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Packer, J., & Reeves, J. (2025). Pulp to Plutonium: Conflict Media and Destructive Dependence. Media Theory, 9(1), 143–168. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i1.1168

Pulp to Plutonium: Conflict Media and Destructive Dependence

JEREMY PACKER

University of Toronto, CANADA

JOSHUA REEVES

Oregon State University, USA

Abstract

This essay argues that media systems are not passive instruments of military power but active infrastructures that shape how war is conceived, executed, and sustained. Building on Harold Innis’s staples theory and the materialist traditions in media scholarship, we analyze three case studies—the U.S. Civil War, World War I, and the ongoing conflict over rare-earth minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo—to demonstrate how media-specific demands produce new regimes of logistics, extraction, and violence. In each historical moment, war is not simply conducted through media but organized around it: paper shortages in the 1860s tied to cotton blockades redefined print media as both resource and battleground; telegraphic entanglements during WWI transformed cable infrastructure into a target and tactical medium; and today’s digital economies sustain conflict through their dependence on minerals sourced from war-torn regions.

Rather than treating media as ancillary to strategy, we position them as infrastructural cores of military operations. Media circuits demand raw materials, labor infrastructures, and spatial control—linking sovereign power to media logistics in enduring ways. Our analysis reveals that war and media are co-constitutive processes tied together by shared material conditions. From the newspaper to the fiber-optic cable, the terrain of conflict shifts in step with the demands of media technologies. This entwinement renders modern war a struggle not just over territory or ideology but over the infrastructures that make communication—and domination—possible.

Keywords

environmental media, e-waste and media, war and media, media and colonialism, conflict materials

Building upon two arguments developed in Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (2020), namely the strategic necessity of resource dominance and the martial a priori of media innovation, this essay examines the interlinked relationship between media-specific resource necessity and warfare. Specifically, it investigates three cases in which military control or destruction of the natural resources, supply chains, or manufacturing facilities of media systems were and are central considerations in the conduct of warfare. We investigate cases in which paper media (the U.S. Civil War), electrical media (the so-called cable wars of WWI), and digital media (ongoing wars over rare minerals in the Congo) necessitated how and why warfare was conducted.

These examples explicate our thesis that media-dependence is a primary driver for military strategic engagement, which follows from the particular nature of the media systems used to sustain the logistical capabilities for conducting warfare and upon the raw materials necessary to produce increasingly sophisticated technologies (media, especially). What we are developing, then, is a media-centric approach to historicizing conflict and a media theoretical understanding of logistics, military strategy, and raw material dependency. Further, as we might note from the work of Harold Innis (1930; 1951), Marshall McLuhan (1964), Friedrich Kittler (1999), and John Durham Peters (2015), to name four prominent media theoreticians in historical order, some of the most prominent developments in media theory have been fundamentally grounded in historical accounts of media development. As Blondheim (2002) pointed out in his description of the work of Innis, this species of media history is itself “philosophical” and adheres to the Hegelian tripartite description of history as adhering to three hierarchical strata; original, reflective and general/philosophical. This is to suggest that a fertile reservoir for generating media theory is a deep investigation into the material, conflictual, and technical innovations informing media system development and the ways in which they reshape the world. Thus, one of our aims is not just to build theory, but to fill in some historical gaps that allow us to make metatheoretical observations about the media/war/theory intellectual enterprise. While the interdependence of media/war has gained considerable attention among media theorists (see Winthrop-Young, 2011), another element—that of natural resources—plays a complementary infrastructural role in fueling the escalatory development of media/war. This claim reveals another dimension of materiality that grounds the media/war relationship, introducing new possibilities for retheorizing their intersection and interdependence. 

Following from the work of Harold Innis (1931; 1951; 2022), we suggest that staples and/as raw materials are not merely economic commodities; they are strategic assets, woven into the logic of imperial expansion and military dominance. The extraction and circulation of resources—timber, minerals, grain, oil—are mechanisms of control, ensuring that colonial peripheries remain tethered to the centers of empire. This dependency is not incidental; it is designed, an infrastructural imperative that transforms margins into logistical outposts, supply chains into battlegrounds.

The center-margin dynamic is not just economic—it is also military, a structure of power that enables war-making through resource control. Colonial centers dictate the extraction of staples, ensuring that naval fleets, infantry divisions, and mechanized armies remain fueled, clothed, and equipped for global dominance. Fortifications rise where resources are plentiful; trade routes double as invasion corridors. The peripheries—whether in Africa, Asia, or the Americas—function as sites of extraction and subjugation, their strategic value determined by their capacity to sustain imperial war machines.

Building upon Innis’s insights reveals that military strategy is not simply about tactic—it is about infrastructures, about the ability to command flows of materials, bodies, and information. In his Introduction to the 2022 edition of Innis’s Empire and Communication, Buxton explains that, “While war and the military figured prominently in Innis’s original analysis, he had downplayed both (xxvii)” in the original version of the book. However, inclusion of Innis’s associated texts and notes makes it evident that,

Innis did not confine himself to descriptions of the war-making capacities of early administrative states; he examined the processes through which war-making apparatuses were assembled and then put into action. This involved discussing the administrative organization in terms of its constituent features including metallurgy, horses and weaponry, building and deploying modes of transportation, such as canals, and the development of new technologies such as the light, horse-drawn chariot (xxviii).

Thus, just as colonial empires secured control through staple dependencies and administrative structures based on communication infrastructures, today’s military-industrial complexes extend their reach through the management of rare earth elements, petroleum reserves, and global logistics networks. Warfare and trade are not separate systems—they are entangled, reinforcing an enduring architecture of imperial control. As such, a “paper war” is organized according to the specific conditions produced by a paper-based military chain of command and the attendant ways that paper is necessary to any war effort. Thus, natural resource extraction, supply chains, rag mills and printing facilities marked out key initiatives to limit the flow of natural resources and destroy the production facilities necessary for paper production. Equally, electric warfare of WWI (primarily telegraphy) was organized by the dictates of electrical circulations and the global conditions of colonial interdependence. This produced fixed lines at the battlefront, but at the same time also gave rise to wildly dynamic naval engagements dictated by destroying and protecting telegraph lines and related raw material supply chains. Finally, digital warfare is driven by the needs of digital infrastructures, devices, and speeds in which so-called rare metals produce highly contentious zones of extraction that have led to a decades-long civil war in Congo—even as this digital technology animates the dream of a world beyond the carbon-based extraction that has organized warfare for the past century. This materialist approach to media and warfare makes clear that the role of media in the conduct of warfare goes well-beyond the ideological realm and instead recognizes that media are both the object and subject of military strategy and destruction.

There is a compelling story about the relationship between war and media escalation that essentially begins with the mid-19^th century and the use of the telegraph and carries forward through to WWII in which problems associated with military intelligence, cryptography, and enemy location function to produce vast innovations that culminate in what we think of today as computer or digital computation. Freidrich Kittler’s version (1999) of this escalation is well-known and also amply criticized (Winthrop-Young, 2002). Paul Virilio provides a related narrative that emphasizes the historical rise of cinema alongside modern warfare (1989). What these two narratives share is an emphasis upon the interplay between technological dynamics and military strategy and how they lead to the invention, application, and manipulation of new media in ways that ultimately reshape geopolitics as well as everyday life. Media, including telegraphs, typewriters, phonographs, magnetic tape recorders, radio transmitters, film cameras and projectors, and electronic computers, are refigured and as such the human situation has been re-determined. The focus of these stories is primarily oriented around the intellectual and technological capacities to make and apply media to the demands of warfare and which foreground two concerns: 1) the need to secure the chain of command, and 2) the capacity to collect and process ever greater amounts of military intelligence (especially cryptography and surveillance). 

The story we want to tell runs alongside this narrative and focuses instead upon militarized interventions to gather natural resources, create and maintain production facilities, and build and control infrastructures necessary for the creation and use of media systems. Such an approach builds upon accounts of understanding media as infrastructural (Star, 1999; Parks and Starosielski, 2015), logistical (Peters, 2013; Hockenberry et al., 2021), and environmental (Parikka, 2015; Cubitt, 2017) and runs a similar path to the one developed by Kaminska and Ruiz (2021) who introduced the concept of “xylomedia”, which highlights the intersection of material, environmental, and infrastructural concerns in media studies; or Rossiter and Zehle, who draw together the overlapping registers of environment, media, logistics, and war (2023). 

The cases discussed below are important insofar as they provide a means for thinking about how the infrastructural, logistic, military strategic, and environmental considerations overlap in different ways according to the needs and capacities existent for different media systems. In simple terms, the raw materials necessary for paper production differ radically from those necessary for undersea cables or lithium batteries. Yet, the dynamics regarding raw material acquisition, transport, processing, refining, securitization, and manufacture are all present for each media-dependent mode of military organization. And while it is impossible to know how this dynamic will continue to play out in the future, the news cycle of Spring 2025 is in part guided by the reworking of such dynamics as they occur in real time, as can be seen in the newly-forming US/Canadian discourse around a renewed “arsenal of democracy” in which Canada provides natural resources for US military production (Panetta, 2025) or the bombing of fiber optic manufacturing facilities in Russia by Ukrainian forces as a means of disabling the supplies necessary for tethered drones recently developed to counteract anti-drone communication jamming developments (Sabbagh, 2025). We have chosen to compress this story into three parts that correspond to the dominance of three different media regimes: paper (the U.S. Civil War), electrical (World War One), and digital (the ongoing Congolese Civil War).

American Civil War or the “first raw materials crisis”

The United States was the largest manufacturer of paper in the world at the advent of the Civil War in 1860 (Crawford, 1925). By the end of 1862, prices for paper had doubled, cotton was unavailable in the North and throughout much of the world due to the Union blockade which snuffed out nearly all Confederate shipments of cotton and pushed paper prices up globally. The paper industry was thus forced to look for a solution to the resource paucity. There was a push to recycle old books and to secure more cotton rags, but eventually this supply would also run out. What had been a united national industry, in which cotton from the South supplied the ongoing reproduction of cotton-based resources to produce paper, was radically thrown into upheaval with the breakout of hostilities. This situation is what accounts for the notion that the Civil War created the “first raw materials crisis” (Isaacman and Roberts, 1995) and that it radically shifted global cotton production toward European colonies in Asia and Africa (Beckert, 2004; 2014).

A focused (and brief) assessment of paper’s role in the Civil War provides exemplary evidence as to why a materialist media genealogy can help us make sense of the centrality of media to war, thereby marginalizing wartime concerns over ideology in order to assess the deeply infrastructural, logistical, and explosive (literally) capacities of paper. Kaminska and Ruiz suggest that “A paper-dependent modernity can be understood as an infrastructural assemblage of harvesting, production, circulation, and consumption” (2021: 315). Following from the work of Lisa Gitelman (2014), when we say paper media, we don’t necessarily mean “print media” as so much of the paper used in the war effort was either blank or in generic forms that corresponded to specific logistical and bookkeeping tasks.  Beyond sketching maps, writing commands, or tabulating accounts for collecting, storing, or transporting information, paper was also used to enfold, ignite, cover-up, hide, or store materials necessary to military logistics and strategy. It’s questionable whether the role of paper was more important as a medium to inscribe information or as a container medium housing bullets about to be fired from the barrel of a rifle.

While Harold Innis (1951) is correct in pointing out the essential role that Canadian wood pulp would eventually play in the ongoing dominance of the American paper and print industries, in 1860, right before the outbreak of the American Civil War, cotton, not wood pulp, was the raw material used to produce the vast majority of paper globally (Comor, 2017). The first paper mill in the U.S. was established in 1690, and for about 125 years, papermaking depended on scavengers, or “rag pickers,” who supplied linen and cotton rags—key raw materials before wood pulp became common. Rag pickers played a vital role in recycling, but demand often exceeded supply due to widespread poverty, as people used clothing for as long as possible. In the eighteenth century, newspaper ads frequently encouraged housewives, children, and domestics to save rags, sometimes offering monetary rewards (Medina, 2001). As noted, cotton rags, excess material from clothing, and “dirty” cotton provided the grist for the paper mills up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Such mills were at the time typically referred to as “rag mills.” For the Confederacy, where cotton was king, there was never a shortage of cotton—even when rags ran out. However, rag mills and printing facilities were few and far between and those that did exist were the target of military destruction, ultimately leading to a near complete collapse of the industry. As U.S political scientist F.G. Crawford explained, the situation was a bit different for the Union: “In 1860, the paper industry was located preponderantly east of the Alleghenies, ninety per cent of the total product coming from the New England and the Middle Atlantic States” (1925: 227). In the Union states, where production capacity existed but where cotton was no longer available, there were increasingly severe shortages of cotton materials as the rag pickers ran out of material to scavenge (Betts, 2016). This eventually led to wide-scale experimentation with other raw materials that would eventually lead to a wholesale change in the paper industry worldwide.

In fact, it was the Civil War that revolutionized the industry and created wood-pulp as a commodity and resource for paper production. Prior to the war, nearly all paper was produced from some form of cotton. However, with the cotton produced in the Confederacy no longer available, the Union States had to locate a new natural resource to turn into paper. 

After a number of experiments with various plants, wood pulp eventually became that resource. Accordingly, it would at first blush seem that the Union manufacture of paper would be the one most disrupted by the war as their entire industry had to be reoriented around a new natural resource. However, the Confederacy’s failure to sustain its paper production had a serious impact on the war. Even though pulp was of lesser importance to Southern mills and the seemingly readily available cotton, this didn’t save the South from extensive and widespread paper shortages which would prove detrimental to their military campaign. Due to supply exhaustion and strategic infrastructure attacks from the Union, “By the end of the war there were practically no mills and no papers in the Confederacy” (Crawford, 1925: 228).

In terms of the centrality of paper to the military infrastructure, we need look no further than the institutional needs that paper affords. Combing through the 128 volumes of War of the Rebellion that comprise an archive of all military communications that could be collected from both the Union and Confederacy at war’s end, the term “paper” is shorthand for a military document containing orders from commanding officers or official statements of commanding officers. The term “paper” thereby turns up thousands of times as a military order exists as “a paper” in this discourse. Orders existed in and were administered by paper. As such, saying “no such paper exists” is tantamount to saying the supposed reality to which you refer is a figment of your imagination or a ploy to deceive. Paper is literally the coin of the realm; it determines the potential for military strategy, command, and litigation. It marks out the means by which orders are contemplated (examination of maps, poring over newspaper accounts of the enemy’s location and motives, decoding intercepted enemy messages, processing the downstream effects of Quartermaster’s reports, etc.), made official strategy, transmitted through the chain of command, used to assess the results of battle, send letters to casualties’ families, call up recruits through conscription campaigns, and create new forms of paper currency.

[C]onsiderable amount came from the necessary bureaucracy of conducting a continental war. Requisitions required at least three copies, and muster sheets required five. For every immortal quote on any major battlefield, there were thousands of pages of maneuver orders, promotions and reassignments, muster rolls, quartermaster reports, medical reports, correspondences, and responses that kept the machine running (Flagel, 2020: 6).

The importance of paper to the bureaucratic functioning of a military should be obvious, but the deeply ingrained logic demanded extensive consideration into how paper was requisitioned and distributed. For instance, “Theodore Spencer Case, Quartermaster for the State of Missouri in 1865, compiled a list of how stationery and writing equipment was apportioned according to each officer’s rank during the war” (Estes, 2015). This list included various applications of paper in communications, logistics, and even weapons provision. Cardboard packaging materials, maps, orders, photographs, blueprints—this broad range of paper products provided the logistical framework within which soldiers could carry out necessary everyday tasks (Estes, 2015). Paper as a medium functions as both a container of information and a container of military goods. Its logistical dimensions are semantic, cryptographic, and infrastructural—it contains the small bits of the larger war machine as they traverse the transportation infrastructure. As such, mills were reassigned from making paper for communicative purposes to making things like cartridge paper used in Confederate guns.

Though modern cardboard was patented in 1856, it was not in widespread use during the Civil War. Military regulations acknowledged the importance and logistical logic that drove container strategy as suggested by this 1861 Army Regulations text:

The size, form, strength, &c. of packages designed to hold subsistence stores will be determined by the purchasing Commissary, who will be governed in these particulars by the kind of transportation offered, by the size of the wagons used, by the convenience of handling the packages, &c. (Revised United States Army Regulations of 1861: 301, cited in Schneider, 2025).

Shortages in container materials have a multiplier effect of diminishing the other networks of production and transportation for which they are so necessary. Optimal shipping containers are ones which properly hold and structure the uniformity of their contained goods. When paper and cardboard are not available as materials for containment, the rest of the system’s efficiency is degraded.

One specific form of container was both made of paper and exceptionally important to any war effort, munitions casing. During a relatively short period, paper was the dominant container medium for small ballistics and necessary for the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifle-musket, the most commonly issued small munition in the Confederacy. A paper cartridge is one of various types of small arms ammunition used before the advent of the metallic cartridge. These cartridges consisted of a paper cylinder or cone containing the bullet, gunpowder, and in some cases, a primer or a lubricating and anti-fouling agent. In fact, production limitations impacted the Confederacy’s war effort, as one Confederate officer’s requisitions account makes clear: “Double-barrel shotguns have been sent down, for land assault, but with loose shot and powder. As many cartridges as possible have been made up, but want of paper and cord require that they be made at the arsenal or that powder pouches be furnished” (‘Operations on 797 Morris Islands, S.C. 1863’, 1892). For soldiers on the ground, paper’s utility expanded beyond the traditional realm of communications and provided a key material for the sustenance of military operations.

Additionally, various types of paper, including old letters, envelopes, and even wallpaper, were repurposed to create new paper products. This resourcefulness was crucial in maintaining the supply of paper for various needs, including military and administrative purposes. During the U.S. Civil War, the Confederate government relied on several printing facilities to produce their paper currency. The primary printing facilities were located in Richmond, Virginia, and Columbia, South Carolina. Additionally, some private firms were contracted to print Confederate money, including firms in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Augusta, Georgia.

Debate continues as to whether the Civil War was the first “total war” (Walters, 1948; Strachan, 2000; Hsieh, 2011). Such a perspective highlights the extensive ways in which logistical failure, both internal and as the result of purposeful enemy destruction, reveals how the failings of a single industry not only affected the military munitions, logistics, and even strategy, and the paper-dependence upon which all culture industries and everyday life were founded. A grim example of the dependence upon paper and the human hands necessary to make paper a valuable communicative medium comes from an educational program designed to teach Civil War soldiers how to relearn to write with their remaining left hand following the amputation of their right hand or arm. It led to the establishment of an “‘Exhibition of Left-Hand Penmanship,’ a competition for soldiers who had lost an arm during the war. Cash prizes totaling $1,000 (or between $14,920 and $15,940 in buying power in today’s dollars) were given out to twenty-eight of the 300 competition participants….Penmanship, Bourne believed, should be celebrated and rewarded because the nature and skillfulness of it marked one’s irrefutably triumphant return to civilian life…to keep on writing was to keep on marching” (Estes, 20015b). This point clarifies how central media are to all war efforts and resurfacing upon the end of war.  Paper was the medium by which newspapers and the postal system carried communication and culture and it was the medium by which bureaucratic institutions organized their daily practices and planned their futures. Paper was fundamental to military intelligence, commerce, national culture, and even interpersonal relationships and familial unity which in the end demanded that citizens and soldiers have something to write on and some way to write. Without paper, war and the rest of life was nearly impossible to carry out. 

WWI or “the first global raw materials war”

While the Civil War produced an altered paper industry due to raw material shortages, WWI saw the exponential growth of a replacement industry whereby the submarine telegraph was countered by radiotelegraphy. In the first instance, a response to a failed raw material monopoly that the Confederacy held over cotton drove the change; in the second instance, it was the British monopoly over submarine cables which forced Germany and other countries’ hands in forming alternative networks to manage their colonial empires, choreograph their militaries, and orchestrate supply chains. This section will highlight the interrelated ways in which communication infrastructure becomes a target of destruction and the mechanism by which military logistics chains are made to function.

Dominance and dependence represent the two sides of the double-edged sword created by technologically sophisticated warfare. Large scale communication networks, global in spirit if not necessarily in practice, provided the communicative capacity for more efficient and extensive colonial dominance. Once the co-dependent colonial and military systems came to depend upon these networks, their nodes became obvious and significant targets for destruction. The greater their success the more highly valued they are as targets. Once targeted, their failures made evident their importance and function as part of the global raw materials supply chains.

The British “all red system” submarine cable was said to be “spread like a net all over the world” (Kennedy, 1971). Was this a net meant to capture, as for fishing, or to keep out, as for mosquitos? Allegorically, we could see it as the means by which value was captured throughout the British Empire while serving to keep at bay the incursion of competing imperial interests. Further, the British global network provides an historical example of the kind of network theory of power that led to ARPA’s distributed network in the 1960s, began to dominate military strategy beginning in the 1990s (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1996) and then media theory in the mid-2000s (Galloway and Thacker, 2007). Specifically, the solution that cables offered to various problems has made them central to military conflict since the time at which cable was first laid (Crimean, U.S. Civil War, WWI, etc.) and continues today (Ukraine, Black Sea). Yet, the dominance of the British submarine cables was extensive and created the most far-reaching network to that point and redundancies built into the system helped ensure its survival during military conflict. As historian Kennedy summarized, “the Eastern Telegraph Company’s line was from the very beginning of the greatest strategical importance and was the first link in an intended ‘all red’ system, that is, a cable network which linked all parts of the Empire without ever touching foreign soil” (Kennedy, 1971: 731). The chain’s weak points were in Egypt, partially resolved after the 1882 occupation, and in Lisbon, a longtime British ally. A second cable was later laid to Gibraltar via Vigo, Spain. By 1889, security concerns led to a recommendation for a direct line between Gibraltar and Land’s End (Kennedy, 1971: 731). 

Britain dominated global telegraphy, especially intercontinental submarine cabling, through what was called the “all red line”; a cable network owned entirely by the British that only passed through British controlled colonies, underwater, or for short distances in their allies’ territory. This ensured security of messages and enabled all parts of the British Empire to be brought within one dynamic network of communicative rule.  Data could be quickly passed from the colonies to London or local administrators and administrative rule could be unleashed quickly from the centres of Imperial power. British dominance in this technological terrain, along with the Marconi affair, led them to largely under-develop a radio-telegraphic network whereas the Germans, recognizing Britain’s dominance of submarine telegraphy, had been working to envelope their empire in a network of radio telegraph stations in the years just prior to WWI. 

The German radio-telegraphic network attempted to unify German colonial rule into Africa, Asia, and Europe. Wireless technology allowed the German government to communicate with colonies without relying on Britain’s submarine telegraph cables. Before 1914, Germany built wireless towers in colonies across Africa, East Asia, and the Pacific, including Qingdao, Nauru, and Samoa. However, when World War I began, these stations became targets for Allied forces. In September 1914, Australian troops attacked a German wireless station on New Britain, capturing German New Guinea. By October, British forces had destroyed German stations on Yap, and by early 1915 in southwest Africa. A British station in Mombasa intercepted German signals from Lake Victoria until at least June 1915 (Tworek, 2014). Whether through destruction or subterfuge, British dominance of the communication infrastructure granted them a significant advantage in terms of maintaining supply chains and accessing natural resources (Tworek, 2014).

Under contemporary military law, military communications cables are considered legitimate targets during conflict. However, the majority of military data is transmitted through commercial submarine cables, which are largely indistinguishable from civilian Internet traffic. The owners of these cables have limited ability to predict or regulate the routes taken by transmitted data. Although civilian submarine cables are not classified as military assets, their utilization by armed forces renders them strategically significant, as their disruption can yield substantial military advantages (Kraska et al., 2023). As during the first World War, the distinction between civilian commercial submarine cables and governmental/military cable is indecipherable. All cable can be utilized for military strategy and colonial administration. 

Whether legally or not, the British had developed policy and plans for how to conduct network warfare prior to the breakout of WWI. A key instance of cable disruption took place in 1914, shortly after Britain declared war on Germany. In the early hours of August 5, following the expiration of Britain’s war ultimatum, the cable ship Alert set sail from Dover into the North Sea. By the following morning, it had successfully cut five undersea telegraph cables that connected Germany to the rest of the world. Deprived of direct communication with its overseas territories and neutral countries, Germany was forced to depend on wireless transmissions to communicate with its naval and colonial forces, as well as its diplomatic representatives. British intelligence in London intercepted and decoded many of these signals, and the Admiralty sent cruisers to disable German transmission stations in Africa and the Pacific while working to prevent German interference with British communications. The British quickly and decidedly solidified their global dominance over the undersea telegraph network and continually weakened Germany’s capacity to produce and secure a competing network. One intelligence success of incredible importance came in 1917 when the British intercepted and deciphered the Zimmerman telegram. Sent from Berlin to the German ambassador in Mexico, it urged Mexico to join the war against the United States. Once revealed, this message significantly influenced the U.S. decision to enter the war against Germany in April 1917 (Fargher, 2016).

But the network also played a key recursive role in managing all the supply chains necessary to keep warring empires afloat with the natural resources needed to supply the war effort and the communications infrastructure necessary for maintaining chains of command. Thus, attacks on cable are both a direct attack on a military strategic target, and an attack on the ongoing capacity of the enemy to direct energy toward its logistical machinery necessary to coordinate the empire’s production and distribution of resources. We see in this dependance a fundamental principle of the media-military relationship. In times of conflict, media systems are “in the last instance” military systems. Not simply because they are used directly to conduct combat, but because all of the infrastructural and logistical systems necessary to conduct modern warfare are integrated by and through media. At their most abstract, media are fundamentally violent, for they always make the first “cut” when they decide what data to choose and which to deny. But far beyond this abstraction, because the media determine our condition and thus condition how warfare must necessarily be fought, media become both the subjects and grounds of warfare. 

We can see this fully develop in World War I, which was an industrial conflict requiring vast amounts of weapons and ammunition. Economic warfare and the imposition of naval and submarine blockades across global transportation networks hindered the import of raw materials necessary for military industrial production, creating a supply crisis due to imbalances in production, consumption, and transport issues. To address this, belligerent nations established administrations to control and distribute materials. The competition for resources also reshaped global markets (Chancerel, 2015). These dynamics have led historians to consider WWI the first global raw materials war, and it spawned the creation of administrative organizations across the warring nations such that raw materials for the war effort became a fundamental guiding principle and strategic initiative. 

To deal with the difficulties arising from a shortage of supplies, the state administered the procurement and rationing of raw materials. The general pattern was similar everywhere and led to the creation of new administrations in charge of taking inventory and distributing the available goods to the industries identified as having priority (Chanceral, 2015).

We also note that submarine cable messages had already been vital to the distribution of raw materials necessary for naval warfare and the lessons learned in the Spanish American War were viewed by contemporary military strategists as telling. One infamous example makes this clear and is used as a prime example of why such cabling networks were vital to warfare. The unintended failure to deliver two cable messages from the Minister of Marine (Bormejo) to the commander-in-chief of the Spanish squadron (Cervera) at Martinique undoubtedly had a significant impact on the entire course of the Spanish-American War. One of these messages informed the Admiral of a nearby coal supply, while the other authorized him to return to Spain immediately with his squadron (Squier, 1900). Captain George Squier of the US Signal Corps summarized the changes in military strategy that resulted:

The story of the Spanish-American war is largely a story of “coal and cables.” That war for the first time demonstrated the dominating influence of submarine cable communications in the conduct of a naval war. As a result of it, the principal maritime powers, with colonial possessions, are each at present elaborating their “Cable Policy,” and have awakened to a realization of the fact that reliable submarine communications under exclusive control are not only absolutely necessary, but exercise a dominating influence upon the control of the seas, whether in commercial strategy or in military and naval strategy (Squier, 1900).

Ultimately, this war of “coal and cables” would hint at emerging intersections of war/natural resource capture/and communication infrastructure.

The digital Congo

As with World War I, media infrastructure finds itself at the center of the Second Congo War. Facing severe postcolonial destabilization, in the 1990s Zaire/Congo was plunged into military conflict with many of its neighbors, particularly Rwanda and Uganda. The war eventually drew in dozens of belligerents and resulted in the deaths of millions of Africans. This “First African World War”—like the First European World War—swiftly gave rise to a more destructive “Second African World War.” Although this second war, commonly called the Second Congo War, officially ended in 2003, its effects continue to ravage the region. Militants from neighboring countries, such as the Ugandese Lord’s Resistance Army, have exploited the economic and political chaos in Congo. Moreover, the treaty that nominally ended the war failed to prevent the spread of ethnic conflict throughout the newly declared Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), especially in its eastern regions (see Eichstaedt, 2011).

As the Belgians recognized during their century-long colonization of Congo, Central Africa has immense natural resource wealth. In the nineteenth century, Belgium was primarily interested in exploiting Congolese resources for the production of rubber and ivory. However, as time went on the vastness and diversity of Congo’s natural wealth became clearer and the Belgians expanded their exploitation of Congolese land and labor. They found that Congo was not only rich in timber, oil, diamonds, and gas, but also in rare earth minerals and precious metals. In fact, Congolese land possesses more than thirty percent of the world’s diamonds, leading many critics to reflect on the horrors of the “blood diamond” trade. But Congo’s most unique possession can be found in its reserves of key electronics components: the DRC is one of the world’s main sources of the “three Ts” (tin, tungsten, and tantalum), and it holds ten percent of the world’s copper, more than sixty percent of its cobalt (Kara, 2018), and seventy percent of its coltan—all of which are key components of digital technology and their highly coveted lithium-ion batteries. As Todd C. Frankel puts it, “Smartphones would not fit in pockets without [these batteries]. Laptops would not fit on laps. Electric vehicles would be impractical. In many ways, the current Silicon Valley gold rush—from mobile devices to driverless cars—is built on the power of lithium-ion batteries” (Frankel, 2016). Congolese mineral wealth, in other words, provides an essential condition for the production of digital media and the maintenance of digital lifestyles.

In the 1990s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank restructured the Congolese economy, forcing the government to privatize its mining industry. Not only did this reopen the door to foreign private exploitation of the Congo’s mineral wealth, but it also exacerbated local battles over mines and other prized territory. For decades, war profiteers and militants have battled over the natural resources in Eastern Congo. More than 250 local militias, and armed forces from fourteen foreign countries, are currently battling over mines in Congo’s five easternmost provinces. This conflict, which has resulted in the deaths of at least six million people—and which has displaced another seven million—is fueled by the natural resource market. These armed forces constantly vie for control of the territories where these “conflict minerals” are mined, as the mines provide a massive source of revenue that allows for the acquisition of more weapons, more soldiers, and more political influence. The cycle of conflict thus fuels itself, as armed groups juggle control of the mines and use the proceeds to carry out future attacks. Hence, while these natural resources could be used to pull Congo out of its extreme poverty—the DRC currently ranks 179 out of 191 on the Human Development Index, leaving more than seventy percent of its population to exist on less than $1.90 per day (United Nations Environment Programme, 2022)—the profits are instead used by militants to fund their attacks on opposing factions of the Congolese population. Thus, despite its tremendous economic and political promise—after all, Kinshasa, which is the capital of the DCR, is the most populous city in all of Africa—Congo has spectacularly failed to live up to its potential to become “the Saudi Arabia of the electric vehicle age” (Mitchell, 2022). 

While this supply chain starts in the mines of the DRC—where workers, many of whom are children, are lucky to earn about sixty cents a day—it runs through a convoluted corporate whitewashing process that enriches a select group of Chinese, Middle Eastern, and European middlemen. The minerals are then typically shipped to China, where they are refined before being sold to electronics manufacturers throughout the globe. Cobalt, for example, is an essential ingredient used in digital technology. Cobalt is the most expensive component inside lithium-ion batteries, and all devices with a rechargeable battery contain it. For example, smartphones contain five to ten grams of cobalt, laptops contain about an ounce, and electric cars contain ten to twenty pounds (Frankel, 2016). Hence, in 2022, several families of Congolese children who were maimed or killed in cobalt mining incidents filed a lawsuit against the reigning kings of digital capitalism: Apple, Alphabet/Google, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla.

The lawsuit alleged that these digital corporations knowingly profited from child labor and brutally exploitative conditions. Siddarth Kara, an activist exposing conditions in the DRC mines who participated in the lawsuit, observed: “In field trips to mines in the DRC I witnessed staggering inequality, pain and misery at the bottom of a supply chain that we are all connected to through the devices we use every day” (Kelly, 2019). Siddharth laid the blame for this exploitation at the feet of the digital device market, tying it to skyrocketing global demand for phones, game consoles, tablets, smart systems, and related media technologies. Indeed, between 2014 and 2020, the global demand for cobalt increased sixfold, primarily because of increased demand for lithium-ion batteries, which have been widely promoted as a “green” alternative to lead-acid batteries (Kelly, 2019). Despite this growing demand, and despite a growing general awareness of the exploitation in which these companies are complicit, in 2024 the families’ lawsuit was thrown out by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. And despite coordinated public relations efforts waged to console consumers, recent investigations indicate that these corporations have avoided taking substantive measures to mitigate their complicity in the ongoing cobalt war in the DRC (Frankel, 2016). Naturally, digital corporations profit from the chaotic atmosphere surrounding the conflict: the gap in governance and regulation allows for levels of worker exploitation potentially unmatched in any other place in the world. The chaos on the ground in the DRC also obscures supply chains, allowing corporations and their middlemen to whitewash their participation in the cobalt market (and claim that their products are “conflict free” (Wexler, 2024), a position that also helps them skirt a 2010 U.S. law aimed at curbing corporations’ use of conflict minerals) (see Frankel, 2016).

The coltan mines of eastern Congo also fuel a similar cycle of resource war. In November 2022, the pro-Tutsi Congolese Revolutionary Army, also called the March 23 Movement, or M23, launched an insurrection in Congo’s North Kivu province. Over the next several years, M23 would invade and occupy several vital towns in North Kivu, including its capital and largest city, Goma. One of the insurrection’s goals is the capture of North Kivu’s mining towns: for example, Rubaya, a coltan mining town, was captured in early 2022. DRC troops fled the area after M23 soldiers overwhelmed the town and forced a withdrawal, immediately occupying the mines. A local lawmaker, Juvenal Munubo, lashed out at the militants after their capture of the city: “M23’s capture of the Rubaya mining site proves economic motives on the side of the aggressors” (Mulegwa, 2023), he said, emphasizing the economic motivation that warring factions have to occupy mining towns.

These economic motives set off a new cycle of violence in January 2025, when M23 occupied Minova, a town on the eastern fringes of South Kivu province. Another Congolese mineral hub, the mountains around Minova are stocked with tantalite and other minerals. Tantalite, like cobalt, has diverse applications in digital technology, particularly when it is used to produce tantalum and niobium. Tantalum is a key component in the production of electrolytic capacitors, which are found in the electronic circuits of various media technologies (including cell phones, laptops, cameras, and even incandescent light bulbs). Niobium, too, is a vital component for digital technology and is widely used in digitally sophisticated optical media like MRI machines. Both of these coltan derivatives, in fact, are considered by the U.S. and other Western countries to be “technology-critical elements” (or “energy critical elements”), a subset of minerals that is used in key emerging technologies and is recognized as being essential for national security and independence.

In the face of the DRC’s instability, the U.S. has attempted to secure its supply of these technology-critical elements by bankrolling African shipping networks. The Lobito Corridor, for example, is a postcolonial infrastructure project developed under the auspices of the G7. By developing a railway leading from the DRC’s mines to Atlantic ports in Angola, the U.S. and its allies hope “to lower the logistics costs and carbon footprint for exporting metals, agricultural goods, and other products as well as for future development of any mineral discoveries” (European Commission, 2023). Under the familiar guise of regional development and green investment, the West is attempting to outmaneuver China’s grip on African infrastructure and secure the constant supply of technology-critical elements to markets in Europe and the United States. A former Heritage Foundation policy analyst, Thomas Sheehy, emphasized how the U.S. and China have turned the DRC into a battlefield on which they fight over access to technology-critical elements. According to Sheehy, media security is national security:

And there’s all elements of national security, and certainly all our technologies, our electronics, which are so essential to our defense, many of those inputs are sourced in Africa… [i]nto airplane, jet fighter airframes, and in weaponry and so forth. So, it’s the full range in the modern economy, nothing works, without these critical minerals… And so, Africa is seen as a continent, as a place where we can start very slowly to move away from our over dependence on China for critical minerals (Sheehy, 2024).

For Sheehy, Congo is a key flashpoint in the U.S.’s long-term geopolitical struggle against China. He adds the obvious point that “our technologies, our electronics” are not just central to the consumer market: they are, perhaps most importantly, crucial to the defense sector and national security (Sheehy, 2024). The wars in Congo, therefore, which have killed and displaced more people than any conflict since the Second World War, are simply one flashpoint in the overarching geopolitical war between the U.S. and China. And at this stage, one of the key battles is shaping up over digital media.

Conclusion

In this paper, we analyzed a few cases of how media technology has driven factors like military logistics, territory occupation, and resource extraction. We offered a different account from that of Kittler, who examines how dependence upon media determines the conditions of warfare in a recursive fashion. Kittler’s narrative states that the greater the dependence upon media systems to conduct warfare, the greater the necessity to create more sophisticated logistical schemes and supply chains for the raw materials and production facilities necessary to maintain the very media systems used to create and support the ever more elaborate logistical systems (and so on). While it is obvious that any modern military has been dependent upon an ample supply of fossil fuels (mainly coal and oil) to power u-boat attacks, blitzkriegs, and air raids, it isn’t quite as obvious that access to pulp, plutonium, or cobalt would dictate the potential for military dominance. For instance, the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos depended upon the rapid extraction and refining of uranium and plutonium at distant facilities. The very limited availability of these raw materials dictated both the design of the actual bombs as well as the fact that two styles of bomb were developed because there was only enough plutonium to build one test bomb and “Fat Man,” and only enough uranium to build a single bomb, “Little Boy,” whose technology had gone through no test when on August 6, 1945 it was exploded over Hiroshima. Limiting access to refined plutonium and uranium remains the primary means of dictating which nations can produce nuclear weapons, as the Israeli and US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025 highlights.

In sum, resource provision and resource security are key drivers of military conflict. Although the centrality of media technology to military communications is no secret, military struggles over media have been largely overlooked. Battles over paper factories, undersea cables, and coltan mines do not illustrate the importance of securing the chain of command; instead, they demonstrate media technologies’ roles as “technology critical elements” which must be fought for, secured, and protected. This has proven true in regional conflicts, world wars, and current struggles for geopolitical supremacy. As digital technology’s demand continues to soar—both in the consumer and military spheres—these struggles will only intensify. From cables to cobalt, and from pulp to plutonium—if media determine our situation (à la Kittler), it seems clear that media conflict determines our wars, as well.

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Jeremy Packer is Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto.  His research investigates technology as it relates to militarization, automation, and political control. His two most recent books are Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Duke UP 2020) with Joshua Reeves and the multi-authored polygraph Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (Minnesota UP 2023) with Paula Nuñez de Villavicencio, Alexander Monea, Kathleen Oswald, Kate Maddalena and Joshua Reeves.

Email: jeremy.packer@utoronto.ca

Joshua Reeves is a Professor of Communication at Oregon State University. He is the author of three books: Prison House of the Circuit (2023), Killer Apps (2020), and Citizen Spies (2017). His recent work has appeared in places like Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, and Theory & Event. He recently finished a new book project, tentatively titled Vital Signs: Cultural Techniques of the Undead, which is coauthored with Ethan Stoneman. 

Email: joshua.reeves@oregonstate.edu

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 3/2/2025
Date of original decision: 25/3/2025
Revised article submitted: 18/4/2025
Article accepted: 18/4/2025