527 José Miguel Alía Plana Rules of engagement and governance of agramante’s camp with the enemy,49 the operating environment of a unit in peace is predictable, but not so in war.50 In this, all is supposition, confusion, divination, Wellington confessed to having spent his life trying to figure out what was on the other side of the hill.51 The ROEs are a map, the tale of an event that we expect will come about (and that would determine the application of one ROE or another) that cannot replace the event per se, or failure would be inevitable. If the ROEs provide for reactions with regard to unreal acts, if they contradict reality, the actor will then confuse map with territory, the ROE language will be inexact and the operation will fail. Examples are the ROEs dictated for the “Multinational Force” in Lebanon in the eighties, or UNPROFOR in the nineties, with the events of Srebrenica as a result. In these circumstances, they may even be detrimental for the units concerned. MACHINE-LIKE ASSEMBLIES AND “Z EFFECT” We already have the machines, with society producing the constructs of their expansion: connection, global reality, machine-like assembly. Any such union is an enunciative issue, given that the issue (enunciation) of orders is one of the principal activities assigned to specific machines which we shall describe as “decision-making” (in the case of armies, these would be: senior command, commanders, those politically responsible, aided by other machines lending support to the decision, the Chiefs of Staff). They are included in the knowledge/power strategies of the many technologies relating to the body, in the writings of Foucault. They explain his theory of control and domination: combat, the use of force, the scale of force; they discipline the spaces; arms, bodies, pain, courage, honour, death and responsibility. How are these machine-like devices born? There is a military machine that governs and directs others, rather like the nervous system of a living being. We have just mentioned the strategies of knowledge/power; this is the area in which we operate in order to find the Command and Control” or C2system. The ROEs form part of this; they are one of the driving forces of the powers of enunciation and transformation with which the subordinate units in an operation are directed and coordinated.52 They act on 49 FM 6-0, Command and Control, Final Draft, August 2000, p. 1-14, in http://content.dcmsnet. org/Courses_ARMY/CAS3/Fd114-1/Lesson/fm6-0.pdf. 50 RELLY, Michael S. The Rules of Engagement in the Conduct of Special Operations (Thesis). Monterey: Naval Postgraduate School, 1995, p. 35. 51 HART, Liddell. Strategy. New York: Praeger, 1968, p. 21. 52 EJÉRCITO DE TIERRA. Empleo de la Fuerza Tterrestre (DO1-001). Madrid: Army Technical Services Directorate, 1996; and ALBERTS, David S.; and HAYES, Richard E. Understanding http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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