What

HLS PILAC will host a working-papers series lunch with Klaudia Klonowska, a PhD Candidate in International Law at the Asser Institute/University of Amsterdam, to discuss her draft chapter titled “The Mirage of the Common Operational Picture: Unpacking How Military Actors See with Algorithms.” Dustin Lewis, HLS PILAC’s Research Director, will moderate the discussion.

When and Where

The discussion will take place on the HLS campus from 12:15 pm to 1:45 pm on April 10, 2024. Location details will be sent to confirmed participants.

How to Participate

This event is open only to current HLS faculty, staff, and students, who may seek to reserve a spot on a first-come-first-serve basis by emailing Marie Turcotte-Hills. Confirmed participants will receive the draft paper and will be expected to have read it closely before the workshop.

Further Information

A brown-bag lunch will be provided. The abstract for the paper is as follows:

“A large trend in military affairs, especially of those in the United States, is the pursuit of the so-called common operational picture. It is an aspiration for different military professionals at different levels of operations, in different locations, and across different institutions to share a common understanding of the conflict. Nowadays, technological advancements are at the forefront of this pursuit. Algorithmic technologies are employed to collect, process, and sift through data from a large variety of sources with the view of combining or fusing it in an accessible manner, so that all parties receive relevant information for their situational awareness. In this contribution, I conduct an analysis of the US Task Force 59’s algorithmic experimentations to unpack how sensing with algorithms uses patterns of movement of maritime vessels and computer vision to produce objects of military interest, such as military vessels. In this paper, I argue that the common operational picture that the military pursues can be better understood as a mirage. A mirage in a desert is an optical phenomenon whereby a subject sees an object in a distance which in fact is only an illusion. Similarly, the algorithms involved in fusing data produce an illusion of a coherent picture of what ‘really’ happens on the battlefields. Gathering more data only serves to reinforce the common operational picture, just like getting closer to a mirage does not make it disappear. Hence, this paper conceptualizes the common operational picture as a socio-technical mirage, where the military objects of interest are produced through the interaction of human and nonhuman sensing techniques.”