Follow The Ho Chi Minh Trail: Analyzing the Media History of the Electronic Battlefield
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analyzing the Media History of the Electronic Battle eld 2 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel Watchmen (1986Watchmen ( -1987) ) is set in an alternative history in which the United States wins the Vietnam War.The HBO miniseries Watchmen (2019) updates the original graphic novel's thought-experiment, asking its viewers to question how American imperial power yoked with white supremacist tendencies operationalizes itself in the contemporary world.In the text, upon President Richard Nixon's request, the godlike superhero Dr. Manhattan intervenes in Vietnam on behalf of the US government.Through the militarization of Dr. Manhattan's superpowers, the US defeats the Viet Cong and colonizes Vietnam, turning the nation into the 51st state of the United States.Dr. Manhattan's powers enable the US to win the Vietnam War and, by extension, control the outcome of the Cold War in the Watchmen superhero universe.Dr. Manhattan is the personification of scientism and cybernetic thinking, symbolizing how technological innovation born out of Cold War science was always-already radicalized, politicized, and weaponized by the United States.The Vietnam War refracted through the Watchmen series sheds light on the bruised ego of the American psyche and the political gut-punch that multiple US presidents received at the hands of the Viet Cong.The defining logic driving the American war effort in Vietnam was that, with the most advanced military in the world, the United States should be able to effortlessly bring down the Viet Cong with technological solutions to the problems of war.In this essay, I suggest that contemporary conversations about digital battlefields and autonomous weapons can be enriched by a better understanding of the history of media technologies whose development was supported by military concerns in the quarter-century after the Second World War.Specifically, I examine the media history of one such technological solution: an electronic sensor network along the Ho Chi Minh trail, described in the study "Air Supported Anti-Infiltration Barrier" by the Institute for Defense Analyses' JASON division, a group of scientists that advised the US government (Deitchman et al.).The JASON division study proposed that installing a network of electronic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh trail, the North Vietnamese supply and logistics route that wound its way through the jungles of Laos, would be the most efficient way to bring the conflict with Vietnam to a close.This network would provide feedback to the computer surveillance systems that were monitoring the troop movements of the North Vietnamese People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong in South Vietnam and was called the McNamara Line, after the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.The McNamara line consisted of several surveillance sensors distributed throughout the Ho Chi Minh trail that surveilled opposition troop movements and instantaneously updated the air command, which used data links and computer-assisted intelligence-gathering systems to engage in targeted attacks.acoustic, seismic, and thermal sensors sent data to reconnaissance airplanes which then transmitted the battlefield surveillance data to two IBM 360-65 computers in Thailand.The computers processed the data and provided aircraft carriers with battlefield coordinates for engaging in targeted bombing missions (Nijholt 123).The US Senate Armed Services Committee greenlit JASON division's strategy with the Electronic Battlefield program.Senator Barry Goldwater referred to the program as the greatest step forward since gunpowder (Deitchman).The 553d Reconnaissance Squadron of the US Air Force Special Operations
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".