Oops? Interdisciplinary Stories of Sociotechnical Error| Discourses of Sociotechnical Error and Accuracy in U.S. and PRC News Media: The Case of the 1999 Bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade

Abstract

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia featured the first operational use of Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) “smart” munitions. The accuracy of these weapons promised a new and more responsible form of warfare, with surgical strikes against military targets. In practice, the campaign featured extensive targeting of nonmilitary targets, including the bombing of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Belgrade. This article explores the deployment of sociotechnical error in media coverage of the bombing in the United States and PRC. Drawing on recent scholarship in science and technology studies and media studies on the anthropophobia of contemporary militarism’s investment in automation, I read U.S. and PRC media coverage of the bombing against the formal prohibition on striking civilian targets. I argue that by carefully pursuing the nature of the sociotechnical error it represented, U.S. media constructed the bombing as anomalous, naturalizing NATO’s practice of selecting civilian targets. A discourse of sociotechnical error is shown to have precluded normative questions of target selection in the United States and clandestine operations in the PRC.