Innovating Algorithmic Warfare: Experimentation with Information Manoeuvre beyond the Boundaries of the Law

Abstract

This article analyses how algorithmic innovation in contemporary warfare unfolds through new alliances and contestations among civil and military actors in the face of an overarching rhetoric around the need to lead in “information manoeuvre”. Drawing on assemblage thinking and applying it to the case of the Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC)—a data centre founded by the Dutch Army that unlawfully tracked and algorithmically predicted its citizen’s sentiment and behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic— the authors identify three logics that held this centre together and helped ward off critique: entrepreneurialism, informality, and experimentation. Emulating innovation practices elsewhere, together, these logics have important political repercussions beyond the Dutch case, pushing the expansion of military surveillance, pattern-finding and targeting, while undermining the rule of law and democratic accountability within algorithmic warfare.