Late modern war is increasingly fought in the borderlands, by which I mean to emphasize both conflicts in the shatter-zones of former empires and a blurring of the conceptual borders of war itself. In the wars fought by the United States and its allies in the early twenty-first century, models of late modern war bleed into one another. A primary purpose of this presentation is to explore this entanglements in the global borderlands. Close attention is paid to the combination of war from a distance – the use of drones as weapons systems – with the invasive intimacy of contemporary counterinsurgency; to the hybridization of military and intelligence operations through the pursuit of undeclared "shadow wars" in the borderlands; to the production of war economies at the intersection of a highly visible, nominally legitimate global economy with the circuits of a "shadow globalization", and to the imminent death of the figure of the civilian who is transformed into insurgent/terrorist or buried as collateral damage. All of these depend on particular performances that produce in parallel the space of the target; the space of the alien other; and the space of the exception.