Refusing the robot? Narrating the humanity of the future soldier

Abstract

This article argues that modes of military future gazing have important functions and implications, and should be understood as practices of strategic narration about definitionally unknowable and constructed futures so that imagining futures of war and their central characters become important elements of recruiting and preparing for future wars and shaping how they can be understood. The article is focused on two army recruitment strategies, ‘Nothing Can Do What a Soldier Can Do’ in the UK and the ‘Future Soldier Preparatory Course’ in the US. The argument hinges on an exploration of the narrative distinction between technologically advanced visions of the future of war and those which focus on the humanity of future soldiers. The article suggests that such a focus obscures the dehumanizing nature of military violence. Contributing to Critical Military Studies, in which constructions of the future of war and soldiering remain underexplored, and drawing on the framework of strategic narratives and insights from Futures Studies, it focuses on examples of military recruitment materials which decentre emerging technologies and the iconic futuristic signals of robots and autonomous weapons systems in favour of an emphasis on atemporality, diversity and the vulnerable, fallible human body of the soldier.

Introduction

A robot crashes across a barren and apocalyptic landscape, marked by the ephemera of human life, but now devoid of it. A blue laser beam radiates from its head, sharp against the dull backdrop of rubble. Its movement is mechanized, aggressive and purposeful. A tense soundscape rises on a quivering note and a robotic female voiceover asks the audience ‘what does the army of the future look like?’ The camera closes in on the eye of the robot and travels forwards into a silvery pupil which, as the camera pans out again, merges seamlessly into a human eye, and then a human face, the face of a woman. ‘It looks’, the voice tells us, shifting tone, becoming warmer, more natural, clearly humanizing, ‘like you’.

As the woman looks out into the battle-hazy landscape, her breathing audible, and launches a small drone from her palm while fellow soldiers move about her, the voice informs us that ‘technology will help us do incredible things, but nothing can do what a soldier can do’. Wording appears across the screen declaring: ‘THE ARMY OF THE FUTURE STILL NEEDS YOU’ and the recruitment campaign ad draws to a close with the image of the British Army logo. ¹ This all takes place within one minute and it is arguably a highly memorable scene with a well-communicated recruitment message which represents particular ideas, both about the future of war, and about the nature and subjectivity of soldiering in the contemporary martial landscape.

This article argues that militarized temporalities and modes of future gazing have important functions and implications, and should be understood as practices of strategic narration about definitionally unknowable and constructed futures, so that imagining futures of war and its central characters become important elements of recruiting and preparing for future wars, and shaping how they can be understood. The article is focused on two army recruitment strategies, ‘Nothing Can Do What a Soldier Can Do’ in the United Kingdom (UK) (described above) and the ‘Future Soldier Preparatory Course’ in the United States (US). My argument hinges on an exploration of the division between technologically advanced visions of the future of war (understanding technology as signalling algorithms, drones, autonomous weapons systems, ‘killer robots’, brain–computer interfaces, etc.) and those which elevate the humanization of future war as a contrast. It focuses on examples of military recruitment materials which decentre emerging technologies and the iconic futuristic signals of robots and autonomous weapons systems in favour of an emphasis on atemporality, diversity and the vulnerable, fallible human body.

Despite a keen interest in the temporal dimensions of militarism, and in particular its tendency to cultivate and mobilize particular narrative formulations about the past in service of contemporary politics (see, e.g., Basham, 2016; Partis-Jennings, 2022), the future of war remains under-explored in work on martial practices, militarism and the military within Critical Military Studies (CMS) and feminist approaches, and has instead been the purview of War Studies scholarship. As such, the overarching contribution of this article is to better develop ‘the future’ as a martial signifier and site of critical analysis within CMS.

In recent years, both the US and the UK militaries have been experiencing a recruitment crisis (see Jester, 2021). Against this backdrop there is what might be described as a technological arms race, and a particular draw towards increasing automation. Former US Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Paul Selva, described this as a ‘terminator conundrum’ whereby marital innovation would be spurred on by a kind of security dilemma, nations driven to enhance their own automation capabilities in line with the capabilities of others (Scharre, 2018: 8). Yet, despite the rush towards increasingly technologically mediated warfare, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has prompted certain military and political elites linked to US and UK national security to invoke the risk of further interstate war, and a need for societies to mobilize in case called upon in service of an existential, all-consuming conflict. Admiral Rob Bauer, Chair of the NATO Military Committee, issued a warning regarding a likely NATO–Russia war within the next two decades ‘which would require many civilians having to be mobilised to fight’ (Arnold, 2024). General Sir Patrick Sanders, UK Chief of the General Staff, called on the British government to ‘mobilise the nation’, calling for a ‘citizen army’ to ensure preparedness for future conflicts (Camut, 2024). When talking about the wider incorporation of society into war preparedness programmes, Arnold (2024), writing for a prominent British defence and security think tank, invokes the spectre of World War II: ‘the Finnish model of comprehensive security is founded on a deep history of societal resilience, developed during the Second World War and the Cold War.’ In the US context, defence intellectuals Crombe and Nagl (2023) write in an article titled ‘A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force’ about the possible need for ‘partial conscription’ (p. 26) to address ailing military preparedness and they refer to the model of military operations against Iraq in the 1990s (p. 21).

We are thus arguably witnessing a period in the contexts under study where robotic and technologically mediated war futurologies are sitting side-by-side with retrofuturologies (see Paul, 2019a), which invoke the past (in this case past wars) to conjure up possible futures and where ordinary citizenry may be called upon to defend their nations (see Arnold, 2024). Future war is a liminal site, always already a construct, that shifts and recalibrates through strategic invocation. As I argue in case studies of recruitment strategies below, it is crucial to pay attention to the ways that future war and soldiering are crafted and narrated, since multiple imagined futures of war, rendered legible through representational practices, feed into the marital politics of war preparedness and the foundational logics of defence and militarism in the present.

Strategic narratives, futurity and visual storytelling

The concept of strategic narrative offers an opportunity to consider the stories that are told by political actors at different sites in an effort to promote a particular vision, and/or to achieve a certain objective relating to war and soldiering (Miskimmon et al., 2017). Feminist scholarship in International Relations has long engaged with narrative as a gendered analytical site (see MacKenzie, 2023), noting narrative to be an avenue through which ‘power is exercised and worlds are investigated as well as invented’ (Mehta and Wibben, 2018: 49). The idea that a story is strategic requires it to be situated within a context in which communicating actors, shaped by particular notions of ‘sense’ themselves (Callahan, 2020) might expect for their storytelling practices to produce cognitive resonance with an audience. A narrative understood to be strategic is thus likely to invoke plotlines, characters or symbols that have legible significance in a given context. Visual politics also relies on the capacity of visual material to produce a certain degree of shared meaning or be channelled into a narrative framework, often through pairing with text, or with iconic images and familiar settings that invoke recognition and clear cognitive associations (Bleiker, 2018). At the same time, it is broadly acknowledged that visuals are unstable, and that their meaning and audience engagement cannot easily be known in fixed terms, which produces challenges for understanding their significance as part of a wider strategic narrative (Crilley, 2015). However, the use of visual and ‘image–text’ signifiers within specific goal-oriented narrative sites, speaks to wider meaning-making logics (Bleiker, 2018; Mitchell, 1994). The interplay between visibility and invisibility, or in Welland’s (2017) terms ‘hypervisibility’ and ‘unvisibility’, what is visually centred and what is left out, erased from the visual story, or implied, is a key element of visualizing strategic narrative because it relates to the choices made by actors to foreground or exclude particular characters, settings, symbols and plotlines. Additionally, the broader characteristics of filmed material (as opposed to static images) such as pace, soundtrack and genre signalling also function to support the creation of particular narrative resonance in storytelling practices because they aid in sense-making for a given audience (Callahan, 2020).

The study of strategic narrative pays attention to temporality (Miskimmon et al., 2017: 7) and, in thinking about the use of strategic narratives to tell a story about the future in a corporate context, Rindova and Martins (2022) have differentiated forms of imagination and storytelling that envisage near and more distant futures. In their account, the former aims for an audience to accept its ‘plausibility’ and harnesses knowledge about the present to produce a sense of continuity and stability, while the latter is interested in generating a sense of desirability and is thus more ‘idealized’ in nature. Since the future does not yet exist, understandings of it are deeply reliant on modes of storytelling, and on how the storytelling actor chooses to collect, aggregate and represent plotlines, characters and settings. The strategic function of stories about the future is dependent on context and collective recognition within a given sense-making community, on the success and coherence of ‘world-making’ attempts and on their ability to produce meaning and effects in the present, rather than necessarily on their capacity to accurately predict what is to come (Rindova and Martins, 2022: 201).

Focusing on the specific interest of this article in sites where stories are told about the future of soldiering in relation to technological advancement, it is important to note the relationship between visuality, technology and imaginaries of future war. In the contemporary context, scholars recognize war to be inseparable from the ‘technologically mediated image’ and constituted by a ‘martial techno-aesthetic apparatus whose production of visibilities and distribution of the sensible’ shape the trajectory and intelligibility of warfare (Bjering et al., 2024: 3). Thus, the future is imagined in part though the visualizations made possible by algorithmic warfare and is bound up with technology not just as a symbol of futurity, but as a mechanism through which future war itself may be rendered visible. The ability to produce a coherent vision of the future of war and its actors and features, which is absorbed by populations and/or elite political actors, and recognized as plausible and salient to shaping action in the present, renders the subject of the future of soldiering a potentially politically powerful imaginative arena. This is true even where, as in the cases explored in this article, the imaginaries of the future are not the sole or dominant ones but contribute to a broader imaginative landscape around future war. Mirrlees (2024), for instance, has illustrated the ways that the future acts as an important domain of signification in multiple forms of ‘militainment’ showcasing the complex entanglement between representations of future war in entertainment, and militarization and war preparedness in the present.

Importantly, strategic narratives about the future of war necessarily start with the likely centrality of warfare to human futures and societies as a feature of cognitive recognition and plausibility (contrasted to imaging the future as devoid of warfare as in the peace practice of Elise Boulding, 2002, for instance). Mirrlees (2024: 74–75) points out that ‘in the United States, futurism has always been intwined with the country’s growth and maintenance as a superpower, or Empire’ and further argues that ‘hegemonic futurism’ fuelled by financial incentive and neoliberal ideology is invested in maintaining the status quo, and in forecasting the inevitability and necessity of militarized and war-torn futures. The representational and narrative strategies of states and militaries explicitly coded as future gazing are thus of significance in understanding the politics of war and soldiering in the present.

Despite this, and a significant body of work on future war (e.g. Allen et al., 2021; Coker, 2015; Freedman, 2018; Lacy, 2023; Scharre, 2018), it is an understudied subject in CMS and feminist scholarship (exceptions include feminist work on drones, see Clark, 2024, military technology, see Masters, 2005, and robotics/automation, see Roff, 2016; Wilcox, 2023). Equally, the notion that futures are constructed and narratively generated is prevalent in Futures Studies, and particularly in the poststructuralist turn which moved away from logics of prediction as a scientific endeavour to an understanding of futures as multiple and contingent (Inayatullah, 1990). Yet, at the same time, direct engagement between Futures Studies and war or militarism, has been relatively limited. For instance, a survey of the field titled Critical Concepts in Future Studies (Paul, 2019b) makes little mention of war, militarism, or soldiering and does not centre these in analysis. As such, this article, located explicitly within CMS, but drawing on wider frameworks such as strategic narrative and insights from Futures Studies, evidences how situated production of stories about soldiering, explicitly coded as ‘future’ oriented, relate to wider themes of conflict, weapons technology and military identity in the present, as well as to conceptions of the future of war.

Military recruitment campaigns

Work on military recruitment has identified the centrality of recruitment campaigns and their narrative formulations as a bridge between the civilian and the soldier, and as a way through which war and soldiering is sold to the public and potential recruits (see Enloe, 2015; Rech, 2014). Recruitment practices have been understood as bound up with the targeting of certain socio-economic demographics for military service, the public communication of military environments, identities and soldiering traits, and the harnessing of entertainment for military purposes (see Phillips and Ghalwash, 2019). Contemporary military recruitment strategies differ depending on the branch of the military in question (see Jester, 2021) but, as outlined by Stern and Strand (2024), often hinge on aspirational promises. The promise of soldiering has in the past been linked to masculinity and the fulfilment of manhood (Enloe, 2015; Jester, 2021) but increasingly in certain contexts incorporates emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and harnesses ideas of female empowerment. This relates to the concept of ‘militarized femininity’ (Gopal, 2023) which explores how femininity and womanhood are mobilized in service of militarism so that women as martial subjects can come to play important roles in the validation and promotion of miliary values, goals and practice (see also Parashar, 2009; Pin-fat and Stern, 2005). In her extensive study of recruitment videos in the UK and the US, Jester (2021) argues that increased emphasis on racial and gender diversity within the military context frames military institutions as progressive and as such is a branding exercise, as well as aiming to attract female and racially diverse recruits.

Recruitment campaigns are an example of strategic narratives that mobilize visuality, image–text combinations and the qualities of film to tell a particular story about war, the military and soldiering in order to reach an audience of individuals eligible (and targeted) for military service, persuade this audience of the merits of military service and achieve a specific objective by recruiting soldiers. They also speak to questions of military identity in their depiction of soldiering. Recruitment campaigns are part of a wider communicative constellation which is shaped by the relationship between state militaries and wider society and, like social media platforms, the videos associated with recruitment strategies offer a direct mode of communication with the public (see Sguazzini and Mazziotti di Celso, 2024). Military recruitment campaigns, given their wide circulation, are explicitly a branding exercise, shaped by advertising logics, particularly when corporate actors are contracted to create them. They speak to their national contexts and the ways that the state relates to its military as an extension of its own ontological narrative. Visuality is key to the mode of storytelling used by recruitment campaigns because of its capacity to convey constellations of meaning in relation to war (see Der Derian, 2018) and to use iconic visuals (see Hariman and Lucaites, 2007) and sets of associated tropes to produce rapid recognition and sense-making in an audience and aid narrative salience (MacKenzie, 2023).

Technology in the narrative landscape

Dominant constructions of the future of war and soldiering are reliant on the centrality of emerging technology which often visually signifies futuristic battlespace. Technology is key to the imaginary of future war as represented/crafted in scholarship (see Scharre, 2018), policy, politics and popular culture (Bjering et al., 2024; Mirrlees, 2024). For instance, the centrality of technology is core to international advocacy which seeks to enhance regulations around possible future weaponry in order to achieve more robust civilian protection mechanisms and counter ‘digital dehumanisation’ (where ‘humans are reduced to data’) in the context of conflict (stopkillerrobots.org, nd). In discussions of the tempering of weaponized automation, the idea of ‘meaningful human control’ or a ‘human in the loop’ is posited, juxtaposing the human and the ‘killer robot’ on the battlefield (see discussion in Wilcox, 2023).

Technology is central to the ways in which military actors forecast and future gaze. For example, in 2020, General Nick Carter, speaking of the UK armed forces, suggested that by 2030: ‘I suspect we could have an army of 120,000, of which 30,000 might be robots’ (Sabbagh, 2020). The now outdated US paradigm Future Force Warrior illustrates the centring of technology and technologically mediated enhancement in representations of future soldiering. Writing in the US-focused Army University Press, Master Sgt Hartzell (2023) reports: ‘The U.S.’s ability to fight and win future wars will depend heavily upon advancements in weapons and technology.’ Thus, ‘advanced technologies constitute an integral and central component of the American military apparatus, and necessarily play roles in shaping, informing and (re)producing military techno-scientific discourses’ (Masters, 2005: 113). This dynamic is also visible in the UK military’s Future Soldier framework where a key element includes ‘trialling’ and ‘integrating’ new technologies (British Army, nd: 20). In these imaginaries, emerging technology is often a necessary, largely positive and inevitable component of the future of conflict – it will enhance soldiering capacity and secure national defence, and technological advancement is understood as a core aspect of national security, as well as a reputational imperative in terms of military readiness.

At the same time, indicative media reporting echoing this techno-centrality is illustrated by the following headline: ‘AI-Powered Killer Robots May Be the Future of War’ (Tirone, 2024). The term ‘killer robots’ appears regularly in news media with articles often signalling an anxiety about the nature of future technology (see Wilcox, 2023: 86). Visually, the paradigm of ‘killer robots’ has coalesced around the iconic image of the aggressive humanoid robot, which often invokes ‘science fiction, especially the Terminator franchise’ (Nadibaidze, 2024). This narrative dominance is also salient to public perception, indeed as part of the motivation behind the UK recruitment campaign under discussion in this article, the army reportedly polled public opinion regarding its future. This data suggested that ‘three in ten people thought the army could one day employ more robots than humans’ and that ‘22 per cent believed that future conflicts may be fought by avatars’ not soldiers (N Johnston, 2022).

This narrative landscape establishes emerging technology as central to future war and, as such, suggests the need to invest in technologically enhanced weapons, and technologically proficient and mediated modes of soldiering (see Gielas, 2025). This has consequences beyond forms of representation as it relates to public understanding and billions of dollars of investment in military technologies and practices of scientific innovation geared towards military use, among other policy decisions (see Johnson, 2019). However, in the examples below, I illustrate the ways in which the ontological centrality of technologically mediated martial futures is also decentred by alternative imaginings and constructions of the subjectivity of the future soldier, and that this too has a strategic function.

Methodology

In this article, I draw on a visual approach to global politics, which recognizes the visual as a site of significant political communication (Bleiker, 2018; Crilley, 2015; Miskimmon et al., 2014: 22) and an important site of meaning in relation to war and militarism (Hanifi, 2018; Welland, 2017). I use Mitchell’s concept of ‘image-text’ to understand how textual practices are embedded in visual logics in particular ways and make possible certain kinds of visual storytelling, channelling visual iconography into knowable meaning-making tropes (Bleiker, 2018; Choi, 2018; Mitchell, 1994: 231). Given that the visual sites under study are mostly videos rather than static images, I draw on work in International Relations by scholars such as Callahan (2020) who explore film as a mode of methodological practice and a research site. As such, I incorporate wider features beyond visuality, such as pacing and sound, into my analysis.

In order to access the two narrative visual sites under study, I analyse a number of materials relating to the UK-based ‘Nothing Can Do What a Soldier Can Do’ (NDSD) campaign, and the ‘Future War Preparatory Course’ (FWPC) based in the US. Though these are very different case studies, they each centre on modes of martial future gazing, and garnered attention in terms of media discussion and explicit policy statements, with the US case being understood as highly successful in recruitment terms. They both also map ideas about future war via representational strategies that rely on crafting a subjectivity of future soldiering, explicitly badged as such. With the UK campaign, I read a number of primarily visual materials, namely the one-minute video described at the start of this article, and a collection of five images with accompanying text which were displayed in poster form in public spaces and are also available online (see Johnson, 2022). The US programme is a more complex site as it involves both recruitment and preparation for military training, which thousands have now completed. To access this, I study seven publicly available, official Army videos created to promote the programme. ² As communicative sites, they explicitly seek to persuade individuals to act (sign up) and thus first and foremost reflect what is believed to be the best narrative strategy to achieve this (see Jester, 2021).

Additionally, to gain a systematic understanding of the discussions around these recruitment strategies in domestic news media outlets, I conducted a LexisNexis keyword search (‘Future War Prep/Preparatory Course’ [FWPC] and ‘Nothing Can Do What a Soldier Can Do’ [NDSD]) for material between the start of 2022 and the end of the collection period in August 2024. I refined the search by removing duplications and irrelevant material, limiting articles geographically to those coming from North America for FWPC and Europe for the UK campaign, leaving 66 articles on the FWPC and 9 articles discussing NDSD. I analysed these for representations of the campaigns, as reflected in domestic news media.

Recruiting soldiers, visualizing atemporal fixity

The NDSD recruitment campaign was launched in July 2022 with the above-described video which was ‘shown in cinemas, on television and online’ (Nicol, 2022), indicating a broad audience on release. A YouTube version of the video had 88,000 views at the time of writing. The campaign message is that ‘while technology is important, only humans can make instinctive decisions on the ground in a conflict zone’ (Frodsham, 2022a) and ‘the future of UK defence will be underpinned by soldiers’ (Frodsham, 2022b). Colonel Nick Mackenzie, assistant director of recruiting, outlined that the campaign was ‘looking at the British Army of the future and the role of soldiers within it’, articulating a hope that ‘the campaign will lead to potential applicants seeing the Army as an exciting place they can learn and grow, and be valued as an integral part in our future’ (Frodsham, 2022b). NDSD was also part of a wider campaign strategy termed This Is Belonging in partnership with the consulting and outsourcing companies Capita and Accenture Song, and is thus shaped by a corporate understanding of advertising and communication, not just that of the Ministry of Defence.

The posters for the campaign, displayed at various public sites around the UK, featured images of male and female individuals of different ethnicities, coded as soldiers due to the presence of uniforms and headgear, facing off against robots. Each poster included a tag line, not just ‘Nothing Can Do What a Soldier Can Do’ but also variations, including ‘Nothing Can React/See/Think like a Soldier Can React/See/Think’ and, most interestingly ‘Nothing Can Feel Like a Soldier Can Feel’ (emphasis added). This emphasis on the feeling, thinking, sensory human body as superior and necessary in soldiering diverges from what feminist scholarship has identified as the expulsion, degradation and marginalization of feminized emotionality and somatic vulnerability within certain modes of soldiering masculinity and the practice of basic training (Cohn, 1999; Partis-Jennings, 2019; Whitworth, 2004). This framing of the future of war and soldiering acknowledges (and weaponizes) the feeling dimension of soldiering and sets the vulnerable, fragile humanity of the soldier up in opposition to the metallic invulnerability of the robot warrior, ‘animated by masculine subjectivity’ (Masters, 2005: 120; Roff, 2016: 2). The distinction is echoed in news headlines about the campaign such as ‘Robots “will never be a match for soldiers”’ (Johnston, 2022) or ‘Army recruits robots to show a human side’ (Frodsham, 2022c). The iconic visual of the humanoid robot in the campaign, familiar from science fiction, is significant in signalling particular constellations of meaning, such as a kind of hypermasculine ‘terminator’ sensibility, an automated mechanized violence, devoid of complex human feeling (see Roff, 2016). This is further enhanced by the aggressive and fast-paced tone of the video at the beginning of the short film, and the initially robotic, detached and harsh nature of the voiceover.

The US Army’s FSPC was initiated as a pilot programme in August 2022. It has been described as a ‘remedial’ course (Ware, 2023), which sets out to improve the academic and fitness standards of those who wish to join the army but do not meet the academic and/or weight requirements to do so. The wider and overt context for the development of the FSPC was a significant military recruitment crisis, which saw the Army and other branches of the military consistently fail to meet recruitment targets while the pool of ‘eligible’ citizens continued to shrink. The academic and fitness tracks of the FSPC are separate pathways, though dual enrolment is available. During the academic track, recruits spend up to 90 days working on their academic capacities, with a specific focus on increasing scores in the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a military entrance exam. The fitness track is based on five ‘domains’: ‘physical, mental, nutrition, sleep, spiritual’. ³ With a strong focus on nutrition as well as physical fitness training, it aims to imbue recruits with the ability to make healthier lifestyle choices long term, as well as losing weight during the programme. The goal of the FSPC is to allow individuals who successfully complete one or both tracks to enter basic training and thus join the US Army. Media reports indicate that close to 18,000 individuals have passed through the FSPC and entered basic training (Shkolnikova, 2024) and repeatedly assert that the programme is considered a great success in addressing enlistment shortfall, as a result of which it has been made a permanent feature of army recruitment. FSPC tells a story and provides a pathway which has had a significant impact on the recruitment landscape in the US.

The FSPC videos offer a clear example of the kind of aspirational promise with which military recruitment techniques are imbued, and indeed make very explicit the relationship between a certain lack or failing in the self, and the possibility of successful self-actualization through martial participation (see Stern and Strand, 2024). The videos fall into two categories. The first category is made up of general informational videos, which are stylistically akin to an advertising campaign or an infomercial with a booming voiceover. They use text and generic images in combination to signal simple and familiar environments, objects, or activities: the training ground, the classroom, healthy food, or exercise. The martial dynamic is communicated by the organized nature of the activities and the uniform clothing. ⁴

The second category includes video materials which incorporate what Stern and Stand (2024) describe as a ‘testimonial’ dynamic, and visually are more akin to a documentary, visually naturalized and intimate. In one of these, titled ‘From Food Delivery to Army Service – Future Soldier Prep Course Testimonial’ (with 4,000 views on YouTube) the female protagonist, a woman of colour, dressed in military fatigues, recounts her fateful encounter with a kindly and inspirational General who pointed her towards the FSPC, framing it in transcendent terms as a ‘sign’ that this life pathway was ‘for me’. The video highlights her emotional journey of self-improvement and bodily enhancement (weight loss and fitness) culminating in acceptance into basic training. Her soldiering contribution is depicted as ‘culinary’ and she is filmed in a kitchen setting preparing food, reinforcing a certain kind of militarized femininity still bound up with signifiers of domesticity and caring labour (see Pin-fat and Stern, 2005). Her key message is one of aspirational affirmation, suggesting the capacity of flawed but motivated ordinary people to redefine their futures (towards war).

As with the UK campaign discussed above, FSPC videos place an emphasis on the fallibility of people, and the humanity and individuality of the soldier. Instead of perfection, innate toughness, natural strength and military readiness, future soldier recruits are lacking, overtly defined by the bodily attribute of excess (in the framing of the programme) weight, or by a lack of academic skill. FSPC provides a vision of future war as bound up with the banality of soldiering (Henry, 2015) and positions future war as an aspect of everyday and very human self-actualization. Media reports often echo this vision, depicting the FSPC as centring people (e.g. US Fed News, 2023), supporting America’s youth, and helping individuals reach their potential and achieve personal goals (e.g. States News Service, 2023). The actual function of the military, which ultimately includes fighting and killing, is invisible in the FSPC videos. The videos are simple, almost timeless, and devoid of the edgy thrill, adventurous action and technological gloss (though the visibility of high-tech weapons and machines) that can feature in dominant representations of military life, particularly those designed to be futuristic and alluring, including recruitment campaigns (see Jester, 2021). As such, visually and in terms of messaging, FSPC videos offer a narrative contrast to a focus on technological innovation as key to American military preparedness.

Though more subtle and indirect, I suggest that here too is a subjectivity of soldiering narrated as distinct from the techno-centrality evidenced in certain US martial future gazing practices (see Johnson, 2019). Where the invocation of advanced technology is bound up with fully transcending the limitations of the human body (Masters, 2005), the FSPC videos tap into a mode of representation where advanced technology is strikingly absent from the story, making ‘hypervisible’ (Welland, 2017) the particularly flawed human body as military asset, and explicitly seeking to entice those who have been found wanting in academic and physical terms according to its own military parameters.

Across both examples, the emphasis on the humanness of the soldier at the heart of war, despite continued technological innovation, highlights the atemporal fixity of soldiering and collapses temporal boundaries, so that the subjectivity of the soldier takes on a reassuring constancy. This relies on the invocation of modes of retrofuturology and a sense that the soldier is an iconic and reliable atemporal figure. As a form of strategic narrative, it draws on the approach to imagination outlined by Rindova and Martins (2022), generative of a near future which seeks to be recognized as plausible through familiarity and proximity to the present (and past), and to bolster a sense of temporal contingency in the face of future uncertainty. The broader message is arguably that though war might be altered in frightening and unknowable ways, the knowable characteristics, relatability, human fallibility and instincts of the soldier will remain a stabilizing force, steady in the face of change. This also serves to sanitize and assuage public anxiety about military investment in technology, artificial intelligence and robots, and, in particular, ‘killer robots’ on the battlefield, which have been shown to be generally unpopular with domestic populations (Human Rights Watch, 2021; see more substantive discussion in Rosendorf et al., 2023).

Diversity and soldiering subjectivities

Both recruitment campaigns visually highlight ideas of gender, diversity and inclusion. This takes place within a juxtaposition between a martial futurity centring technologically mediated advancement, algorithms and robot warriors on one hand, and the ordinary relatability and inclusive category of human soldiers on the other. Here, envisaging robotic warriors as ‘techno-masculinized’ (Masters, 2005: 115; see also Roff, 2016), the human side of this division is amplified through links to militarized femininity in the modes of strategic narrative which present diverse human soldiers as key subjects and characters in an imagined story of future war.

Of course, the strategic aspect of this is to recruit more women and people of colour, and it is explicitly instrumental in this sense. Additionally, there is a relationship to a wider narrative and policy framework outlined by Wright (2024), whereby diversity is a national security imperative and critical to enhance operational effectiveness. This is amplified by the actors involved in the production of the campaign in the UK context, since the Ministry of Defence is working with corporate partners, and corporate actors have often accepted a business case for workforce diversity (see Wright, 2024: 99). This is also a deeply contested framework. Within the UK context, the increasing shift towards a focus on racial and gender diversity in military recruitment (see Jester, 2021) can be seen as part of a broader emphasis on diversity in national security arenas which has been denounced as both ‘woke’ and weak by right-wing political actors (see Wright, 2024: 101). Since President Trump has taken office for a second time, ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ initiatives in the military and defence sector have been critiqued and abolished, and scope for conversations about race and gender in the military limited (Debusman Jr and Mackintosh, 2025). As such, as a strategic narrative and branding exercise, these campaigns are visual interventions into a contested arena whereby the nature and subjectivity of future soldiers is part of a broader strategic and political contestation around the image, identity and function of the state military and its soldiers in the present.

Additionally, associating racial and gender diversity with a ‘human’ element in war, balancing against a techno-centric vision of future conflict, and functioning to signal a reassuring ‘human in the loop’ in the NDSD campaign (the soldier controls a drone) erases the gendered and racialized nature of western warfare and the extent to which concepts of race and gender in conflict are entangled with modes of technological sense-making. As Wilcox (2023) points out, the category of ‘human’ in warfare (and more broadly) is a racialized and exclusive one, and technologically enhanced warfare has only amplified existing logics of racialized experimentation, surveillance and targeting (Bhila, 2024; see also wider discussion in Benjamin, 2019). As such, visualizing diversity as a facet of the human face of future soldiering tells a story about a form of futurity in which militarism is inclusive and progressive (see Jester, 2021), rather than a near future in which war continues to depend upon and (re)produce racist and gendered violence, and dehumanization. Indeed, any strategic use of a division between human soldier and weapons technology in imagining future conflict arguably negates the extent to which recognition of humanity in warfare is likely to remain technologically mediated (see, e.g., Downey, 2024).

The strategic salience of corporality

The central video for NDSD, with its intimate lingering on the soldier’s eye and face, and the audio of her breathing as well as the overarching focus of the FSPC videos on fitness, weight and physical self-care invoke a non-mechanized corporality. Though an artificial distinction given the entanglement between human and non-human materiality, particularly in warfare (see, e.g., Bjering et al., 2024; Gielas, 2025; Masters, 2005) both campaign stories invoke ideas of fleshy, bodily humanity. They craft a subjectivity of soldiering that is feeling and embodied, and privilege such fleshy vulnerability and emotional capacity above ideas of infallibility, bio-enhancement and techno-superiority. As outlined by feminist scholars, war always relies upon the body, and is profoundly sensory in its appeal and experiential foundations (see Baker, 2020: 5). Yet, the explicit centring of this kind of embodied dynamic through the lens of humanity has, I suggest, both practical and ideational implications. On the one hand, it artificially distinguishes human and technological bodies to emphasize that militaries need human bodies to fight wars, and that, faced with recruitment crises (and perhaps salient to an increasing emphasis on a requirement for society as a whole to be mobilized in possible existential warfare) the subjectivity of the soldier must map onto the idea of the ordinary person through an assertion of the innate humanity and bodily fallibility of soldiers, and the general accessibility and relatability of war participation.

A further point is that the emphasis on the bodily humanity of soldiering redirects the gaze, focusing on the ‘hypervisible’ human body of the western soldier, rather than the humanity and corporal fragility of others at the receiving end of technologically mediated warfare which are distinctly ‘unvisible’ in the depictions of military purpose and battlespace evidenced in these narrations of the future of soldiering (see Welland, 2017). A contrast between dehumanizing technology and corporeal human subject is thus harnessed within a strategic recruitment logic, which is a complementary parallel to weaponized technological innovation (as signalled by the use of the drone in the British campaign), rather than one which critiques the dehumanizing capacity and false precision (see Wilcox, 2023: 94) of violent technological infrastructure.

Conclusion

This article has looked at two case studies of recruitment practices, arguing that these signal strategic narratives coded as representing the near ‘future’ of soldiering to attract recruits. It has suggested that these sites draw on wider frames of reference in relation to the identity of the military, the nature of soldiering and the near future of war. It has argued that, though these sites present a niche imaginary of future war, not dominant or singular, their perceived success in shaping the recruitment landscape (in the US example) and wide visual circulation and policy-oriented messaging (especially in the British case) as well as their shared features relating to the atemporal fixity, visualized humanity, vulnerability, embodied fallibility and diversity of soldiering in contrast to an abstracted, mechanized, techno-centric futurism, render them a significant contribution to a broader imaginary of future war. I argue that these sites do not critique a techno-centric vision of the future of war but harness other elements of storytelling about soldiering to achieve a strategic goal and contribute to an understanding of military identity. As such, they absorb the idea of the humanized foil to the high-tech robot warrior and fold this into a broader imaginative landscape of future war, potentially reducing space to tell stories about the other kinds of humanity that can be eroded by weaponized technology.