Virtuous War. Mapping the Military-industrial-media-entertainment-network

After the Gulf War the United States armed forces spent the next decade preparing for the next war in the Mojave Desert, off the shores of San Francisco Bay, in the hills of southern Germany, next door to Disneyworld and in the heart of Hollywood. Wars would be fought by the military in the same manner as they are viewed by citizens, on real-time networks and by live-feed videos, on the PC and the TV, actually and virtually. Enabled by smart technologies yet constrained by political and humanitarian imperatives, a new form of high-tech, low-risk warfare was born, Virtuous War. In this book, James Der Derian takes the reader on a ten-year road trip through the future of war, where cyborg combat technologies, video games, TV news stories, army training exercises, and Hollywood movies all blur in a new military-industrial-media-entertainment network. He shows us a world in which CNN and Disney are as much a part of the battlefield as Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon, where Marine fire-teams train with the video game 'Doom', and entertainment executives design army war games.

All the while he offers tremendous insight on the questions that arise as the tail of technology wags the dog of war: Will killing become easier? Will peace become harder? Will war lose its place as the ultimate reality-check of international politics?