The concept of control is taken from Deleuze to account for a form of military training that does not operate under the logic of enclosure but rather through ubiquitous forms of adaptive management. This paper contends that the integration of embedded training systems into the US Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) exemplifies a form of post-disciplinary control that is endemic to contemporary discourses of strategic virtuosity. Hailed as revolutionary, all of the FCS platforms in addition to being networked will include on-board or embedded training systems. The US Army Future Combat Systems is a large-scale procurement program that will introduce a number of ‘manned’ and ‘unmanned’ platforms all of which will be completely interconnected into one layered network. Indeed, it is precisely through the enhancement of lethality that Western militaries are able manage and preserve the lives of their own soldiers. Following the work of Foucault and Agamben on biopolitical power, military training must be understood as biopolitical as well as disciplinary such that in contemporary discourses on martial virtue, training is as much about managing and preserving the lives of a fighting force as it is about enhancing the lethality of the individual soldier. The paper then contends that this expressed physiognomy constitutes a new strategic discourse of martial embodiment derived as much from the exercise of biopower as it is discipline. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it will be argued that the silhouette functions semiotically as a visual realization of specific discourses of virtue and virtuousness that are to be instilled through military training. There is of course, a long-standing and well-established visual convention of treating the human shadow as a virtual ‘sign’ for the inner qualities or essence of the subject. The argument is put forth that the silhouette serves to symbolize the physiognomy of the well-trained soldier. This paper describes of the use of the silhouette as a semiotic resource in a number of military simulation training system advertisements published in a prominent military trade magazine Training and Simulation Journal.
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