Presentation short abstract

Biomimicry, the imitation of biological forms and behaviors, has emerged as the underlying logic of contemporary military innovation. This paper argues that biomimicry in weapons systems operates as a modality of ontological warfare, recasting nature as a terrain of ambient and permanent violence.

Presentation long abstract

Biomimicry, the imitation of biological forms and behaviors in technological design, has emerged as the underlying logic of contemporary military innovation. Far from a benign aesthetic choice or efficiency strategy, biomimetic design in weapons systems functions as a form of ontological warfare. This paper argues these forms of militarized biomimicry operate as modalities of perpetual counterinsurgency, recasting nature itself as a terrain of ambient surveillance and lethality.

By blurring distinctions between civilian and combatant, life and death, organism and machine, biomimetic drones are more than mere technologies embedded in environments; they become indistinguishable from them. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the deterritorializing war machine alongside a genealogy of counterinsurgency as prevailing U.S. military doctrine, this paper argues that biomimicry represents the production of a militarized nature that has intensified under the Global War on Terror. Weapons modeled after nature extend this logic into a new ecological register, creating an environment of perceptual instability where every being is enrolled in an all-pervasive war that no longer needs to be declared.

This paper sketches a conceptual and material history of militarized biomimicry through the close reading of documents and media surrounding two Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded biomimetic drone programs: OFFSET and Manta Ray. These cases illustrate how biomimetic weapons perform governance while shrouding machines of war in the aesthetics of ecological harmony. Under this paradigm, biomimetic drones enact an ontological reconfiguration of nature into a cyborg ecology of permanent militarization, where violence is constitutive rather than exceptional.