Digital future-making in the military

This chapter explores digital future-making in the military context through the case of the Dutch Army’s Robots and Autonomous Systems (RAS) unit. Soldiers in this unit experimented with emerging digital technologies such as drones and semi-autonomous vehicles, focusing particularly on human–machine collaboration. Building on a four-month ethnographic study, this chapter examines the interplay between strategic visions, operational realities, and soldiers’ experiences of meaning and purpose. The chapter reveals a significant discrepancy between the utopian narratives of military digital futures and the lived experiences of soldiers. While private businesses and commanders co-produced military digital futures through imaginaries that assume technological digital advancements are necessary, desirable, and inevitable, infantry soldiers at the operational level often felt disillusioned when their expectations and experiences did not align with these imaginaries. Using the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries and digital futures anthropology, this study provides a deeper understanding of how digital futures in the military are imagined, materialised, and institutionalised in practice.