Virilio's wager is that the 1999 Kosovo air war is not a Balkan episode but the opening event of a new planetary order, and that its failure is precisely what installs that order. Operation Allied Force fails as a military and political operation, and that failure discredits coalition warfare (NATO) and coalition politics (the UN) at a stroke, clearing the ground for an American supremacy that needs neither adversary nor partner: a second deterrence that is cybernetic and aero-spatial rather than nuclear. Its instrument is not the bomb that lands but the accident that is engineered, war conducted through orbital surveillance, information saturation, the interruption of a nation's electricity and airwaves, and the deliberate spread of systemic breakdown, in a conflict where the civilians are the casualties and the soldiers are the protected species. What the four articles track cumulatively is the passage from a war of territory to a war of the atmosphere, the airwaves, and the infrastructure, and past that to a globalitarian biopolitics Virilio is willing to call post-human.
The book gathers four short articles written into the event as it unfolded, not a treatise composed after it. The dating is the frame:
The first three articles reprinted here were written between 19 April and 15 June 1999 during the Kosovo conflict. The first was published on 27 April in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The fourth was completed on 5 July.
The French original is Stratégie de la déception (Galilée, 1999); Chris Turner's translation appeared from Verso in 2000, and this Radical Thinkers edition in 2007. The volume is dedicated to Father Patrick Giros and opens under an epigraph drawn from NATO's own Secretary-General, which sets the book's suspicion of the Alliance's very reason for being:
The Atlantic Alliance is perhaps in the end more a bastard child of the Communists than a child born because we wanted it.
Paul-Henri Spaak, Secretary-General of NATO.
The title carries a doubleness the English cannot hold, and the whole book turns on it. The translator flags it at the outset:
It is always disappointing to report something lost in translation. In this case, the element lost is that of disappointment itself, for this is, of course, the everyday meaning of the French word 'la déception'. The term does, however, also have a more recondite military sense, the déception of missiles being the overall process of the deflection of such weapons from their course (this part is, technically, their séduction) and their redirection to some other – preferably harmless – target. Virilio uses the term to refer to this bundle of techniques of decoying, distraction and disinformation which make up a classically 'deceptive' strategy in the modern English sense. However, in his title he is alluding also, and more directly, to the (possibly intended) disappointment and disillusionment which remains after the massive Allied military efforts in the former Yugoslavia, where, were we nineteenth-century speakers of English, we might contend (pace Jamie Shea) that 'never was expectation more completely deceived'.
Chris Turner, translator's note on the French title.
Both senses run at once through everything that follows: déception as the military art of decoy, distraction and disinformation, and déception as the disappointment that is the war's actual residue. The reconstruction below keeps Virilio's own order, four articles across four chapters, because the argument is cumulative. Chapter 1 descends from the terrain of the Balkans to the atmosphere itself and arrives at the weapons ecosystem and its cybernetic accident. Chapter 2 anatomizes global information dominance and the war of the airwaves. Chapter 3 names the second break, with NATO, and the second deterrence, and works out its logistical logic. Chapter 4 carries the whole into law, the humanitarian pretext, and a biopolitics that ends on the abolition of the human.
The chapter opens on Vauvenargues and turns the epigram against NATO's planners, indicting a war fought with no distance between political aim and chosen means:
'Reason deceives us more often than nature,' claimed Vauvenargues. However that may be, the nature of the terrain in the Balkans seems to have been totally left out of account in the reasoning of NATO's war leaders. In allowing no tactical distance between their political goals and their chosen means of action, the strategists of the Atlantic Alliance have once again revealed the shakiness of their military conceptions and the fragility of those scenarios in which, since the end of the Cold War, the technical illusionism of the United States has found expression.
The first move reads Blair's slogan as a confession that the physical conditions of battle no longer count:
In a recent interview, Tony Blair declared: 'This is a new kind of war, about values as much as territory.' In so saying, he indicated, if not that geopolitics had followed history in coming to an end, at least that the Allies have now ceased to attach importance to the physical conditions of a battle being fought against a well-entrenched adversary in an environment which is both geologically and geopolitically tormented.
Wesley Clark's boast about precision supplies the counter-image, the “highest proportion of precision weaponry” immediately shadowed by apology:
General Wesley Clark, an enthusiastic supporter of warfare remote-controlled by satellite from space, pointed out on 13 April 1999 in Brussels: 'This campaign has the highest proportion of precision weaponry that has ever been used in any air operation anywhere.' This massive use of high technology, though purportedly employed to avoid causing 'collateral' damage, would not prevent the Commander-in-Chief apologizing shortly afterwards for a number of 'regrettable incidents', such as the bombing of refugee columns.
Clark is read not as NATO's spokesman but as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon's revolution in military affairs. The chapter's architecture is a descent, from terrain to atmosphere, and its first term is the generalization of automatic strikes into the “open sky” of tele-war. This is the first appearance of the Open Sky / Open City pairing that returns in Chapter 2:
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