Here Again, Numbers Rule, a review of Mike Hill, On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence

In 2021, my social media feed brought up a CIA recruitment ad entitled I Am Unapologetically Me. The video features a CIA officer describing herself as “a woman of colour, a mom, a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder”.¹ Her identity is presented both as a marker of diversity and as a form of institutional allegiance. At the time, the video went viral as a joke, with many pointing out the irony of a national security agency—that infiltrates civil rights movements and orchestrates coups and targeted assassinations—using the language of progressive identity politics. What was once a vocabulary of resistance has been rebranded as a recruitment tool for the security state. This is more than just a PR blunder; it signals a deeper transformation in how identity is leveraged by institutional power. This is also the key concern of Mike Hill’sOn Posthuman War, which explores how contemporary power, driven by computational processes, has not only absorbed but has radically altered identity. Through a computational framework that “individuates, counts, and reassembles,” (p.2) identity is no longer a stable, self-determined reality but one that is malleable and reconstituted to align with military and security goals.
Hill’s analysis offers a stark look at how computational logics dissolve identity. Through the study of Pentagon field manuals and strategic plans for net-centric warfare, and leaning on realist philosophy and posthuman theory, he interrogates computation as a framework that collapses boundaries: between war and peace, friend and foe, citizen and target. Hill develops his argument introducing a series of concepts—de-civilisation, identity infiltration, terraining, “soldier as sensor first”— to investigate how disciplines such as demography, anthropology, and neuroscience have been integrated into the machinery of war. On Posthuman War dismantles the liberal myth of the state as a benevolent protector: individuals are no longer beneficiaries of state protection or the targets of its violence. Instead, they are “entities infused with military violence” (p. 4), integrated into systems that extend war into everyday life, where identity itself becomes a site of operationalisation. The controversial CIA ad, similar to the systems Hill examines, exemplifies this process, where an individual’s identity is no longer an intrinsic, politically and historically grounded aspect of the self but is instead rendered into an operational construct for job recruitment.
Fast forward to January 2025, Trump’s inauguration speeches and the destructive policies that follow it, show how the state is now less concerned with wrapping itself in the language of diversity and more keen on raw displays of power – whether in the form of aggressive immigration policies, militarised policing or the rejection of ‘political correctness’ in government discourse. While agencies such as the CIA and the Pentagon had adopted identity-driven messaging under the previous administration, this never meant the dismantling of their core functions. The adoption of progressive discourse was always a performative move rather than an institutional transformation. On the one hand, the instrumental use of the language of dissent empties it of its radical potential. On the other hand, even in its hollowed-out form, this appropriation provokes a backlash from reactionary forces who, in their paranoia, see it as a threat to their authority. By framing this language as a tool of manipulation or moral corruption, reactionaries ensure that even the remnants of dissent become a rallying point for their own agenda. The co-optation of radical language by the security state not only neutralises its potential, it also turns it into a target, further dismantling the possibility of meaningful opposition.
In the book’s first chapter, War Demography, Hill introduces the concept of de-civilisation to describe how the post-9/11 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has collapsed the distinction between civil society and the battlefield. War is no longer an event but a condition that reproduces itself—“no longer a power of the human but a power productive of it,” as Brian Massumi writes.² At the heart of this transformation is the operationalization of identity. Hill’s framework reveals how military systems, through “identity infiltration,” dismantle the personal self and reassemble it within structures that strip individuals of intention and autonomy. The focus is not the individual’s internal world—her thoughts, desires, or subjective experiences—but on how to produce a more manageable version of those through computational processes, constructing an externalised self that can be utilized. As Hill writes: “Friends and enemies recombine, just as citizens become suspects regardless of their will” (p.64). Identity is dismantled and reconstituted within military systems, becoming a site of governance, in which the individual is no longer a subject of protection but one that is constantly reshaped and deployed in the service of warfare.
This logic doesn’t just play out in foreign battlefields but works its way into domestic governance, threading warfare through cultural, social, and cognitive life. Hill points to the 2000 US census as a paradigmatic case of the logic of de-civilisation, this time unfolding within domestic policies. After the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, individuals won the right to self-select racial or ethnic identities. By 2000, citizens could tick multiple racial categories, expanding the official classifications from five to thirty-two. Diversity, once a demand for recognition, is repurposed as an instrument of administrative legibility. Hill terms this process ‘identity infiltration’ (p.49), in which the quantification of identity allows the state to manage individuals. Once reduced to numerical categories, identity ceases to function as a claim to rights and instead becomes a mechanism for counting and reassembling. The result is a porous, unstable boundary between inclusion and exclusion: to be recognised as a citizen is also to be legible as a potential threat. In the first chapter, Hill develops the concepts of de-civilisation and the operationalisation of identity, focusing on individuation, counting and assembling as a means of transforming war within the state. But computation is only part of a longer history in which the state has waged war against its own citizens—often hidden by the illusion of social peace. Hill frames the turn of the century, and especially the beginning of War on Terror, as the point of collapse of the state’s role as protector. However, I would argue that civil war has always been at the heart of the state. The state’s opposition to workers’ struggles, civil rights movements and other forms of resistance have defined its boundaries, consolidated its power and justified its violence. Just as foreign wars have been central to the expansion and dominance of the state, internal struggles have been equally critical to its formation and its continuity. What computation introduces, then, is a fundamental shift in how antagonism is produced within the state. With the rise of computational logic, practices of power from disciplinary society representing, sorting, and disciplining, co-exist with a new triad: individuating, counting, and reassembling. Individuation breaks down individuals into discrete data points – demographics, behaviours, affiliations – stripping identity of its historical and social context. Counting aggregates and analyses these data points, transforming identity into categories for governance and control, as the case of the US Census. Reassembling reconfigures these data into new configurations, aligning identity with state objectives. Where the state once sought to define and fix identities within rigid categories, it now operates through a fluid logic that constantly reshapes and reconfigures them.
If we understand civil war to be the natural condition of the state, then Hill’s critique offers a way to interrogate how computation is used to transform antagonism within it. Here Grégoire Chamayou’s work is useful in reflecting on the shift from counterinsurgency, which treats the enemy as a political actor, to counterterrorism, which recasts the enemy as a security threat.³ Through individuating, counting, and reassembling, power constructs the enemy not by identifying political intent or acts of violence but through a system that categorises behaviors and affiliations and turns them into suspects. As Hill argues, with computation it’s no longer about identifying the enemy or the terrorist—it is about continuously producing it. Hill frames this as a collapse of the boundary between self and other. However, a new logic of differentiation emerges: the self and the other, which is political, and identity based, gives way to the normal and the abnormal, which are depoliticised and decontextualized. Dissent is no longer political opposition, but an abnormal behaviour to the proper functioning of the state. While the self and the other have perhaps collapsed, the normal and the abnormal enable the state to continuously (re)produce civil war.
In the second chapter, War Anthropology, Hill engages with the colonial legacies underpinning the collapse between civil society and war. He introduces the concept of terraining—the deterritorialization of identity, where traditional markers such as culture or race, are stripped away and reterritorialized within computational systems. Hill examines this shift through the lens of the US Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a programme designed to provide military commanders with knowledge of local populations in conflict zones, by integrating anthropologists and social scientists into military teams. Its aim, according to the Pentagon’s strategic plans, was to improve decision-making and mission effectiveness through cultural understanding. HTS can be situated within the longer history of imperialism and counterinsurgency, where anthropological knowledge has long served as a tool for occupation.⁴ But terraining, as Hill describes it, is not simply the militarisation of ethnographic data, which characterised colonial wars throughout the twentieth century. With terraining, occupied populations are no longer framed as others with fixed cultural or ethnic identities; instead, they are modelled as evolving data points, where tactical categories overcome fixed identities.
Hill’s argument raises pressing questions about what this transformation means for the culture and identity of populations caught within these systems. Hill suggests that identity disappears, becoming subsumed into computational systems that prioritise data flows over fixed classifications. But rather than disappearing, identity may be reconstituted in more abstract and insidious ways. Media scholars Theo Phan and Scott Wark’s research on racial formations might be useful to expand Hill’s critique. Phan and Wark argue that traditional racial formations rooted in visible markers are increasingly giving way to systems that infer racialisation indirectly. Instead of explicit classifications, bodies are increasingly managed through correlations—economic status, geographical location, behavioural patterns—constructing identity through statistical proxies rather than physical characteristics.⁵ Hill’s example of the white Afghan, a term used in the Canadian HTS, does not denote a racial or ethnic identity, but signals a temporary, strategic affiliation dictated by military objectives. The white Afghan is constructed by proxies which include factors like behavioural responses to occupation or tactical usefulness. What computation does then is erase the political, cultural and historical motivations of resistance, equating opposition to a temporary characteristic. The issue, then, is not the disappearance of identity, but its abstraction and reconfiguration—made fluid, contingent, and instrumental to the strategic imperatives of occupation.
In the closing chapter, War Neuroscience, Hill explores the progression of warfare into the realm of cognitive science, where the human brain becomes the object of operationalization. This shift is exemplified by DARPA’s transcranial stimulation programs, which serve as a hallmark of the militarization of cognition. These initiatives, aimed at enhancing soldiers’ memory and decision-making, reflect a broader trend of treating the brain as a system to be optimized, reprogrammed, and incorporated into military infrastructure. Hill contrasts this utilitarian view with Henri Bergson’s theories of perception and matter, suggesting that cognition cannot be reduced to computational processes. For Bergson, perception is not a passive mirroring of reality but an active process that shapes reality in response to human needs and actions. Using Bergson’s framework, Hill critiques the military’s reductive approach to cognition, which treats the brain as a manipulable component of a larger computational system. This perspective finds its most striking expression in the concept of the “Soldier as a Sensor first”, where individuals are reimagined as nodes within a network, blurring the boundaries between human judgment and automated targeting systems.
Hill places this transformation within a broader posthumanist framework, where both animate and inanimate matter are reconfigured as information. In this context, the human becomes not the limit of technology but an “artifact of technology” (p.128). Perception becomes embedded within systems that prioritise efficiency over ethical constraints. By dissolving the boundaries between sensing, knowing, and targeting, computational warfare dehumanises not only those it seeks to eliminate but also those who operate within it. Hill warns that this shift not only accelerates the tempo of war—it corrodes the moral frameworks that have historically constrained violence, turning cognition itself into a battlefield and making war an ongoing, self-sustaining condition. The operationalisation of cognition also entails the erosion of accountability from decision-making.
A central idea running through On Posthuman War is that computational systems do not represent reality—they produce it. Hill develops this point by tracing a trajectory from Kant through Foucault to media scholars like Wolfgang Ernst, Walter Ong, and Clifford Siskin. Kant’s “realm of ends” represents a humanist framework, where technology is understood as a tool for advancing human progress, autonomy, and moral values. Foucault rejects this anthropocentric view, focusing on how the means, practices, and apparatuses that structure society play a central role in shaping and defining human needs, behaviours, and even the understanding of what it means to be human. In this sense, technology is more than an instrument to fulfill pre-existing human needs; it actively constructs those needs by regulating behavior, defining norms, and producing new kinds of subjectivities.
Wolfgang Ernst opens up this perspective by focusing on the temporal and material properties of media technologies. One of Ernst’s key contributions is the idea that media technologies—such as digital devices, computational systems, and recordings—introduce a distinct kind of time, what he calls ‘media time,’ which affects human experience.⁶ Media technologies influence not only social behaviour but also shape knowledge, memory, and perception, offering a phenomenological understanding of media’s role in constructing reality. Hill observes that Ernst “presents a way to think about communication linking machines and human beings, where these entities recombine as ‘mathematizable things'” (p. 78). This challenges the traditional view of communication as subordinate to human subjectivity, suggesting that both subjectivity and technology should be understood in relation to larger-scale, material realities. In this framework, human subjectivity is not the origin of meaning-making but part of a system that includes information exchange, and computational logic.
Clifford Siskin’s ideas on systems as a mode of production serve to develop Hill’s point. Siskin argues that systems are not just structures that organise knowledge but are both “ways of knowing what is there” and modes of production. (p.112). Systems—whether human, technological, or environmental—are continuously assembled and reassembled to process infinite complexity, creating a particular form of knowledge of the world. As Siskin suggests, minds, bodies, geology, and even atmospheric flows become integrated into a system of information exchange, where events are perceived and processed through the same computational and systemic frameworks. This idea aligns with Ernst’s notion of media time, as both suggest that our experience and perception are transformed by the networks and technologies that mediate them. Both human cognition and technological systems are embedded within a broader logic of production where knowledge is continually generated, restructured, and redistributed in response to the system’s demands. However, Hill warns that this risks reducing knowledge production to an assembly and reassembly of information, rather than the advancement of our understanding of the world.
In the opening chapter, Hill describes how “human beings themselves become means, means become everything, and everything becomes war” (p.35). In posthuman war, the focus shifts from achieving specific outcomes—such as victory or peace—to an ongoing process of operationalization that encompasses everything, from identity to sociality to cognition. This makes war a self-sustaining system, where there is no resolution—only the perpetual reconfiguration of human existence within the machinery of war. In a way, computation entrenches irresolvability. Hill marks the turn of century as the moment where computation transformed war into a self-sustaining system. Nevertheless, as media scholars Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova argue, irresolvability is a phenomenon rooted in the arms race and game theory that structures life around a series of unresolved and intentionally unresolvable problems.⁷ The structuring incapacity of action of the Cold War extended into preemptive governance and became part of our everyday “infrastructures of feeling”. If we locate the origins of irresolvability in the Cold War, as an endless process of calculation and deferral built atop massive concentrations of destructive power, then we can understand it as the driving force behind network-centric warfare rather than as its consequence.
Hill’s assertion that “numbers rule, but also rule out epistemic advancement” (p.18) reverberates throughout On Posthuman War. Numbers promise expansiveness—offering multiple futures, infinite recombinations—yet at the same time they constrain understanding. This paradox, where computation offers infinite operational pathways but forecloses speculative reimagination, sits at the core of Hill’s critique. By reducing identities, behaviours, and social relations to calculable data points, computational systems prioritise function over form, and utility over understanding. They encode a worldview that foregrounds control and efficiency in detriment of care and relationality, transforming governance into a process of endless recalibration. The unsettling conclusion is that while these systems promise precision, they generate something else entirely—a state of perpetual instability, where life is governed through irresolvablity. In this sense, Hill’s work compels readers to confront an urgent question: if computation dissolves agency and turns reality into its means, what remains of our capacity to intervene?
On Posthuman War offers a daunting critique of how computational logics dissolve agency, and reconfigure identity into an operational construct for warfare. Hill’s analysis of de-civilisation, identity infiltration, and terraining exposes the ways in which military violence extends beyond the battlefield, transforming social life into a site of perpetual war. Yet, while his framework powerfully captures the totalizing tendencies of computational systems, its conceptual strength becomes a limitation: by deriving his analysis primarily from official doctrines and strategic plans, Hill’s framework risks replicating their totalizing worldview. In practice, computation is never absolute—it contends with the incalculable, the unpredictable, and the messy materialities of lived experience. To open up to the potential of multiple epistemologies that emerge with computation, we need a language that attends to both its violence and its possibilities.
Without this, critique risks either overstating computational domination or overlooking sites where its logic might be disrupted, repurposed, or refused. Louise Amoore’s Cloud Ethics, for instance, reframes ethics not as a demand for transparency but as an attentiveness to opacity—an acknowledgment of the gaps and fissures within algorithmic systems where agency is reconfigured.⁸ In another approach, the Critical Computation Bureau’s work on recursive colonialism examines how computational violence repeats and intensifies colonial logics, but also introduces nonlinear temporalities that disrupt Cartesian linearity. Recursion, in their formulation, is not just the return of domination but also a site where alternative interventions become possible. The challenge, then, is not only to critique computational violence but to ask: In a world where numbers rule, how do we make them count for life?

Bibliography
Amoore, Louise. 2020. Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. London: Penguin Books Limited, 2013.
Ernst, Wolfgang. 2011. ‘Media Archaeography: Method and Machine versus History and Narrative of Media’. In Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.
Forbes Breaking News, dir. 2021. Viral CIA Recruitment Video Features ‘Cisgender Millennial’ Who Says ‘I Am Unapologetically Me’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHckeZoYx04.
Fuller, Matthew, and Goriunova, Olga. 2017. Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lepore, Jill. 2021. If Then: How One Data Company Invented The Future. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Massumi, Brian. 2015. Ontopower. Durham: Duke University Press.
Phan, Thao, and Scott Wark. 2021. ‘Racial Formations as Data Formations’. Big Data & Society 8 (2).

Notes