Military Muzak: Cold War Spectra and the Twenty-First-Century Real-Time Battlefield

The real-time battlefield is a military goal to achieve full-spectrum dominance of a war zone using a plethora of real-time telecommunications technologies. These technologies have a long history of military and corporate collaborative development in terms of controlling aural and visual spectra. In the process, the achievement of real-time communications provides supposed advantages for battlefield combatants by having time overcome space. The technological realization of this strategy has profound effects on individual and collective agency as well as geopolitical decisions. To chart some of this history and its effects on the present military and civilian spheres, this article uses the technologies that helped establish Muzak as a US cultural product with global reach. This unusual example of telecommunications technological prowess also has helped construct the real-time battlefield.