The United States began its attack on Iraq in the evening of March 19, 2003. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense at the time, had already announced his doctrine of “shock and awe,” according to which the American military would quickly demonstrate its superiority to the Iraqi troops and leadership with a show of force both in the air and on the ground. According to the military discourse at the time,1 the enemy was supposed to be promptly defeated by a networked operation consisting of unprecedented intelligence, situational agility, and overwhelming firepower. American dominance of Iraqi airspace was in fact established within six hours. Stealth bombers flew undetected by Iraqi radar, and thus the Iraqi air defense was forced to shoot blindly into the dark sky – shots that appeared like fireworks on television screens being watched around the world. Only a single Iraqi fighter jet, moreover, was able to get off the ground. After it was shot down, the personnel stationed at Iraqi air force bases received the radio message “You Fly – You Die,” which was also distributed on pamphlets throughout the country. From this point on, the American military was theoretically capable of controlling every location in Iraq with whatever firepower would be necessary.

Despite such capacities for locational positioning, the anticipated control was never established in Iraq, nor was any order whatsoever. My intention here is to conduct a media-theoretical analysis of the military discourses and media technologies that were current at the time; the goal will be to demonstrate how the American military reacted to this problem. I hope to show that, in the military debates and projects of the time, the problem of establishing local control and order shifted from metaphors of occupying territory to possible formats for ordering and governing social ensembles. New wars – or so the argument went – require social media and are to take place with and within such media. In what follows, the concept of social networks will thus not be sought in the usual places – Xing, Twitter, Google+, and Facebook – but rather where its logic has been implemented in an especially urgent manner, namely in contemporary international conflicts. A media-theoretical investigation of publicly accessible documents and projects will demonstrate that the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan has aimed to make the populations of these countries, even those segments that...