Adversarial Infrastructures
June 18, 2022
Weapons are usually imagined as standalone objects. Yet they are often enmeshed in dense networks of relationships.
Such relational networks should be seen as infrastructures. Weapons rely on and work as infrastructures. Even though wars are perceived as direct confrontation between enemies, invasions are not possible without infrastructure (Belanger and Arroyo, 2016), including militarism hidden within landscapes outside of war zones.
Infrastructures that inflict harm have also been defined as 'invasive infrastructures' (Anne Spice 2018). For example, Canada’s 'critical infrastructures' like pipelines can be reconsidered from the perspective of indigenous struggle as enabling the resource extraction that subtends the ongoing colonial invasion.
Along these lines, I look into what I call 'adversarial infrastructures'. On the one hand, these infrastructures imply the presence of an adversary. They cause harm by design. On the other, they suggest a specific relationship between the functions of an infrastructure, like disrupting or facilitating movement. 'Adversarial' here derives from machine learning methods, in which two neural networks are designed to be mutually antagonistic. Even though their functions are programmed to oppose each other, their entrapment in a looped contest strengthens the neural network as a whole. This same capacity defines Adversarial Infrastructures: while divergent functions may appear to create friction and technical problems, they strengthen its overall ability to inflict harm. Adversarial properties allow masking one function of the infrastructure (connection) with another (disconnection), concealing their double purpose.
One instance of an adversarial infrastructure is the Crimean Bridge, a material manifestation of the Russian annexation of Crimea. It was designed as a mega-project to make the annexation process irreversible, physically stitching the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland. This bridge acts and is promoted as a connector. While it does facilitate the expansion of Russian settler-colonialism into the Crimean land, it has a lesser-known purpose of enabling a new border regime.
The Crimean 'bridge-as-border' interrupts various ecological and logistical flows in the Kerch Strait, thereby disrupting Ukrainian harbours in the Azov Sea with a de facto economic blockade. It imposes a physical limitation on ships that can cross under the bridge. Until Russia attacked Ukrainian port cities this year, halting their logistics entirely, it also allowed Russia to stop and search all passing ships. Creating a full-scale border control on both sides brought about waiting zones where up to 300 cargo ships awaited approval, often taking a week, to pass under the Bridge (Klymenko, 2018). This has taken a toll on a Ukrainian economy already damaged by a war ongoing since 2014. Russia also used the border regime of the Crimean Bridge in the escalation of this war in 2021 to prohibit the passage of Ukrainian military ships, weakening the defence of cities such as Mariupol that are currently under Russian siege.
'Adversarial Infrastructure' aims to capture the defining logic of contemporary mobility regimes – a new form of logistics that does not guarantee the mobility of any actor but instead brings about their restriction (Salter, 2013). This restrictive logistics seeks to render actors (im)mobile while disguising political repression as a technical or economic limitation. One can see such a principle in action in another instance of adversarial infrastructure – electronic warfare.
![Nikolenko N. F. Table 18.3. Quantitative (18.3) limitations of [electromagnetic] radiation [used in electronic warfare].](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f63a4b50cae71760faa00ad/1655552139421-LSHLV9QUJJL9K7KXJIFP/02-2.png)
This diagram visualises the principles of electronic warfare that allows the capture of a drone on Figure 4. Diagram, p. 340 - 341. in The Foundations of Electronic Warfare. 1987
The weapons here are GPS spoofers, fake cellular towers, IMSI-catchers and Stingrays that attack by simulating and subverting infrastructures that our digital devices rely on. GPS spoofers can set your GPS location to any desired numerical value instead of actual coordinates. Fake cellular towers, IMSI-catchers and Stingrays disable your internet connection, or send you messages pretending to be someone else, and extract generally inaccessible data. Russian military and police use electronic guns like 'Arbalet' (rus. "aрбалет," or crossbow) to disable and ground enemy drones – like those used by Moscow protestors to broadcast demonstrations. Arbalets do so by emitting strong noise over the standard frequencies used for remote-controlling these drones. These weapons function as malicious infrastructures that promise your device connection while disrupting its normal use.
While one Federal Protective Serviceman is emitting noise at the drone with the electronic gun, another is grabbing it during its forced landing. Moscow, 2019. Meduza. Photograph by Sergey Savostyanov, TASS/Scanpix/LETA. Collage by Anna Engelhardt, 2022.
The fact that our devices are hardwired with complete trust in infrastructures is exploited in another instance of adversarial infrastructure – fake weaponry. Such weapons and even entire military bases are produced to simulate an army capacity or advantage that does not actually exist.
Russia manufactures these fake weapons for satellite observation, radiolocation, communication interception or human vision. Such fake weapons are made of tarpaulin with the print of a weapon, as seen from above. Satellite photos, being a part of what Jussi Parikka calls 'infrastructural images', lure open-source journalists into the adversarial infrastructure of the Russian military (Parikka, 2021). The images they create cannot exist outside of these infrastructures. The flatness of the tarpaulin is concealed solely from a vantage point that is infrastructurally predefined -- of a satellite or drone. Furthermore, the human eye can’t quite perceive or make sense of these models that are made to fool radiolocation. What looks like a military jet through a radar screen seems like a bouncy castle without the infrastructural mediation of vision machines.
Bibliography:
Belanger, Pierre and Alexander Arroyo. Ecologies of Power. Countermapping the Logistical Landscapes and Military Geographies of the U.S. Department of Defense. Cambridge (Massachusetts): The MIT Press, 2016.
Klymenko, Andrii ‘Russian Federation Blockade of the Mariupol and Berdyansk Ports: trends and statistics.’ BlackSea News, 29 August 29, 2018, https://www.blackseanews.net/en/read/143935 .
Parikka, Jussi ‘On Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See: Practices of Light Beyond Photography.’ in ‘Photography Off the Scale Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image’ ed. by Tomáš Dvořák, Jussi Parikka, 2021.
Salter, Mark B. ‘To Make Move and Let Stop: Mobility and the Assemblage of Circulation’. Mobilities 8, no. 1, February, 2013, pp. 7-19.
Spice, Anne. “Fighting Invasive Infrastructures: Indigenous Relations against Pipelines.” Environment and Society, vol. 9, 2018, pp. 40–56, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26879577.
