Dr Daniel McCarthy1
1The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Dr Daniel R. McCarthy is Associate Professor in International Relations at the University of Melbourne. His current research examines the concept of utopia in International Relations theory and the absence of techno-utopianism in American national security policy.
Abstract:
The adoption of Emerging and Disruptive Technologies (EDT) by the militaries of liberal democratic states has the potential to alter widely accepted imaginaries of civil-military relations and their place in established political orders. In Samuel Huntington’s influential discussion, the role of the military in liberal democracies is, and should be as a neutral, technical, and apolitical institution. Military professionals are, in this account, removed from the domain of political action, neither taking part in the cut-and-thrust of party politics nor interceding in policy debates concerning military matters. Yet, despite its deep impact, this view of civil-military relations has never been uncontroversial, with both its normative implications and empirical substantiation called into question. This article will examine how contemporary imaginaries of civil-military relations are being, and may continue to be, impacted by the adoption of EDTs. It will suggest that the dominant view of EDTs as apolitical and neutral technological artefacts reinforce Huntington’s vision for an apolitical military; existing conceptions of military professionals as technocrats of violence are reinforced through the adoption of self-organizing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Viewed in these terms, the political settlement that attempts to frame this specific form of political order as apolitical is grounded in classic modernist understandings of technological systems and their role in political order more broadly.