not a passive process and, in practice, placed civilians at risk
of military harm even when civilian protection was cited as the reason
these technologies were used in the first place. The United States now
argues, most visibly at meetings hosted by the United Nations Conven-
tion on Certain Conventional Weapons, that “autonomous” weapons,
which would at least partially automate the sensor-to-shooter sequence
by extracting patterns from big data, can increase civilian protection
during wartime (US Group of Governmental Experts 2018). Similar to
drones, autonomous weapons are positioned as democratic technologies
that policymakers argue are part of the smart weapons lineage.
3 A Few Notes on Feminist Methods

As anyone who has translated their dissertation into a monograph knows,
the methods chapter is the first to get axed from the published product.
However, a few methodological points should be addressed here, espe-
cially given our current social climate in the “west,” where women are
routinely targeted by disaffected groups who not only blame feminism
for very real social problems that impact men, but who then appropriate
the language of victimhood to justify misogyny and violence directed at
women (Mann 2017; Farrell et al. 2019). Readers may twist a message
that says men are vulnerable during wartime to mean that men have
it worse during wartime, an argument that this project most definitely
does not try to make. Or perhaps this project will go unnoticed because
many of these online groups are concerned with the diminished status of
18 S. SHOKER
white men while I research the impact of war on racialized men in the
global south. (Or perhaps this project will go unnoticed because that’s
the general fate for academic volumes.)
I recognize that as a document located within disciplinary IR, the time
spent writing a book about military-age males carves out even more space
in a discipline that has an asymmetric focus on men. Joane Nagel chron-
icles a number of seminal titles relating to nation-building and gender,
noting that most classical works omit women entirely from their theoret-
ical discussions. She lists them one-by-one (Ted Gurr’s Why Men Rebel,
Seymour Martin Lipset’s Political Man, T. H. Marshall’s Class, Citi-
zenship, and Social Development , Karl Deutsch’s Nationalism and Social
Communication etc.), calling them a “tale of one gender” (Nagel 1998,
242). These titles do not merely ignore the role of women in the making
of nations, but reify the naturalness of men in politics. “The scripts in
which these roles are embedded are written primarily by men, for men,
and about men, and… women are, by design, supporting actors whose
roles reflect masculinist notions of femininity and of women’s ‘proper
place’” (Nagel 1998, 243).
Why, then, would feminist IR scholars choose to study masculinities
when, as Nagel writes, IR scholarship has focused almost exclusively on
men? Perhaps the strongest criticism comes from Marysia Zalewski’s 2007
article “Do we understand each other yet? Troubling feminist encoun-
ters with(in) International Relations.” Zalewski chronicles the turn from
feminist IR scholarship to neo-feminist scholarship, the latter which aims
to study gender from a nonfeminist perspective. These criticisms came
after scholars like Charli Carpenter (who is cited at length in Chapter 2)
and Mary Caprioli called for the expansion of feminist IR scholarship
because the feminist project was “increasingly charged with being an inef-
fective vehicle for producing comprehensive and effective gender analysis”
(Zalewski 2007, 303). Zalewski describes neo-feminism as a “democratic
remedy” designed to redress gender as being of equivalent injury to
men. But the more damning argument is that neo-feminism is a perfor-
mance that “injects a sense of normality back into the feminist/gender
IR interruption” through a “cruel regendering wherein feminist projects
[are] tamed to replicate male desires and interests” (Hawkesworth 2004,
quoted in Marysia Zalewski, 308).
Both Zalewski and Nagel present a rich critique and a serious chal-
lenge to IR feminists who seek to study boys and men. However, I do not
approach this project by adopting a neo-feminist standpoint, but through
an explicitly feminist methodology. From the beginning, feminist IR has

included men and boys in its scholarship. Notably, Zalewski coedited
a volume with Jane Parpart called The Man Question in International
Relations, which examined how “men and masculinities are implicated
in international relations theories and practice” (Zalewski and Parpart
1998). I understand Zalewski’s criticism as directed toward specific schol-
arship that positions men as recipients of injury, not at scholarship that
focuses on how masculinity is used to promote certain norms within the
international system.
Yet I am not convinced that a focus on injured men, especially racial-
ized men in parts of the world known as the global south, replicates “male
desire and interests” in a field that often omits (forgets?) bodily injury
from its theorizing on war. I think that Zalewski’s description of Caprioli
is perhaps uncharitable, given that Caprioli’s main argument has been
that “quantitative methodology and feminism are not mutually exclusive”
(Caprioli 2004, 253). Instead of disavowing feminism, Caprioli argues
that excluding men from a gender analysis would “provide an equally
biased account of international relations as those that are male-centric”
(ibid., 255). Her argument, therefore, calls for resistance to theories that
attempt to constrain analysis by excluding men, but this position does
not mean that gender must be studied from a nonfeminist standpoint. If
anything, this project demonstrates that feminist methods are well-suited
to studying men. Instead of using words like gender and women inter-
changeably and therefore avoiding the “add women” formula that has
already been extensively critiqued (see Peterson 2005; Whitworth 2004)
this project views gender as an analytical tool that is applicable to a wide
range of IR problems that go beyond addressing research problems that
are dismissively called “women’s issues.” As a result, I borrow Laura
Shepherd’s definition of gender: Gender is “a noun, a verb, and a logic
that is product/productive of the performances of violence and security”
(Shepherd 2009, 209).
Moreover and as Carol Cohn (2013) has noted, vulnerability should
be viewed as a universal trait at the core of human experience, though it
is often ascribed to women and children Cohn (2013, 53). In practice,
this means that UN resolutions that focus on “vulnerable groups,” like
Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, posi-
tion vulnerability as a condition caused by female physiology, even when
vulnerability is supposed to be acknowledged as a social phenomenon
(ibid., 61). International Relations may be a story about men, but the
20 S. SHOKER
discipline is also a story about men without gender, whose bodies are
treated simultaneously as peripheral and identical, and where masculinity
remains free from human frailty. As I discuss in Chapter 3, liberal thought
has struggled to associate men with vulnerability, a theoretical short-
coming that carves a political space for defense and security planners to
portray the decision to exclude men and boys from the collateral damage
count as reasonable.
The military-age category is language at work, stabilizing the connec-
tion between masculinity and violence, a choice that has been determined
by male-majority groups located in US defense and intelligence commu-
nities. As work on gender and technology illustrates, gender is not an
essential, static concept and it is possible, through the technologies of
war, to render boys and men into recipients of injury. The drone monitor,
for instance, is a visual technology designed to highlight male bodies
for the purpose of directing harm. Men are, quite simply, the targets of
injury within international relations, and they are targets made through
language, technology, and bureaucratic design.
In Chapter 2, I demonstrate how social values, often articulated
through liberal norms and the laws of war, have become “a vocabulary
for marking legitimate power and justifiable death” (Kennedy 2016, 260).
In order to delegitimize their opponents, the United States condemned
the Taliban and al-Qaeda for killing civilians and recruiting children to
act as suicide bombers. US foreign policymakers positioned militants who
used and attacked children as especially heinous. But if civilians generally,
and children specifically, are used to legitimize US intervention abroad,
then how do US officials make sense of a collateral damage count that
excludes adult and child civilians? This puzzle goes beyond excluding boys
and men from the collateral damage count and covers the detention of
minors in Guantanamo Bay and other US military prisons, where male
detainees under the age of eighteen were tortured. The language that was
frequently repeated by US defense and intelligence practitioners produced
the normative code that was used to see the battlespace as an ecosystem
of plain-clothes insurgents and civilian clutter. Though much post-9/11
rhetoric seems congruent with what Barry Buzan, Jaap de Wilde, and Ole
Waever called “panic politics” (Buzan et al. 1998, 34) that framed the War
on Terror as an existential emergency, this project also highlights the role
of defense and intelligence intellectuals in producing data that made the
security theater decipherable and thus governable. The military-age male
category was used to add “shades of gray” to the principle of distinction.
Rather than framing counterinsurgency and drone warfare as a lawless

space, I argue that US foreign policy after 9/11 as an extension, not an
abandonment of liberal politics. Instead of positioning the War on Terror
as an extension of US lawlessness in an international system, I argue that
the United States advances its military practice through the law, rather
than around it. My research comes to the troubling conclusion that liberal
norms, rather than contributing to democratic peacefulness, can actually
enable warmaking by democratic states.
Chapter 4 positions the US decision to move toward counterinsur-
gency in a history of colonial counterinsurgency practice. Counterinsur-
gency, prompted after an initial period of conventional war in Afghanistan
and Iraq that proved disastrous, was motivated by a “population-centric”
approach to warfare. In practice, a population-centric approach meant
synthesizing military action with economic and social development. The
move toward using social incentives, with the ultimate goal being to rein-
force local support for the US presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, meant
that the household became a site of military intervention. The paradox-
ical turn toward what some academics have called “humanitarian war”
resulted in an explosion of data collection and anthropological knowl-
edge that was intended to decrease the risk that populations would side
with insurgent groups.
While I situate US counterinsurgency practices within a history of colo-
nial policing, I also note that modern counterinsurgency is distinguished
from its predecessor in notable ways. The population-centric approach
that characterized counterinsurgency meant that local populations were
treated as rational economic subjects who would side with US interven-
tion if offered adequate culturally sensitive incentives. Liberal subjecthood
expanded to include civilian groups, who were described as rational, self-
interested, and subjects in search of Hobbesian security—with women and
(some) children explicitly marked for protection by foreign policy prac-
tices. Crucially, by citing the human security of women and children as
worthy of protection, home life and domestic relationships became sites
for military intervention.
The turn to “humane warfare” also instigated investment into new
technologies that could manage and coerce recalcitrant and marginalized
populations. The development of these technologies were the conse-
quence of a US “global counterinsurgency” (Kilcullen 2006) where,
partially in an effort to comply with the principle of distinction, both
administrations pursued surveillance technologies that could socially sort
22 S. SHOKER
insurgents from a general civilian population. The pursuit of precision,

however, was not always effective nor were ISR technologies immune to
bad anthropology. The population became a site for data mining, where
social scientific facts about the population were understood to be mili-
tary assets. Physical space was transformed through the introduction of
checkpoints and development programs in order to monitor and contain
military-age males from engaging in violence and, in conjunction with
viewing populations as a group that harbored “raw data,” policymakers
developed ISR technologies that could monitor civilian networks. Said
otherwise, social, economic, and political life—the human terrain—was
reorganized in order to preempt violence. As we see in Chapter 4, bad
data collection can lead to what is now called algorithmic discrimination
and, as machine learning and other autonomous features proliferate in the
battlespace, these technologies internationalize a problem that is already
well-documented in domestic policing.
In Chapter 4, I chronicle how drone crews used gender to inform
strike decisions. Though often described as machines that enable “per-
sistent presence” (Parks and Kaplan 2017, 4), drones are fundamentally
reliant on human subjectivity. Drone technology became a crucial surveil-
lance technology where alleged combatants were marked for death if they
exhibited a pattern of life that was above the acceptable risk threshold.
Because insurgents blend into the civilian population and do not self-
identify as combatants, US defense and intelligence planners pushed for
greater investment into drone sensors and batteries, which in turn meant
that drones could collect more video footage (data) and loiter for longer
periods of time. Despite the public controversy surrounding drone strikes,
US officials justified their use by citing civilian protection; longer loiter
times were supposed to help drone crews identify insurgents hidden in
civilian environments. However, analysts were and are still required to
interpret drone footage, a slow and inefficient process that has been a
source of consternation for US defense planners and which has led to
the introduction of big data analytics and automation in the sensor-to-
shooter sequence. As I detail in Chapter 4, automation, usually in the
form of machine learning, comes with a host of problems and threatens
to introduce algorithmic discrimination into international conflict.
Drone warfare is sometimes viewed as a doctrinal shift from coun-
terinsurgency. Indeed, one prominent researcher was told by a security
analyst in 2007 that “technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine
of future war” (Singer 2009, 27), a claim that while easily dismissed in
2019 was not so obvious at the start of the second Iraq War. As the story
goes, the 2003 Iraq War revealed that the Revolution in Military Affairs,
credited for US success in the first Gulf War, contained theoretical gaps
that made the paradigm ill-equipped for the War on Terror (Cohen 1996;
Hoffman 2007). Chapter 3 dispels this myth and illustrates that, instead
of abandoning technology, drone warfare is an extension of counterinsur-
gency logic, where intimate life became a site of military monitoring and
intervention.
Chapter 4 details how automating the sensor-to-shooter sequence can
amplify discriminatory outcomes in the battlespace. Given that drones are
sustained by a distributed common ground system that transmits data
across 27 locations in the United States and internationally, the norms
that inform civilian targeting and hyper-surveillance are sustained by a
physical architecture of state power, all directed toward producing infor-
mation about populations caught in violent conflict. Data did (and does)
political things because it allocates moral and material value. The United
States used the military-age male as a salient category to reorganize the
social and political life of Muslim-majority populations to suit military
needs.
Proponents argue that autonomy in weapons systems, sometimes called
Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS), can increase civilian
protection during wartime. However, many UN members and civil society
groups have expressed concern that these weapons will be unable to
distinguish civilians from combatants, thereby degrading civilian protec-
tion and the international legal regime that regulates military action
during violent conflict. The argument, that LAWS may enable greater
protection for civilians during wartime, can be audited by examining the
physical infrastructure that makes such a normative claim even possible.
(Though autonomy in both commercial and military systems has been
present for decades, the current push for autonomy in weapons systems is
understood to be part of a new artificial intelligence ecosystem that uses
big data to make predictive assessments.)
There is a conceptual bridge between Chapters 2 and 4. In Chapter 2,
I showed that US spokespersons used language and imagery to build a
social environment that would make targeting military-age males appear
reasonable. These social values did not disappear in high-technology mili-
tary environments and, in fact, were fundamental to understanding and
analyzing drone imagery. While development in autonomous and semi-
autonomous software for military drones is still incipient, evidence taken
24 S. SHOKER
from commercial products used in policing suggests that social biases are
easily transferred into data-driven software and that autonomy in weapons
systems can amplify civilian harm, especially if behavioral attributes asso-
ciated with boys and men in Muslim-majority environments continue to
be used as proxies for combatant behavior.
Though this project focused on security practices under the Bush and
Obama Administrations, I conclude by reflecting briefly on the Trump
Administration’s foreign policy. I suggest that remarks made by the
Trump Administration present a pronounced discursive shift from the two
previous presidential administrations. The change in rhetoric, however,
has not stopped US defense and intelligence agencies from pushing for
autonomy in weapons systems, especially since these technologies are now
seen as vital to counter the return of near-peer competitor states like
China and Russia. While autonomy in weapons systems comes with a
number of challenges, I end this book by providing a few optimistic notes
and explaining how researchers, policymakers, and activists may move
toward reducing civilian casualties and convincing policymakers to adopt
better standards for identifying combatants in civilian environments.
The military-age male, rather than describing a biological reality, is a
social identifier used by security professionals to transform civilian envi-
ronments, often framed as sites harboring raw data, into actionable data.
This is done by transforming several gendered social behavior into entry
points for preemptive military action. Understanding, predicting, and
containing violent conflicts are major themes in the study of International
Relations. Not only does this book illustrate that defense and intelligence
practitioners use gender to produce data about the battlespace, but this
project points to a landscape where gender is at the center, rather than
margins, of security practice. These findings are salient for any scholar who
seeks to understand how liberal democracies behave in violent conflict.
Though the Bush and Obama Administrations are sometimes described
as paradigmatic opposites, the foreign policy differences between the two
administrations begin to appear more ideologically aligned when gender
is taken seriously. From counterinsurgency to drone warfare to autonomy
in weapons systems, the military-age male remains crucial to orienting
the state’s response to external threats. These findings come with a
very serious challenge for liberal democracies who take their behavior in
violent conflict seriously. Fortunately, feminist IR can provide scholars the
tools to use gender as an analytical framework to solve this challenge.
Unfortunately, security professionals chose to use gender as a cognitive
shortcut instead. Without a serious recommitment to civilian protection,

US security professionals risk perpetuating a norm where gender is used
as a risk-assessment tool that excludes boys and men from the collateral
damage count before they have committed a combat function, thereby
punishing individuals before a wrong has been done.
References
Barela, Steven J. and Avery Plaw. 2016. “The Precision of Drones: Prob-
lems with the New Data and New Claims.” E-International Relations,
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blems-with-the-new-data-and-new-claims/.
BBC News. 2016. “Mosul Battle: US Says IS Using Human Shields.” BBC News,
October 19. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-37699233.
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CHAPTER 2
Producing the Not-Civilian: Military-Age

Males as Visual Identifier
1 Introduction
Visual cues have always been central to the laws of war. Wearing a mili-
tary uniform becomes a visual guide to distinguishing combatants from
civilians. Insurgencies, however, frustrate this distinction. According to
both the American and international laws of armed conflict, combatants
and civilians occupy distinct categories. This difference is known as the
principle of distinction. In an insurgency where combatants intentionally
disguise themselves as civilians, the United States uses an alternative visual
vocabulary to highlight combatants who seek to blend into a civilian back-
ground. For instance, insurgents have been described as “low contrast”
targets (Flynn et al. 2008), language often associated with photography.
The military-age male (MAM) is a designation that reasserts the impor-
tance of visual signifiers in the practice of war; it is a category that acts as a
social sorting device to transform the security theater into a high-contrast
environment.
However, the military-age male should not be thought of as an objec-
tive description, but as a “mode of thought” (Cohn 2013, 47) that reveals
how technocratic categories influence the direction of warfare. Language
upholds a visual regime that tells counterinsurgents, drone crews, and
military planners where to look. Political language acts as a surveillance
technology, institutionalizing masculinity and its link with violence as a
relationship worth monitoring. The military-age male category acts as a
cognitive shortcut that allows policymakers to see the security theater.
© The Author(s) 2021 31

S. Shoker, Military-Age Males in Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52474-6_2
32 S. SHOKER
Unlike the uniform, where combatants self-identify based on their role—

their behavior—during wartime, the military-age male is a category that
uses physiology to reorder social life during wartime. Boys and men are
targeted with differentiated treatment, not because of what they have
done, but because of who they are.
But where does the military-age male come from, and how does this
category influence the practice of war? The link between masculinity and
political violence is not self-evident, and the term is not found in interna-
tional law. Rather, the category is a US policy creation, though other
NATO allies use similar designations within their own military struc-
tures. Under current domestic and international legal conventions, civilian
status is applied to all those who are not combatants, regardless of age
or gender. Yet the military-age male category destabilizes the idea that
civilians are equally protected under international and domestic conven-
tions. Moreover, the MAM category highlights how gender is used to
direct military activity at civilians during wartime. Importantly, the United
States self-identifies as a liberal democracy and, as shown in the introduc-
tion of this project, takes the protection of civilians seriously. Moreover,
in order to delegitimize their opponents, the United States condemned
the Taliban and al-Qaeda for killing civilians and argued that children
were especially vulnerable to being recruited as suicide bombers. Yet, the
military-age male category includes male civilians who have not reached
the age of majority. But if civilians generally, and children specifically, are
used to bolster US intervention abroad, then how do US officials make
sense of a collateral damage count that excludes adult and child civil-
ians? And how, as will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, did US military
practitioners use the military-age male category to orient the direction of
counterinsurgency and drone warfare?
The purpose of this chapter is to address how the military-age male
became a salient, legitimized category within US foreign policy under the
Bush and Obama Administrations. Consequently, all the case studies in
this chapter—from the Bush-Cheney Torture Memos to the treatment
of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay—have been selected because they
reveal the MAM mode of thought in practice. I come to the conclusion
that the subversion of civilian immunity is mediated by bureaucratic insti-
tutions who take legal conventions seriously; the military-age male is not
a symptom of US lawlessness that some scholars have argued characterizes
the War on Terror (Johns 2005; Shaw and Akhter 2012).
2 PRODUCING THE NOT-CIVILIAN: MILITARY-AGE MALES … 33
The chapter begins by examining historical narratives that connect

civilian protection with civilizational progress and documents how the
United States has appealed to these narratives, by mentioning civilians
generally and children specifically, in the pursuit of its foreign policy goals.
Legal protections for civilians are not a self-evidently important foreign
policy goal. Rather, the United States took this legal norm seriously due
to historical events like the Vietnam War, which led to further bureau-
cratic entrenchment of civilian protection. Yet despite a historical shift
toward legality, civilian protection has not been applied evenly across all
demographic groups and male civilians were at greater risk of military
violence under the Bush and Obama Administrations.
The chapter then examines how historical ideas about gender, civilian
status, and childhood in the Global South can help make sense of the
military-age male category’s existence. Foreign policy actors appealed to
audiences by trying to use language that their constituents found persua-
sive. “Ideologies…cannot enter a room. They are carried by rhetors, who,
in turn work with inherited words” (Murphy 2004, 10). This language
was often on display during times of social crises, where officials were
more often asked to justify contentious policies. Subsequently, more data
exists about cases like the Torture Memos or the treatment of Omar
Khadr. These cases illustrate, as Robert Dean notes in his examination
of masculinity and US foreign policy, that “gender must be understood
not as an independent cause of policy decisions, but as part of the very
fabric of reasoning employed by officeholders” (Dean 1998, 30). This
chapter uses the controversy surrounding the Bush-era Torture Memos,
the detention of male children at Guantanamo Bay, select counterinsur-
gency operations, and failed drone missions to make the case that gender
acts as a governing code to make sense of warfare.
Crucially, however, US officials continued to justify the treatment of
military-age males—whether they were subjected to torture, detention, or
death—by appealing to legal codes and bureaucratic procedure. Instead
of stripping civilian status from military-age males, which would have
been more obviously illegal, US foreign policy marked boys and men as
risky subjects who were more likely to be involved in political violence.
Consequently, military-age males technically kept their civilian status, but
were highlighted as a risk factor, which enabled conditions for monitoring
and profiling. This bureaucratic decision made sense to policymakers
precisely because of historical intellectual labor that sustained the connec-
tion between masculinity and political violence. The act of surveillance
34 S. SHOKER
allowed the United States to maintain a commitment to its legal agree-

ments while simultaneously placing civilian boys and men at greater risk
for violent targeting. Instead of avoiding the law, the US enacted security
practice by working through the law.
2 The History of Civilian Protection

Despite the intellectual labor that has justified the principle of distinc-
tion, the Geneva Protocols do not attempt to unpack the term “civilian.”
Instead, civilians are defined relationally, as whatever a combatant is not
(Crawford 2015, 18). Protocol I states that civilians are any persons who
do not fall into categories 4A(1)–(3) and 4A(6) of Geneva Convention III
and Article 43 of Protocol I. Protocol I also states that “[i]n case of doubt
whether a person is a civilian, the person shall be considered a civilian”
(ibid.). Under these articles, combatants are persons who are members
of armed forces, militia or volunteer corps, and include members in
organized resistance movements. These persons are combatants, whether
or not they are allied with an unrecognized authority and/or whether
they are operating inside or outside their territory (Crawford 2015, 17).
The Geneva Protocols also ensure that children aged fifteen and older
who participate in international armed conflict are entitled to “prisoner-
of-war” status. Children under the age of 15 share the same special
protections as those children who are not combatants (Jamison 2005,
144).
In this chapter, I discuss boys and men that fall under the military-
age male (MAM) category, but also minors who fall under the minimum
age requirement of this category. While my main focus is on the MAM
category, participants I interviewed indicated that children younger than
16 had been killed in COIN and drone strikes and that, additionally,
collecting this information was notoriously tricky because not everyone in
Afghanistan chronicles their age (Taylor, interview with author, January
2017). Boys under the age of sixteen, therefore, were sometimes consid-
ered military-age males. This problem was further complicated by the
technological limitations presented by drones. While dead bodies can be
counted on a screen, determining age through a drone screen is almost
impossible (Linebaugh 2013). In my own interviews, Taylor confirmed
that boys younger than sixteen were killed in drone strikes, though this
policy was not officially endorsed (Taylor, interview with author, April
2016).
2 PRODUCING THE NOT-CIVILIAN: MILITARY-AGE MALES … 35
Though I will ultimately argue that the MAM designation erodes

civilian protection, I note that examining the military-age male category
in relation to civilians and combatants is crucial if we are to determine
how policymakers made sense of the security landscape. The idea that
civilians and combatants fall under differentiated categories has well-
documented historical and intellectual roots. Protecting civilians has long
been associated with civilizational progress. For instance, the St. Peters-
burg Declaration of 1868, the successor of the First Geneva Convention
of 1864, the preamble states that:
The progress of civilization should have the effect of alleviating as much

as possible the calamities of war; [t]he only legitimate object which States
should endeavour to accomplish during war is to weaken the military forces
of the enemy. (International Military Commission 1868)
On assassination, the Lieber Code, also known as Instructions for the

Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, states that “civi-
lized nations look with horror upon offers of rewards for the assassination
of enemies as relapses into barbarism” (Grobklaus 2015, 8). The pream-
bles of UN declarations are free of terms like “barbarism.” Instead, the
1945 UN Charter prefers the term “social progress” and “development,”
terms which stretch to the United Nations Convention on the Rights
of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, the latter two explicitly stating that the
additional protections afforded to children and women are a form of
social progress and development (OHCHR 1989; ibid. 1979).
Narratives that link civilian protection with civilizational progress
extend to contemporary wars in the Middle East, South, and Central
Asia. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have sought to reassure
domestic and international audiences that preventing civilian death is an
American imperative. Bush, referring to the ground war in Afghanistan,
stated that the principle of distinction still applied. In his Nobel Peace
Prize speech, Obama stated that: “I believe that the United States of
America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. This is what
makes us different from those whom we fight” (Obama 2009). Moreover,
American foreign policy actors routinely link civilizational progress with
gender and children. When former First Lady Laura Bush spoke on the
issue, she centered gender and childhood as central to violent conflicts
and as a moral standard of conduct within foreign policy.
36 S. SHOKER
Afghan women know, through hard experience, what the rest of the
world is discovering: The brutal oppression of women is a central goal
of the terrorists. Long before the current war began, the Taliban and its
terrorist allies were making the lives of children and women in Afghanistan
miserable. (Bush 2001d)
Ironically, the United States has been criticized by human rights organi-
zations who use civilian death as a standard to judge other countries. In
2013, a coalition of advocacy organizations that included Amnesty Inter-
national, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Human Rights Watch,
submitted an open letter to the Obama Administration, where they asked
for accurate information about civilian casualties and how US officials
defined civilian and combatant (ACLU 2013). The letter contested the
“factual basis” of John Brennan’s characterization of drone warfare as
one that led to “exceedingly rare” civilian casualties (ibid.).
International actors routinely condemn states for military actions that
result in disproportionate civilian deaths. The principle of proportionality
differently is generally understood as the weighing of military activi-
ties in relation to expected civilian death—civilian immunity is not a
form of absolute protection but is better understood as protection from
intentional targeting or targeting that would not be justified in rela-
tion to anticipated military gains. Long-standing historical support from
both states and liberal institutions indicates that civilian death resonates
internationally as a legitimate arena for criticism.
The US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual
(herein called The Manual ) a document which emerged from the military
failure of the 2002 Iraq War, states that the goal of US forces should
be “securing the civilian, rather than destroying the enemy, their top
priority” (Sewall 2007b, xxv). The Manual describes insurgent groups as
entities that do not conform to international norms guiding the practice
of warfare. The US Army is “unprepared for an enemy…[that]…chose
to wage war against America from the shadows” (Nagl 2007, xiv). Aware
that the Field Manual may be construed as a “marketing campaign,” the
introduction’s author admits that this skepticism has its roots in history
and cites the “rogue atrocities” of My Lai, where the administration
spoke of winning “hearts and minds” but did not match its rhetoric
with military actions on the ground (Sewall 2007b, xxxiv). To convince
the audience of the doctrine’s sincerity, the author cites how the Carr
Center for Human Rights Policy cosponsored the “Doctrine Revision
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
1899:
"German economists are not exaggerating when they say this

Empire's people and capital are operating in every part of the
world. Not only Hamburg, Bremen, Stettin, Lübeck, and Kiel—i.
e., the seaport cities—but towns far inland, have invested
millions in foreign enterprises. In the Americas, North and
South, in Australia, in Asia, in a large part of Africa,
German settlements, German factories, German merchants, and
German industrial leaders are at work. Nor is it always in
settlements under the Empire's control that this influence is
strongest. In Senegambia, on the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast,
in Zanzibar and Mozambique, in Australia, Samoa, the Marshall
Islands, Tahiti, Sumatra, and South and Central America, there
are powerful commercial organizations aiding the Empire. From
Vladivostock to Singapore, on the mainland of Asia, and in
many of the world's most productive islands, the influence of
German money and thrift is felt. In Central America and the
West Indies, millions of German money are in the plantations;
so, too, in the plantations along the Gold Coast. In
Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Venezuela, Brazil, etc., German capital
plays a very important part in helping to develop the
agricultural and in some cases the manufacturing and
commercial interests. A consequence of this development is
seen in the numerous banking institutions whose fields of
operation show that German commerce is working more and more
in foreign parts. These banks look after and aid foreign
investment as well as the Empire's other commercial relations.
They help the millions of Germans in all parts of the world to
carry on trade relations, not only with the Fatherland, but
with other countries.
"These are the links in a long and very strong chain of gold
uniting the colonies with the Mother Country. Quite recently,
large quantities of German capital have been invested in
various industries. The Empire's capital in United States
railroads is put down at $180,000,000. In America, Germans
have undertaken manufacturing. They have used German money to
put up breweries, hat factories, spinning, weaving, and paper
mills, tanneries, soap-boiling establishments, candle mills,
dye houses, mineral-water works, iron foundries, machine
shops, dynamite mills, etc. Many of these mills use German
machinery, and not a few German help. The Liebig Company, the
Chilean saltpeter mines, the Chilean and Peruvian metal mines,
many of the mines of South Africa, etc., are in large part
controlled by German money and German forces. Two hundred
different kinds of foreign bonds or papers are on the Berlin,
Hamburg, and Frankfort exchanges. Germany has rapidly risen to
a very important place in the financial, industrial, and
mercantile world. Will she keep it? Much will depend on her
power to push herself on the sea."
United States Consular Reports,

September, 1899, page 127.
{248}
GERMANY: A. D. 1899.
Military statistics.
A report presented to the Reichstag showed the total number of

men liable for service in 1899, including the surplus from
previous years, was 1,696,760. Of these 716,998 were 20 years
of age, 486,978 of 21 years, 362,568 of 22 years, and 130,216
of more than 22 years. The whereabouts of 94,224 was unknown,
and 97,800 others failed to appear and sent no excuse; 427,586
had already undertaken military duties, 579,429 cases were
either adjourned or the men rejected (for physical reasons),
1,245 were excluded from the service, 43,196 were exempt,
112,839 were incorporated in the naval reserve, 226,957 were
called upon to join the colors, leaving a surplus of 5,187;
there were 23,266 volunteers for the army and 1,222 for the
navy. Of the 226,957 who joined the colors 216,880 joined the
army as combatants and 4,591 as non-combatants, and 5,486
joined the navy. Of the 5,486 the maritime population
furnished 3,132 and the inland 2,354. There were 21,189 men
who entered the army before attaining the regulation age, and
1,480 under age who entered the navy; 33,652 of the inland
population and only 189 of the maritime were condemned for
emigrating without leave; while 14,150 inland and 150 maritime
cases were still under consideration at the end of the year.
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (February).

Chinese anti-missionary demonstrations in Shantung.
See (in this volume)

CHINA: A. D. 1899.

Purchase of Caroline, Pelew and Marianne Islands from Spain.

CAROLINE AND MARIANNE ISLANDS.
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (May-July).

Representation in the Peace Conference at The Hague.

PEACE CONFERENCE.
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (May-August).

Advice to the South African Republic.

SOUTH AFRICA (THE TRANSVAAL):
A. D. 1899 (MAY-AUGUST).
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (June).

State of German colonies.
The following report on German colonies for the year ending
June 30, 1899, was made to the British Foreign Office by one
of the secretaries of the Embassy at Berlin:
"The number of Europeans resident in the German African

Protectorates, viz., Togoland, Cameroons, South-West Africa,
and East Africa, at the time of the issue of the latest
colonial reports in the course of 1899 is given as 4,522 men,
women, and children, of whom 3,228 were Germans. The expense
to the home government of the African colonies, together with
Kiao-chao in the Far East, the Caroline and Samoa Islands in
the South Seas, and German New Guinea and its dependencies, is
estimated at close upon £1,500,000 for 1900, the Imperial
Treasury being asked to grant in subsidies a sum nearly double
that required last year. Kiao-chao is included for the first
time in the Colonial Estimates, and Samoa is a new item. The
Imperial subsidy has been increased for each separate
Protectorate, with the single exception of the Caroline
Islands, which are to be granted £5,000 less than last year.
East Africa receives about £33,000 more; the Cameroons,
£10,000; South-West Africa, £14,000; Togoland, £800; New
Guinea, £10,000; and the new items are: £489,000 for Kiao-chao
(formerly included in the Naval Estimates), and £2,500 for
Samoa. A Supplementary Vote of £43,265 for the Protectorate
troops in the Cameroons is also now before the Budget
Committee. …
"Great efforts have been made to encourage German trade with

the African colonies, and it is shown that considerable
success has been attained in South-West Africa, where the
total value of goods imported from Germany amounted to
£244,187, as against £181,961 in the previous year, with an
appreciable falling-off in the value of imports from other
countries. In East Africa the greater part of the import trade
still comes from India and Zanzibar—about £450,000 worth of
goods out of the gross total of £592,630, having been imported
thence. The export trade is also largely carried on through
Zanzibar."
Great Britain, Parliamentary Publications

(Papers by Command: Miscellaneous Series,
Number 528, 1900, pages 3-5).
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (August).

Defeat of the Rhine-Elbe Canal Bill.
Resentment of the Emperor.
An extraordinary edict.
Among several new canal projects in Germany, those of "the

Dortmund-Rhine Canal and the Great Midland Canal (joining from
the east to west the rivers Elbe, Weser, and Rhine) are the
most important. The first involves an expenditure of over
£8,000,000 altogether, and the second is variously estimated
at from £10,000,000 to £20,000,000, according to its eventual
scope. The latter is intended to amalgamate the eastern and
western waterways of the nation and to join the Dortmund-Ems
Canal to the Rhine system, in order to give the latter river
an outlet to the sea via a German port, instead of only
through ports in the Netherlands. It will also place the
Rhine-Main-Danube connection in direct communication with all
the streams of North Germany."
United States Bureau of Statistics,

Monthly Summary of Commerce and Finance,
January, 1899.
The Rhine-Elbe canal project is one which the Emperor has

greatly at heart, and when, in August, 1899, a bill to promote
it was defeated in the Prussian Landtag by the Agrarians, who
feared that canal improvements would promote agricultural
competition, his resentment was expressed in an extraordinary
edict, which said: "The royal government, to its keen regret,
has been compelled to notice that a number of officials, whose
duty it is to support the policy of His Majesty the King, and to
execute and advance the measures of His Majesty's government,
are not sufficiently conscious of this obligation. … Such
conduct is opposed to all the traditions of the Prussian
administration, and cannot be tolerated." This was followed by
an extensive dismissal of officials, and excited strong
feeling against the government in a class which is nothing if
not loyal to the monarchy.
GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (November).

Railway concession in Asia Minor, to the Persian Gulf.

TURKEY: A. D. 1899 (NOVEMBER).

Re-arrangement of affairs in the Samoan Islands.
Partition of the islands with the United States.
Withdrawal of England, with compensations in the Tonga
and Solomon Islands and in Africa.

SAMOAN ISLANDS.
Military and naval expenditure.

WAR BUDGETS.
Naval strength.

NAVIES OF THE SEA POWERS.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (January).

Introduction of the Civil Code.
On the first day of the year 1900 a great revolution was
effected in the laws of Germany, by putting into operation the
new German Civil Code. "Since the close of the fifteenth
century Germany has been the land of documentary right. The
Roman judicial code was recognized as common law; while all
legal procedure distinctly native in its origin was confined
to certain districts and municipalities, and was, therefore,
entirely devoid of Imperial signification in the wider sense.
The Civil Code of the land was represented by the Corpus Juris
Civilis, a Latin work entirely incomprehensible to the layman.
{249}
This very remarkable circumstance can be accounted for only by
the weakness of mediæval German Imperialism. In England and
France royalty itself had, since the fourteenth century,
assumed control of the laws in order that a homogeneous
national code might be developed. German Imperialism of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, however, was incapable of
such a task. …
"An incessant conflict has been waging in Germany between the

Roman Law of the Empire and the native law as perpetuated in
the special enactments of the separate provinces and
municipalities. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
the preponderance of power lay with the Roman system, which
was further supported by the German science of jurisprudence—
a science identified exclusively with the common law of Rome.
Science looked upon the native systems of legal procedure as
irrational and barbarous; and as Roman judicature exercised
complete dominion over all legislation, the consequence was
that it steadily advanced, while native and local law was
gradually destroyed. Only within the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries has the native law of Germany been aroused to the
defence of its interests, … the signal for the attack upon
Roman Law being given by King Frederick William I, of Prussia.
As early as 1713 this monarch decreed that Roman law was to be
abrogated in his dominions, and replaced by the native law of
Prussia. The movement became general; and the era of modern
legal codes was ushered in. The legal code of Bavaria was
established in 1756; Prussia followed in 1794; France, in 1804
(Code Civil); Baden, in 1809; Austria, in 1811 (Das
Oesterreichische Buergerliche Gesetzbuch); and finally Saxony,
in 1863 (the designation here being similar to that adopted by
Austria). Everywhere the motto was the same; viz.,
'Emancipation from the Latin Code of Rome.' The native code
was to supplant the foreign, obscure, and obsolete Corpus
Juris. But the success of these newly established codes was
limited; each being applicable to its own particular province
only. Moreover, many of the German states had retained the
Roman law; confining their reforms to a few modifications. …
"The reestablishment of the German Empire was, therefore,

essential also to the reestablishment of German law. As early
as 1874 the initial steps for the incorporation of a new
German Civil Code had already been taken; and this work has
now at last been completed. On August 18, 1896, the new
system, together with a 'Law of Introduction,' was promulgated
by Emperor William II. It will become effective on January 1,
1900, a day which will ever be memorable as marking the climax
of a development of four centuries. At the close of the
fifteenth century Roman law was accepted in Germany; and now,
at the end of the nineteenth, this entire system is to be
completely abolished throughout the Empire. As a means of
education, and solely for this purpose, the Roman Code will be
retained in the universities. As a work of art it is immortal;
as a system of laws, perishable. The last relic of that grand
fabric of laws, which once dominated the whole world, crumbles
to-day. The national idea is victorious; and German law for
the German Empire is at last secured."
R. Sohm,
The Civil Code of Germany
(Forum, October, 1800).
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (January-March).
The outbreak of the "Boxers" in northern China.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (JANUARY-MARCH).

Adhesion to the arrangement of an "open door" commercial
policy in China.

CHINA: A. D. 1890-1900 (SEPTEMBER-FEBRUARY).
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (February-June).

Increased naval programme.
With much difficulty, and as the result of strenuous pressure,

the Emperor succeeded in carrying through the Reichstag, in
June, a bill which doubles the programme of naval increase
adopted in 1898.

GERMANY: A. D. 1898 (April).
"After the way had been prepared by a speech of the Emperor to

the officers of the Berlin garrison on January 7, 1900, and by
a vigorous Press agitation, this project was brought before
the Reichstag on February 8. In form it was an amendment of
the Sexennate, or Navy Law of 1898, which had laid down a six
years' programme of naval construction. By the new measure
this programme was revised and extended over a period of 20
years. Instead of the double squadron of 10 battleships, with
its complement of cruisers and other craft, it was demanded
that the Government should be authorized to build two double
squadrons, or 38 battleships and the corresponding number of
cruisers. The Bill also provided for a large increase in the
number of ships to be employed in the protection of German
interests in foreign waters. The Centre party, both through
its speakers in the Reichstag and through its organs in the
Press, at first took up a very critical attitude towards the
Bill. Its spokesmen dwelt especially upon the breach of faith
involved in the extension of the programme of naval
construction so soon after the compromise of 1898 had been
accepted, and upon the difficulty of finding the money to pay
for a fleet of such magnitude. The Clerical leaders, however,
did not persist in their opposition, and finally agreed to
accept the main provisions of the Bill, with the exception of
the proposed increase in the number of ships employed in
foreign waters. They made it a condition that the Government
should incorporate with the Bill two financial projects
designed to provide the money required without burdening the
working classes. Both the Stamp Duties Bill and the Customs
Bill were adopted by the Government, and the Navy Bill was
carried with the aid of the Centre."
Berlin Correspondent, London Times.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (May).

The Lex Heinze.
The Socialists won a notable triumph in May, when they forced

the Reichstag to adopt their views in the shaping of a measure
known as the Lex Heinze. This Bill, as introduced by the
Government, gave the police increased powers in dealing with
immorality. The Clericals and the Conservatives sought to
extend its scope by amendments which were denounced by the
Radicals and Socialists as placing restrictions upon the
"liberty of art and literature." After a prolonged struggle,
in which the Socialists resorted to the use of obstruction,
the most obnoxious amendments were withdrawn.
{250}
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (May).

Passage of the Meat Inspection Bill.
A much discussed and sharply contested bill, providing for a

stringent inspection of imported meats, and aimed especially
at the obstructing of the American meat trade, was passed by
the Reichstag on the 23d of May. It prohibits the importation
of canned or sausage meat entirely, and imposes conditions on
the introduction of other meats which are thought to be, in
some cases, prohibitory. The measure was originally claimed to
be purely one of sanitary precaution. It "had been introduced
in the Reichstag early in 1899, but the sharp conflict of
interests about it kept it for more than a year in committee,
When the bill finally emerged for discussion in the Reichstag,
it was found that the Agrarian majority had distorted it from
a sanitary to a protective measure. Both in the new form they
gave the bill and in their discussions of it in the Reichstag,
the Agrarians showed that it was chiefly the exclusion of
foreign meats, rather than a system of sanitary inspection,
that they wanted. As finally passed in May the bill had lost
some of the harsh prohibitory features given it by the
Agrarians, the latter contenting themselves with the exclusion
of canned meats and sausages. To the foreign student of German
politics, the Meat Inspection Law is chiefly interesting as
illustrating the tendency of the general government to seize
upon functions which have hitherto been in the hands of the
individual states and municipalities, as well as of bringing
the private affairs of the people under the control of
governmental authority. It is another long step of the German
government away from the principle of 'laissez-faire.' The
task undertaken by the government here is itself a stupendous
one. There is certainly no other great government in the world
that would endeavor to organize the administrative machinery
for inspecting every pound of meat that comes upon the markets
of the country."
W. C. Dreher,
A Letter from Germany
(Atlantic Monthly, March, 1901).
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (June).

Opening of the Elbe and Trave Canal.
"The new Elbe and Trave Canal, which has been building five
years and has been completed at a cost of 24,500,000 marks
($5,831,000)—of which Prussia contributed 7,500,000 marks
($1,785,000) and the old Hansa town of Lübeck, which is now
reviving, 17,000,000 marks ($4,046,000)—was formally opened by
the German Emperor on the 16th [of June]. The length of the
new canal-which is the second to join the North Sea and the
Baltic, following the Kaiser Wilhelm Ship Canal, or Kiel
Canal, which was finished five years ago at a cost of
156,000,000 marks ($37,128,000)-is about 41 miles. The
available breadth of the new canal is 72 feet; breadth of the
lock gates, 46 feet; length of the locks, 87 yards; depth of
the locks, 8 feet 2 inches. The canal is crossed by
twenty-nine bridges, erected at a cost of $1,000,000. The span
of the bridges is in all cases not less than 30 yards and
their height above water level about 15 feet. There are seven
locks, five being between Lübeck and the Möllner See—the
highest point of the canal—and two between Möllner See and
Lauenburg-on-the-Elbe."
United States, Consular Reports,

September, 1900, page 8.
A memorandum by the British Charge d'Affaires in Berlin on the

Elbe-Trave Canal says that the opening of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Canal injuriously affected the trade of Lübeck. This was
foreseen, and in 1894 a plan was sanctioned for the widening
of the existing canal, which only allowed of the passage of
vessels of about thirty tons. The direction of the old canal
was followed only to some extent, as it had immense curves,
while the new bed was fairly straight from Lübeck to
Lauenburg, on the Elbe above Hamburg. The memorandum states
that the undertaking is of great importance to the States
along the Elbe, as well as to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and
Russia. It will to some extent divert traffic from Hamburg,
and possibly reduce somewhat the revenue of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Canal.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (June-December).

Co-operation with the Powers in China.

CHINA.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (September).

Government loan placed in America.
Great excitement and indignation was caused in September by

the action of the imperial government in placing a loan of
80,000,000 marks (about $20,000,000) in the American money
market. On the meeting of the Reichstag, the finance minister,
Dr. von Miquel, replying to attacks upon this measure,
explained that in September the state of the German market was
such that if they had raised the 80,000,000 marks at home the
bank discount rate would have risen above the present rate of
5 per cent. before the end of the year. In the previous winter
the bank rate had been at 6 per cent, for a period of 90 days,
and during three weeks it had stood at 7 per cent. The
government had been strongly urged to do everything in its
power to prevent the recurrence of such high rates of
discount. The London rate was rapidly approaching the German,
and there was reason to fear that there would be a serious
flow of gold from Germany. It was therefore urgently desirable
to attract gold from abroad, and there was no country where money
was so easy at the time as in the United States. This was due
to the extraordinarily favorable balance of American trade and
the remarkable increase in exports out of all proportion to
the development of imports. Another reason was the American
Currency Law, which enabled the national banks to issue as
much as 100 per cent. of their capital in loans, whereas they
formerly issued only 90 per cent. There was no doubt that the
80,000,000 marks could have been obtained in Germany, but the
public must have been aware that other loans of much greater
extent were impending. There was going to be a loan of about
150,000,000 marks for the expedition to China, and it was
certain that before the end of the year 1901 considerable
demands would be made upon the public.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (September).

Proposal to require leaders of the Chinese attack
on foreigners to be given up.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (AUGUST-DECEMBER).
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (October).

Anglo-German agreement concerning policy in China.

CHINA: A. D. 1900 (AUGUST-DECEMBER).
{251}
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (October 9).

Lèse-majesté in criticism of the Emperor's speech to soldiers
departing for China, enjoining no quarter and commending the
Huns as a military example.
Increasing prosecutions for Lèse-majesté.
On the 9th of October, a newspaper correspondent wrote from

Berlin: "The Berlin newspapers of yesterday and to-day
chronicle no fewer than five trials for 'lèse-majesté.' The
most important case was that of Herr Maximilian Harden, the
editor of the weekly magazine 'Zukunft.' Herr Harden, who
enjoyed the confidence of the late Prince Bismarck, wields a
very satirical pen, and has been designated 'The Junius of
modern Germany.' In 1898 Herr Harden was convicted of
lèse-majesté and was sentenced to six months' incarceration in
a fortress. In the present instance he was accused of having
committed lèse-majesté in an article, 'The Fight with the
Dragon,' published in the 'Zukunft' of August 11. The article
dealt with the speech delivered by the Emperor at Bremerhaven
on July 27, 'the telegraphic transmission of which, as was
asserted at the time, had been forbidden by Count von Bülow.'
The article noted as a fact that the Emperor had commanded the
troops who were leaving for China to give no quarter and to
make no prisoners, but, imitating the example of Attila and
the Huns, to excite a terror in East Asia which would last for
a thousand years. The Emperor had added, 'May the blessing of
God attend your flags and may this war have the blessed
result that Christianity shall make its way into China.' Herr
Harden in his comments on this speech had critically examined
the deeds of the historic Attila and had contrasted him with
the Attila of popular story in order to demonstrate that he
was not a proper model to set up for the imitation of German
soldiers. The article in the 'Zukunft' had also maintained
that it was not the mission of the German Empire to spread
Christianity in China, and, finally, had described a war of
revenge as a mistake." No publicity was allowed to be given to
the proceedings of the trial. "Herr Harden was found guilty
not only of having been wanting in the respect due to the
Emperor but of having actually attacked his Majesty in a way
that constituted lèse-majesté. The Court sentenced him to six
months' incarceration in a fortress and at the same time
directed that the incriminated number of the 'Zukunft' should
be destroyed.
"The 'Vossische Zeitung' remarks:—'We read in the newspapers

to-day that a street porter in Marburg has been sentenced to
six months' imprisonment for insulting the Empress, that in
Hamburg a workman has been sentenced to five months'
imprisonment for lèse-majesté, that in Beuthen a workman has
been sentenced to a year's imprisonment for lèse-majesté, and
that in Dusseldorf a man who is deaf and dumb has been
sentenced to four months' imprisonment for the same offence.
The prosecutions for lèse-majesté are multiplying at an
alarming rate. We must emphatically repeat that such
proceedings appear to us to be in the last degree unsuited to
promote the principles of Monarchy. … The greater the number
of political prosecutions that are instituted the more
accustomed, under force of circumstances, does the Press
become to the practice of writing so that the reader may read
between the lines. And this attitude is to the advantage
neither of public morals nor of the Throne. … We regret in
particular that the case of yesterday (that of Herr Harden)
was tried 'in camera.' … It has justly been said that
publicity is more indispensable in political trials than in
prosecutions against thieves and murderers. … If there is no
prospect of an improvement in this respect the Reichstag will
have to devote its serious attention to the question how the
present administration of justice is to be dealt with, not
only in the interest of freedom of speech and of the Press,
but also for the good of the Crown and the well-being of the
State.'"
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (October 18).

Change in the Imperial Chancellorship.
On the 18th of October it was announced in the "Imperial

Gazette" that" His Majesty the Emperor and King has been
graciously pleased to accede to the request of the Imperial
Chancellor, the President of the Ministry and Minister for
Foreign Affairs, Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Prince of
Ratibor and Corvey, to be relieved of his offices, and has at
the same time conferred upon him the high Order of the Black
Eagle with brilliants. His Majesty has further been graciously
pleased to appoint Count von Bülow, Minister of State and
Secretary of State to the Foreign Office, to be Imperial
Chancellor and Minister for Foreign Affairs." Count von Bülow
is the third of the successors of Prince Bismarck in the high
office of the Imperial Chancellor. The latter was followed by
Count von Caprivi, who gave way to Prince Hohenlohe in 1894.
Prince Hohenlohe had nearly reached the age of 82 when he is
said to have asked leave to retire from public life.

Withdrawal of legal tender silver coins.
"Germany has lately taken a step to clear off the haze from
her financial horizon by calling in the outstanding thalers
which are full legal tender, and turning them into subsidiary
coins of limited legal tender—a process which will extend
over ten years. At the end of that time, if no misfortune
intervenes, she will be on the gold standard as surely and
safely as England is. Her banks can now tender silver to their
customers when they ask for gold, as the Bank of France can
and does occasionally. When this last measure is carried into
effect the only full legal-tender money in Germany will be
gold, or Government notes redeemable in gold."
New York Nation,

November 29, 1900.
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (November-December).

The Reichstag and the Kaiser.
His speeches and his system of personal government.
In the Reichstag, which reassembled on the 14th of November,

"the speeches of the Kaiser were discussed by men of all
parties, with a freedom that was new and refreshing in German
political debates. Apart from the Kaiser's speeches in
connection with the Chinese troubles, the debates brought out
some frank complaints from the more 'loyal' sections of German
politics, that the Kaiser is surrounded by advisers who
systematically misinform him as to the actual state of public
opinion. It has long been felt, and particularly during the
past few years, that the present system of two cabinets—one of
which is nominally responsible to the Reichstag and public
opinion, while the other is merely a personal cabinet,
responsible to neither, and yet exercising an enormous
influence in shaping the monarch's policies—has been growing
more and more intolerable. This system of personal government
is becoming the subject of chronic disquietude in Germany, and
even the more loyal section of the press is growing restive
under it. Bismarck's wise maxim, 'A monarch should appear in
public only when attired in the clothing of a responsible
ministry,' is finding more and more supporters among
intelligent Germans."
W. C. Dreher,
{252}
GERMANY: A. D. 1900 (December).

Census of the Empire.
Growth of Berlin and other cities.
Urban population compared with that in the United States.
A despatch from Berlin, February 26, announced the results of

the census of December, 1900, made public that day. The
population of the German Empire is shown to have increased
from 52,279,901 in 1895 to 56,345,014. Of this population
27,731,067 are males and 28,613,947 females. Over 83 per cent.
of the whole population is contained in the four kingdoms; of
these Prussia comes first with (in round figures) 34,500,000
inhabitants, and Bavaria second with 6,200,000. The figures
for Saxony and Würtemberg are 4,200,000 and 2,300,000
respectively. More than 16 per cent. of the population is
resident in the 33 towns of over 100,000 inhabitants. Of these
33 towns the largest is Berlin, while the smallest is Cassel,
of which the inhabitants number 106,001.
The Prussian Statistical Office had already published the
results of the census, so far as they concern Berlin and its
suburbs. It appears that the population of the German capital
now amounts to 1,884,151 souls, as against 1,677,304 in 1895
and 826,3!1 in 1871. The population of the suburbs has
increased from 57,735 in 1871 and 435,236 in 1895, to 639,310
in 1900. The total population of the capital, including the
suburbs, is given as 2,523,461 souls, as against 2,112,540 in
1895, an increase of over 19 per cent. Some figures relating
to other cities had previously appeared, going to show "an
acceleration of the movement of population from the country
toward the great cities. The growth of the urban population in
five years has been astonishing. The population of Berlin, for
example, increased more than twice as much in the last five
years as in the preceding five. The fourteen German cities now
having a population of above 200,000 have increased more than
17 per cent since 1895. … No other European capital is growing
so fast in wealth and numbers as Berlin; and the city is rapidly
assuming a dominant position in all spheres of German life."
W. C. Dreher,
The percentage of growth in Berlin "has been far outstripped

by many other cities, especially by Nuremberg; and so far as
our own census shows, no American city of over 50,000
inhabitants can match its increase. In five years it has grown
from 162,000 to 261,000—60 per cent increase. That would mean
120 per cent in a decade.
"But though Germany has only one city of more than one
million, and one more of more than half a million, and the
United States has three of each class, Germany has, in
proportion to its population rather more cities of from 50,000
to 100,000 inhabitants, and decidedly more of from 100,000 to
500,000, than the United States. In the United States
8,000,000 people live in cities of over 500,000 inhabitants,
against some 3,000,000 in Germany; yet in the United States a
larger percentage of the population lives in places which have
under 50,000 inhabitants."
The World's Work,

March, 1901.

Celebration of the Prussian Bicentenary.

PRUSSIA: A. D. 1901.

Promised increase of protective duties.
In the Reichstag—the Parliament of the Empire—on the 26th of

January, the Agrarians brought in a resolution demanding that
the Prussian Government should "in the most resolute manner"
use its influence to secure a "considerable increase" in the
protective duties on agricultural produce at the approaching
revision of German commercial policy, and should take steps to
get the new Tariff Bill laid before the Reichstag as promptly
as possible. In response, the Imperial Chancellor, Count von
Bülow, made the following declaration of the policy of the
government, for which all parties had been anxiously waiting:
"Fully recognizing the difficult situation in which
agriculture is placed, and inspired by the desire effectively
to improve that situation, the Prussian Government is resolved
to exert its influence in order to obtain adequate protection
for agricultural produce by means of the Customs duties, which
must be raised to an extent calculated to attain that object."

The Prussian Canal scheme enlarged.

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Military-Age Males in

Counterinsurgency and Drone Warfare

ISBN 978-3-030-52473-9 ISBN 978-3-030-52474-6 (eBook)

1 Introduction: Who Counts? 1

2 Producing the Not-Civilian: Military-Age Males

3 Risk-Management and Humanitarian War 67

7 Conclusion: Moving Away from Counterinsurgency? 118

4 Learning to See Data: Military-Age Males and Drone

5 Conclusion: The Future of Warfare 195

Introduction: Who Counts?

In a 2012 investigation conducted by The New York Times , reporters

© The Author(s) 2021 1

nonmilitary age” were allowed to flee Fallujah during Operation Vigi-

the principle of distinction represents liberalism’s promise to fight civi-

American imperative. Bush, referring to the ground war in Afghanistan,

officials used gender to inform “normative judgments about effective and

Very simply, taking gender seriously can be a corrective for a disci-

with personnel who are actively enlisted in a military apparatus, retired

constraints with this approach. On one hand, having a technocratic cate-

of the security terrain. As James Mahoney and Gary Goertz explain,

for “description.” Constitutive relationships do not describe events or

1 Counting the Dead

in or posted by questionable sources” (Townsend 2017). However, the

2 Data Is the New Oil?

Director of Intelligence at CENTCOM and who would then later serve

process. Humans cannot analyze data at the pace of its collection, a

and drone warfare. The military-age male is emblematic of a “future-

3 A Few Notes on Feminist Methods

an explicitly feminist methodology. From the beginning, feminist IR has

Rather than framing counterinsurgency and drone warfare as a lawless

insurgents from a general civilian population. The pursuit of precision,

shortcut instead. Without a serious recommitment to civilian protection,

Guzik, Keith. 2009. “Discrimination by Design: Data Mining in the United

Lin, Ann Chih. 1998. “Bridging Positivist and Interpretivist Approaches to

Sylvester, Christine. 2012. “War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory.”

Producing the Not-Civilian: Military-Age

© The Author(s) 2021 31

Unlike the uniform, where combatants self-identify based on their role—

The chapter begins by examining historical narratives that connect

allowed the United States to maintain a commitment to its legal agree-

2 The History of Civilian Protection

Though I will ultimately argue that the MAM designation erodes

The progress of civilization should have the effect of alleviating as much

On assassination, the Lieber Code, also known as Instructions for the

"German economists are not exaggerating when they say this

United States Consular Reports,

A report presented to the Reichstag showed the total number of

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (February).

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (February).

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (May-July).

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (May-August).

See (in this volume)

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (June).

"The number of Europeans resident in the German African

"Great efforts have been made to encourage German trade with

Great Britain, Parliamentary Publications

GERMANY: A. D. 1899 (August).

Among several new canal projects in Germany, those of "the

United States Bureau of Statistics,

The Rhine-Elbe canal project is one which the Emperor has