Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defense fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

All this is very straightforward, and hardly a novel development in the evolution of warfare. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill’s seemingly instinctive understanding of the technology meant that Britain famously had 22 “Chain Home” early-warning radars along its southern and eastern coasts. Without them, RAF fighter pilots would have had to rely on chance encounters with German aircraft, and could not possibly have resisted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

From there, the bombing of Germany itself was soon enabled by the war’s greatest British invention: the “cavity magnetron” that made airborne radars effective. Herman Göring, the monstrous but highly intelligent head of the Luftwaffe, quickly recognized it as a decisive technological advance, one condemning German bombers to defeat. That is when he stopped opposing the very first “stand-off” weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles, launched from the Continent, the first fiendishly difficult to stop and the second unstoppable without surface-to-air missiles.

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Yet unlike Britain in the Forties, Iran today has no effective radar detection or tracking network. Its badly outdated radars are easily deceived by the advanced electronic countermeasures installed in every US combat aircraft. Otherwise, they are simply destroyed by anti-radiation missiles or blinded with barrage jamming.

Moreover, even if US aircraft arriving to bomb Iran were somehow detected and tracked, the Islamic Republic has no effective way of shooting them down. Its combat aircraft are badly outdated, encompassing, among other things, some ancient Chinese fighters; French Mirages flown from Iraq on the eve of the 1991 war; and a number of highly celebrated but in fact grotesque homemade modifications of the US F-5, which entered service half a century ago. Iran does, perhaps, still have a few once-powerful F-14 Tomcats — but none of these aircraft could survive an encounter with the US Air Force’s powerful F-15 fighter-bombers.

Nor can Iran’s forces shoot down US aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Its few extremely old US-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles are thoroughly outdated, and their wiring is seemingly very palatable to rats. Iran also has some Russian anti-aircraft missiles, acquired recently but dating back to Soviet times. They were well-engineered during the Cold War and would potentially be very capable even now — if, that is, they had not long since been left behind by US and Israeli electronic countermeasures. This crippling shortcoming also applies to Iranian attempts to update Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles, and to efforts to develop homegrown alternatives. That leaves so-called “MANPADS”: small, shoulder-launched missiles, and which can sometimes work at extremely short range.

Though they are greatly celebrated by the regime as colossal technological achievements, Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles, and the rest of its air defenses, are so ineffectual that despite flying several thousand sorties over the country, including right over Tehran, the US has lost only two aircraft, both to Russian-made MANPADS. The Israeli air force, for its part, has lost no manned aircraft whatsoever. It did admittedly lose a Hermes 900 unmanned reconnaissance drone — promptly recovered and publicly displayed in Tehran amid self-congratulatory festivities from the Revolutionary Guards, which only revealed their inability to defend the country against the attacks they had provoked.

The broad meaning of all these details is easily summarized: because of Iran’s backward air defenses, there was no real need to use scarce and expensive “stand-off” weapons to target the country. Normal gravity bombs with cheap guidance kits would have been sufficient to do the job — with the notable exception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s deep-underground command headquarters. For that, Israel relied on the world’s most advanced air-launched weapon, its own Blue Sparrow, which flies straight up through the atmosphere before descending to its target with extreme precision and tremendous kinetic force.

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Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

The risks of flying over Iran are evidently so low that they are almost comparable to the everyday risks that ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines, some of which I could not avoid using on a regular basis to reach my Amazonian ranch (not without some trepidation, amid habitual delays, frequent cancellations, and several very hard landings, only one of which ended in a veritable crash).

Nor is the drastic decline in the tolerance of combat risks by the Pentagon chiefs — and even more by the White House — limited to the US Air Force. From the start of the current round of fighting, at least 4,000 82nd Airborne troops, and some 6,000 Marines, arrived at American bases in the Gulf. They could have physically secured the desert islands and islets in the Persian Gulf all the way through the Straits of Hormuz, preventing expedient mine-laying and rocket attacks by Revolutionary Guards. They represent the Islamic Republic’s only remaining threats to the traffic of oil tankers, liquified natural-gas vessels and fertilizer bulk-carriers that affect the world economy, because every one of Iran’s warships and submarines were sunk when the conflict began.

In the event, the White House was so frightened by the possibility of even minimal combat casualties that it made no attempt to keep the Gulf secure and the Straits open, thus allowing Iran to claim victory even to this day. To an extent, then, we should be thankful for the Air Force’s reliance on expensive stand-off weapons: at least it prevented the White House from imposing some abrupt and unilateral ceasefire, merely because a handful of pilots were lost.

It might be tempting to attribute America’s drastic post-heroic turn, in which it was preceded long ago by almost all its Nato allies, to Donald Trump’s dismal performance as a war leader.

To begin with, he refused to explain why the war had to be fought, even in a few grammatical phrases read before the TV cameras. From there, he abruptly accepted a ceasefire justified by a very dubious “memorandum of understanding”, concocted by his war-averse and frankly isolationist vice president; his son-in-law; his favorite wheeler-dealer Steve Witkoff; and Pakistan’s practiced deceivers, who rightly view Americans as easy marks, having obtained billions in aid to allow US trucks to reach Afghanistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban.

Then Trump abruptly reverted to fighting, again without any explanation. Again, that would have required the immense sacrifice of reading four or five grammatical phases before the TV cameras. But, most unfortunately, America’s “post-heroic” turn cannot be blamed on the easiest target; if it were really all Trump’s fault, I could not have predicted that historic transformation in a series of lengthy Foreign Affairs articles decades ago.

After excluding any straightforward political explanations, and ruling out a sudden upsurge of pacifism — that perfectly coherent humanistic creed which has never prevented a single war — I was left with biology: specifically the fall in female fertility, which had already declined to 2.2 in 1994 and is now down to 1.57, well below the 2.1 replacement level.

That, in turn, means that very few families now have more than one boy, or girl for that matter, making each one too precious to sacrifice. In case anyone is in a hurry to move on to other things, viewing the refusal to fight wars as a solution rather than a problem, there is that other effect of the baby shortage: the biological decrepitude of the entire nation as it relentlessly ages. That, it goes without saying, is a challenge that no amount of Tomahawks can correct, and which our rulers absolutely refuse to address.

Two days earlier, then-president Felipe Calderón announced the deployment of 6,500 soldiers and federal police in an offensive called Operation Michoacán. The following January, an additional 3,300 troops would carry out Operation Tijuana. It gradually became a national mobilization with the bulk of the Mexican army along with marines and paramilitary federal police taking on narcos. Soon after, President George W. Bush held talks with Calderón. By 2008, Washington was bankrolling the new Mérida Initiative, a pan-American campaign to take on drug traffickers.

“New pages of glory will be written. I instruct you to persevere until glory is achieved,” Calderón told soldiers in February 2007. “We will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.” These were stark martial terms. In another event, Calderón addressed troops wearing an army jacket and cap in a base on Michoacán, unusual attire for a Mexican president.

Over 18 years later, the Mexican army is still on the streets fighting cartels, which have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of rackets including extortion, human smuggling and oil theft. During this time, Mexico has suffered about half a million total homicides (Mexico’s statistics institute counts 486,000 between 2007 and 2024). Cartels and the security forces fighting them, which have also committed massacres, could be responsible for almost two thirds of that number. Cartel sicarios — hitmen — not only wield Kalashnikovs and 50 cals (mostly from the United States), but build home-made fighting vehicles, or “monsters”, armored drones and improvised landmines. Self-defense militias, or auto defensas, have risen up as a third force, though they can often just be narcos in disguise. With 130,000 people disappeared, and mass graves in cow fields and ranches, mothers join brigades to search for their lost children, while citizens march vainly for peace.

Meanwhile, foreign mercenaries are increasingly involved on the side of the cartels. They have come from various countries, including the United States, but Colombian veterans are especially sought after, with their combat experience and with specialist snipers and drone operators.

And then there’s Trump. He has designated various cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and US special forces are currently training Mexican soldiers. He has also threatened US attacks on cartel targets in Mexico, and US forces have blown up boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

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While this bloody mess in Mexico has claimed more victims than some traditional wars, there is still disagreement over how we should understand this conflict, or even name it. This isn’t just an academic debate. Recognizing an armed conflict has legal implications for the Mexican government. It’s also bad publicity.

When the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London classified Mexico as the second deadliest armed conflict in the world in 2017, Mexico’s foreign office issued an irate response. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an “(non-international) armed conflict” in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect.”

But beyond what is politically convenient for Mexico, there are other factors making the Mexican labyrinth tricky to frame. Much of the country appears largely peaceful despite the bloodshed, and even when cartels control territory it’s as a shadow power rather than a full takeover. And as there are comparable problems of organized crime and militarized law enforcement across Latin America, should we also talk about armed conflicts in Brazil, Honduras and now Ecuador?

So how can we understand this period of violence, which I now think is best referred to as the Mexican Cartel Wars? We need to look at when it really began, who the sides involved are, and, to offer some hope, when it may finally end.

I join some other writers in describing the Mexican Cartel Wars as a form of hybrid armed conflict, somewhere between crime and war. This crime war is far less lethal than international conflicts like the Second World War, and nor does it reach the threshold of traditional civil wars, like the Spanish, US or Salvadoran, in terms of intensity or politics. There aren’t two sides with clear leaders and ideologies fighting for dominance of the central state. Yet there is endemic organized violence, which claims thousands of lives per year. As such, it could be compared to periods of violence elsewhere, which, though brutal, did not descend into full-scale civil wars. These include the Colombian conflict, the civil conflict in the Philippines, the Chinese warlord era, the Haitian crisis and, albeit on a smaller scale, the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

The Mexican Cartel Wars involve a plethora of criminal kingpins, death squads and self-defense militias, as well as police, soldiers and marines. All these are entwined with the cartels and fight among themselves. Violence shifts around the country in a series of distinct but interconnected conflicts, with operatives, money and techniques (from beheading to drones) flowing between them.

The Geneva Conventions haven’t caught up with the language and laws for this type of hybrid conflict. I wouldn’t argue that the Mexican government has to treat sicarios like prisoners of war, but it still has to figure out a strategy for peace.

Cartels are at the heart of this conflict, yet they are complex and evolving organisms. Essentially, they are hierarchical networks of paramilitary organized crime. Profits from drugs and a range of rackets drive the violence. Cartels include the biggest mobs, Jalisco and Sinaloa, and powerful regional players, like the Gulf and Northeast cartels, as well as more local but still brutal outfits like the Guerreros Unidos, which we could call cartelitos.

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When Calderón launched his offensive in 2006, he was reacting to rising cartel violence, especially in his home state of Michoacán. But fighting between drug traffickers and the involvement of the Mexican army in anti-drug operations go back decades. The first US Customs probe into Mexican opium traffickers was in 1916. The Mexican government mobilized soldiers against poppy growers in Sinaloa in the Forties, and then more seriously in the Seventies in what it called Operation Condor (which was also the name of a CIA op against Leftists across Latin America).

Colombian traffickers were dubbed the Medellín Cartel from about 1980, and the Guadalajara Cartel reached its zenith in 1985 (though, as the academic Carlos Pérez Ricart writes, people didn’t refer to it as that until later). The Tijuana Cartel pioneered narco terror in the Nineties, and army defectors in the Zetas seriously upped the game with paramilitary hit squads in the 2000s, leading to Calderón’s offensive.

Yet the sheer quantity of Mexican troops on the streets, and the severity of cartel violence, reached new heights under Calderón. We could see the period from the Nineties to 2006 as a proto-phase of cartel battles: with the real Mexican Cartel Wars unleashed after the military offensive.

Another detail is that after Calderón kicked off the crackdown, murders in Mexico actually dipped, before going up sharply in 2008 and then exploding in 2010. It’s unfair to blame Calderón entirely for the cartel wars, but he did throw oil onto the fire, as cartels escalated their brutal battle tactics and Mexican soldiers carried out murders themselves. From 2010 onward, Mexico suffered the massacres and mass graves that have characterized the conflict.

A tricky but central question is how many murders are actually related to cartels, as opposed to just bar fights or “passion” killings. The truth is we can’t know for sure: about 90% of homicides are never solved. Yet there are clues.

Calderón created a unit with members of the army, police and Mexico’s intelligence agency (CISEN) to estimate how many deaths were cartel-related. Alejandro Hope, who was then at CISEN, described to me how they looked for signs of cartel activity, from beheadings to the use of grenades and AK-47s. They also included killings confirmed by soldiers.

The count varies by year, but in both 2010 and 2011 cartel-related violence represented close to 60% of all homicides. If you extrapolate that over all homicides since 2006, it would be about 300,000 deaths. That is a colossal figure. Over these last two decades, Mexico has been a genuine bloodbath.

Is there a way to end the Mexican Cartel Wars? One challenge is that it’s not like a regular war where governments or political factions come to the table and hammer out a peace deal. We have also learned that taking out kingpins, like El Chapo and El Mayo, doesn’t stop it. Cartels are many-headed hydra, and when you cut off a head, several more vicious ones grow in its place.

Some have called to send the army back to the barracks. This doesn’t finish the fight either, as cartels keep on battling amongst themselves. Presidents have pulled troops out of various cities only to send them back when violence explodes.

But no conflict goes on forever. About 2010, I heard a CISEN officer make the prediction it would be a 30-year war. There is no exact science to that, but it rings true to me: a full generation of killing before things calm down. Or until the murders go back to the level of 2006, with 10,000 homicides or fewer in a year.

There needs to be a combination of factors to reach this. More effective law enforcement in Mexico is crucial, however that is achieved. Trump’s idea of bombing cartels is certainly a deterrent, though it could put prices up, which encourages others to get in the business. And Trump hasn’t addressed US drug demand; perhaps in the future this will finally go down. Changing demographics in Mexico may be key too: as the birth rate falls, there will be fewer youths to recruit as sicarios. Increased living standards could also reduce the temptation of becoming a cartel killer.

There are other worries though. Back in 1998, Charles Bowden wrote Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future, illustrating the violence on the US-Mexico border. In retrospect, the title was prescient about the bloodshed that awaited Mexico in the 21st century. But has Mexico over the last two decades itself been a laboratory for a new style of warfare? And if that is the case, could this type of hybrid armed conflict find new environments to nestle in? With organized crime moving easily over borders, economic stagnation and the power of many states eroding, I fear it will.

My visit was shrouded in secrecy. No one was to know where I was going. So we met beside a nondescript bank in Kyiv to ensure the taxi driver did not discover our destination. I was led along a cluster of ordinary streets filled with residential blocks, offices and shops — and sharply told to stop my questions when we passed a woman walking her dog. Then, suddenly, we ducked down into a basement and I was ushered through a heavy door.

I found myself in a clandestine white-walled workshop cluttered with shelves of tools, boxes of machine parts and spools of wire. Here, a handful of men in their 20s and 30s were making some of the most sophisticated military drones on earth.  The future of warfare was being built before my eyes.

A Buntar 3 drone was there on a table with its wings removed. It looked like a big model aircraft, with its gray fuselage and tail propeller. But these craft, almost four meters long, are highly complex machines that cost up to $100,000 each. They take off and land vertically using four wing-mounted rotor blades before flying like conventional aircraft with a range of 80 kilometers. They can remain airborne for more than three hours. The carbon-fiber body contains a $30,000 camera with thermal imaging capabilities to detect enemy positions day or night. This is backed up with sophisticated software created from combat experience that integrates tools to monitor altitude, weather and terrain with the Delta battle management platform used by Ukrainian forces, which links to artificial intelligence systems.

There were 31 small stickers on its fuselage — 23 black ones marking its test flights and 8 red ones denoting combat missions on the frontline of the grim war despoiling the biggest country in Europe. Bohdan Sas, the firm’s 26-year-old co-founder, showed me around a rabbit-warren of rooms, pointing out carbon fiber being painstakingly layered, compressed in vacuum packs and spray-painted, explaining how they had created specialist software to speed and simplify military operations.

Bohdan with a Buntar 3 drone which can cost up to $100,000. Photo: Ian Birrell.

Welcome to the weapons factory of the future. For this is not just the sort of place where the war in Ukraine might be lost or won. These fast-evolving drones are changing the way that battles are now fought the world over. “In places like this, we are pushing the boundaries of warfare and reconnaissance,” says Sas, who started his career in technology as a teenager linking dumbbells to fitness trackers. “Because of the war, both Russia and Ukraine have developed their drone technology incredibly quickly.”

Buntar Aerospace — set up two years ago, spread across several locations and also making cheaper reconnaissance craft — is one of about 250 such drone-makers that have sprung up across Ukraine. Some are buried like this one in basements, others are located in smart IT office hubs or crumbling former Soviet factories. Together they reveal how the art of war is evolving with amazing rapidity in this country as unmanned land, air and sea vehicles reshape 21st-century combat. Innovative firms and creative brains are disrupting the defense industry in a world where even homemade drones can destroy expensive military aircraft, ships and tanks. “Right now there are only two countries in the world that really know how to fight this new type of war — Russia and Ukraine,” says Sas. And as I was told by several Ukrainian experts — from defense analysts through to frontline drone operators — this should be causing grave concern in Europe.

The new military age dawned at the end of 2020 in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, fought between Armenia and Azerbaijan, when waves of drones turned the tide of the battle in a mountainous region that traditionally favored defenders. The fighting lasted just 44 days — unlike the previous conflict between these two former Soviet republics that lasted six years — and resulted in decisive victory for Azerbaijan. Its drones, bought from Israel and Turkey, destroyed air defense systems, armored vehicles and artillery forces on the ground. They provided speed and intelligence with control and communications systems that hoovered up data and helped determine targets at lightning speed.

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Ukraine and Russia began using drones for intelligence and targeting after the Kremlin’s initial invasion of Crimea, with Russia developing an initial lead through exploiting Israeli technology. But Ukraine had also invested in Turkey’s Bayraktar drones and used them to great effect in repelling the mechanized Russian forces attempting to seize Kyiv three years ago. Yet as one Ukrainian drone operator told me last week, comparing the craft from 2022 — such as one that buzzed me in the Donbas trenches days before Moscow’s full-scale invasion — with those dominating today’s battlefield is “like comparing rocket science with the horse and cart.”

For Ukraine, necessity has been the mother of invention. As it fights for its survival, the nation has become a world leader in drone manufacture and warfare by exploiting previous strength in defense manufacturing, engineering and technology. “Ukraine has now started to be the creator of a new military doctrine,” says Mykhailo Samus, a military analyst and new generation warfare expert who argues that this arose from a need to deploy asymmetrical tactics against a much bigger foe. “We are fighting drone-centric warfare with drones now conducting different roles including first as the intelligence to find clear coordinates of the enemy, then of course as the weapon itself but also as the command and control system. So if you look at drones, they are weapons that can find and destroy.

Samus points out that the “kill cycle’” — the time it takes between obtaining coordinates of an enemy position, transferring this information to command and control, then taking the decision to fire a missile to destroy a target — can now be just a couple of seconds. This can be devastatingly effective and far less cumbersome than the old methods of battle.

So while all the tanks and trenches we see on news reports are eerily redolent of previous wars, this conflict offers a glimpse into a future of highly automated fighting. “This new doctrine changes all our understanding of military tactics”’ says Samus. “So it’s very important to have our own European understanding of this future, the battlefield future of war. This is the new reality.”

Yet the frequencies used to control drones and send back footage often change weekly in cat and mouse games with enemy-jamming systems — something impossible on many traditional military systems or civilian drones. So both sides are in a constant race to keep up with their adversary’s advances. Nations at war, I am told by one Ukrainian official, must “innovate or die.”

In a war dominated by drones, electronic warfare is both critical and complex. Bear in mind that until recently, armed forces relied on a handful of jamming stations to throw a ring of protection around their frontline. Ukraine’s military had fewer than 100 such systems — and they relied on the standard 900 megahertz frequency typically used for civilian drone telemetry. But now battlefield drones can use frequency bands ranging from 100 to 12,000 megahertz. Different frequencies, however, require different signal generators and antennas to detect and jam them.

So the following day I visit an electronic warfare company helping to shape this new reality of warfare. Unwave, formed less than two years ago, has 100 staff inside an old factory in Kyiv region who are churning out thousands of jamming devices each month. Walking round the factory, I find small clusters of workers building an astonishing array of devices from sophisticated, multi-channel jammers designed for fixing onto armored vehicles, through to smaller backpack-carried systems and handheld devices to alert soldiers to nearby drones costing $300 each.

Tetiana at the electronic warfare factory. Photo: Ian Birrell.

“The idea is for every person on the frontline to have a device like this — it’s an absolute necessity, like having a helmet or gun,” says Taras, the firm’s product manager. “If you go into the dead zone there might be hundreds, maybe thousands, of drones flying overhead. Yet when we talk about this being a drone war, it’s really a war of frequencies. It’s about finding the frequencies and evading the frequencies.”

This felt like a more familiar factory set-up with men and women clad in blue overalls, some making metal antennas but others operating 3D printers or peering through microscopes at intricate electronic parts. They seem driven by similar motivation. Sergii is a burly former builder from a devastated border region. “It’s more than just work for me,” he tells me, choked as he tells of his pride in helping his nation and friends in the military. “It is not like going to work and getting some money — I’m helping those who defend us.” Tetiana, who is using a magnifying glass to check circuit boards placed in drone detectors, only joined the firm earlier this month. For her, it is personal with a brother fighting and friends of her husband killed by the Russians: “I wanted to do something useful. I love my country, I want to live here and I don’t want to leave.”

The mood of resigned self-sufficiency amid turbulent geo-politics is striking. Such is the agile desperation of this nation caught in an existential fight for survival, that this firm produces its own batteries to reduce reliance on China. I am shown classified projects being built in case critical support from the United States is lost. This firm is even manufacturing unmanned ground vehicles — flat-bodied with tracks and cameras — for de-mining, ferrying supplies and evacuating wounded. The boundaries of military technology are being pushed constantly — as Taras tells me: “This is far superior to what would have been around even two years ago. Much of this didn’t even exist then.”

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Military procurement systems — infamously slow, bureaucratic, corrupt and profligate — must also innovate to survive when a nation is under such assault. Brave 1, the state agency that helped foster the birth of Buntar Aerospace, boasts of assisting 3,500 innovations from 1,500 “teams” since its own creation two years ago to respond fast to military needs. It collates demands from the frontline, then uses competitions and hackathons along with monetary grants to meet them. Such an approach is both disruptive and necessary in today’s theater of war. “The period of life for a military system used to be maybe 30 or 40 years but now it is sometimes just three or four weeks before it’s taken over by another technology,” says Oleh Donets, who coordinates their links with Ukraine’s armed forces.

Ukraine is effectively crowd-sourcing frontline information to survive. And this method of invention has yielded some unexpected results, such as the development of interceptor drones to shoot down other drones. “It was like a crazy idea — drones to counter drones,” says Donets. They began with an ambition to destroy the low-cost Iranian Shahed that are now being mass-produced in Russia and used to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defense systems. After about nine months of working with a close-knit group of companies, however, they ended up developing devices that proved far more effective against Moscow’s reconnaissance drones — and are now shooting down about 1,000 a month of them.

Inside a weapons factory. Photo: Ian Birrell.

At the start of this war, soldiers were tinkering with racing drones, adding explosives or grenades and then trying to drop them onto Russian positions. By 2023, it was reported that 10,000 drones were being destroyed monthly as both sides ramped up production. Last year, Ukraine produced 2.2 million, from basic drones flying short distances to aircraft flying deep into Russia to target arms dumps, munitions factories and oil refineries. President Zelensky recently claimed their engineers have designed a drone now with a range of 3,000 kilometers, which could hit even locations in Siberia.

Their biggest success, though, has been at sea, where a $250,000 craft loaded with 500 kilograms of explosives has shown it can sink a $300-million warship bristling with weapons. Kyiv’s maritime drones managed to defeat Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, pride of Moscow’s navy, forcing it to retreat from its Crimea base. They hit 17 air and sea targets, totally destroying 15 of them — striking five ships, six patrol vessels, two landing craft, two helicopters and, earlier this month, shooting down two SU-30 fighter jets using Sidewinder missiles. This was a step change in combat: the first time a surface drone brought down a combat aircraft.

These sea drones — which entered service only two years ago — have been devastatingly effective, causing Russian losses valued at half a billion dollars. And Ukraine is proud of them. Last week in Kyiv, Lieutenant-General Kyrylo Budanov, their head of military intelligence, joined members of his secretive Group 13 special forces team to display the all-new Magura (Maritime Autonomous Guard Unmanned Robotic Apparatus) craft. Four models were on display: a ship “killer” capable of swarm synchronization; a kamikaze vessel able to carry high loads of explosive; and two equipped with missiles and machine guns. One speaker at this slick event — which felt like the launch of a glitzy sports car, rather than a new robot army— hailed the arrival of “a modern fleet of the 21st century” while another described their success as akin to “the parable of David and Goliath.”

Members of Group 13 were there, faces masked by dark glasses and black balaclavas, and I ask them about striking enemy targets. “It’s like hunting — it is very difficult,” says Xena, a female member of the team. The team’s commander — known by his call sign Thirteenth — concedes that it had been challenging to create a new type of military vessel. “Previously, there was no such experience anywhere, there was no place to draw information,” he says. “These things completely change the philosophy of defense. They are changing the nature of warfare. No one was prepared for such a turn of events. Now many countries in the world, including Great Britain, are very quickly thinking how to reformat their fleets because they have turned out to be very vulnerable.”

Group 13 with Thirteenth at front and Xena on right. Photo: Ian Birrell.

Ukraine simply cannot afford to be complacent in this field of battle. Russia is also finding new ways to harness military innovation and has proved effective at scaling up production as it shifts from its traditional top-down, monolithic approach in an economy retooled around war. The Kremlin has even introduced “drone studies” into classrooms to help produce the next generation of developers. It has taken a lead also in using fiber-optics — with filaments up to 40 kilometers long — to avoid jamming, showing how advances can be creative adaptation of existing technologies rather than innovative breakthroughs. As one Kyiv source tells me, “We shouldn’t underestimate them. They are changing, everything is changing.”

The rest of the world is watching, although largely left playing catch-up. In the United States, tech start-ups are seeking to similarly disrupt the huge defense sector with the invention of autonomous weapons, drone swarming and artificial intelligence. China, too, is investing heavily in such futuristic technologies — and is preparing to launch a high-altitude drone mother ship that can release 100 kamikaze craft. But where does this leave Europe? There is concern in Ukraine that it is failing to see the true threat posed by the Kremlin even as warfare is being so drastically transformed. One analyst tells me about meeting the head of a next-door nation’s navy at an annual defense conference. “Each time I ask him how many drones he has and he says they have three. That was maybe fine when he said it in 2022 — but not in 2023, let alone in 2025.”

Europe simply cannot afford to remain wedded to the old military technologies such as battleships and tanks, suddenly so vulnerable, or it risks becoming dangerously left behind. As I am told by Vadym Adamov, a 21-year-old drone specialist, it is impossible to imagine doing almost any tasks today on the battlefield without them. “We evacuate with drones. We are mining with drones. We are shooting with drones. We do everything with them. The only limit is your creativeness on how to use them.”

Thirteenth, the commander of Group 13. Photo: Ian Birrell.

He believes this is a disruptive revolution in defense that bears comparison with the advent of the Guttenberg Press in the 15th century, “when words were taken from the hands of mighty people into the hands of ordinary people”. He points to a project he assists called Victory Drones, which has produced thousands of craft by teaching civilians how to make them. “In two weeks you can learn to assemble a drone with parts you buy yourself,” says Adamov. “You send it to the military and for $300, you’ve got a drone that can destroy a tank. Most of the stuff comes from China — it’s like Lego for adults.”

This young soldier, 10 years old when Russia invaded Crimea to start the war in Ukraine and a veteran of three years in combat, has little memory of living in a country without conflict. “So for me it is almost routine. You do not expect everyone to obey international laws — we see that if you have a big army you can go in, take what you want. There are no moral values in this new world. Now if Russia marches into Europe they will be really successful because they have learned all the lessons of modern warfare.”

He has a warning for us in Europe. “The first Russian rocket that hits your capital opens up a portal into a different world. When you find yourselves in this new world — and there’s more and more chance you will find yourselves here — you will be looking back at doing nothing for three years of the Ukrainian war. When I go to Europe and say to people I’m in the military, they say ‘Oh I’m so sorry’. But I say I’m sorry because we are on the verge of the Third World War and I should be sorry for you since you don’t know how to kill people with drones.”

Who knows if he is right in his fears about a Third World War? But his nation certainly bears the bloody scars of Russian aggression. And perhaps the ultimate irony is that one day soon we might end up looking for help from Ukraine in fighting to defend ourselves in the coming robotic techno-wars.

Additional reporting by Kate Hatsenko

As Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968, McNamara introduced systems analysis into decision-making, asserting that war could be rationalized and won through quantitative management that would later shape much of the activity of the American government. Vietnam became his proving ground, with progress measured by tons of bombs dropped, roads cleared, or Viet Cong killed. If the numbers looked good, so too would the future.

Yet the press conference betrayed the fragility of his vision, which mistook legibility for understanding. Beneath the seductive statistics lay deeper truths that were resistant to data’s neat columns. The jungle might be penetrated by special forces or removed by Agent Orange, but the culture and politics that flowed through it remained elusive. America’s failure to quell these currents would ultimately cost it the war.

McNamara’s tenure in Vietnam stands as a cautionary tale for rationalist governance, which seeks mechanistic mastery while ignoring human ambiguity. In confusing the map with the territory, McNamara charted not victory but a deepening mire. His story encapsulates the perennial tension in governance between legibility and judgment, data and reality. It is a tension we see today in Donald Trump’s tariff program, which relies on a blunt economic formula being applied wholesale to scores of countries, irrespective of their particular relation to the US economy. It is also one we see in the work of DOGE, in which the multidimensional work of government agencies has been reduced as far as possible to a single dimension: cost.

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Some institutions put legibility above all other considerations. On his way to the White House, McNamara ascended through a technocratic elite that, in this spirit, valued formal procedures and quantitative analysis. It was an elite he thrived in. Born in San Francisco in 1916, son of a shoe merchant, McNamara was an able student. By 1939, he had earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he absorbed the method of scientific management, an endeavor that seeks to transform human enterprises into optimizable systems. Specializing in case studies, McNamara dissected businesses into quantifiable parts, defeating ambiguity with numbers. In 1940, he returned as Harvard’s youngest and highest-paid assistant professor.

The Second World War tested these principles on a grand stage. In 1943, McNamara joined the Office of Statistical Control, applying analytical rigor to military logistics. There, he optimized bomber deployments and reduced aircraft losses for General Curtis LeMay in Southeast Asia. The mechanics of war became a statistical laboratory for McNamara, one that reaffirmed his faith in optimization and data.

After the war, McNamara joined the Ford Motor Company with other wartime analysts — dubbed the “Whiz Kids” — and introduced statistical methods that streamlined production, improved inventory control, and analyzed markets. Ford rebounded from financial struggles, becoming a model of corporate efficiency. President Kennedy, having read about McNamara’s brilliance in TIME magazine, hired him as Secretary of Defense in 1961.

McNamara was hailed as one of the “best and brightest” in government, a moniker that would later resound with irony. McNamara’s belief in the supremacy of quantitative analysis left little room for the qualitative dimensions of leadership — the interactions of culture, behavior, politics — that eluded metrics. In the early Sixties, American involvement in the Vietnam War began to escalate. McNamara, a hawkish voice in Kennedy’s cabinet, would find his faith in data was tested against reality. His strategy of gradual escalation, designed to incrementally compel the North Vietnamese to capitulate, presumed that war was a machine that could be tuned for optimal results.

Quantitative metrics became the measure of success: body counts, sortie rates, bombing tonnage. Yet, reliance on these numbers obscured the true nature of the conflict. The data showed roads cleared and villages controlled, but could not capture the loyalties of Vietnamese elites or the political will that sustained the insurgency.

This focus on metrics induced distortions that exemplified Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Commanders inflated body counts; villages were bombed to produce favorable statistics, alienating populations. The numbers became a channel of deception, prioritizing legibility over reality.

Even accurate metrics proved irrelevant. Body counts could not measure enemy resilience; bombing tonnage could not gauge political impact. By 1968, the mirage of legibility had begun to vanish. For all the metrics pushed in the right direction, the US was no closer to achieving its objectives. The gap between data and reality widened. As McNamara’s vision faltered, critics offered alternative frameworks. Among them, Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger advanced a realist approach that rejected McNamara’s technocratic abstraction in favor of judgement, restraint, and recognition of empirical reality.

Morgenthau’s view was that successful foreign policy required a deep understanding of power and human nature, not formulas and data. In his 1948 work Politics Among Nations, he argued that national interest — not ideology or numerical targets — should guide policy. Morgenthau entered government service during the Kennedy administration and stayed to serve Johnson, but was dismissed on account of his criticism of McNamara’s reliance on metrics. Morgenthau became one of the most public critics of the war.

Henry Kissinger, who came to prominence during the Nixon administration, similarly embodied the realist tradition, though his methods were more controversial. His policy of Vietnamization, which sought to transfer combat responsibilities to South Vietnamese forces, reversed McNamara’s strategy of incremental escalation. As National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State under Nixon, Kissinger sought to extricate the US from Vietnam, not through a decisive military victory, but through a combination of negotiation, battlefield maneuvering, and pragmatic compromise. His strategy acknowledged the political realities on the ground and the limits of US power, focusing on achieving a “decent interval” that would allow an orderly withdrawal while maintaining American credibility. He prioritized détente with China and the Soviet Union, seeking to isolate North Vietnam diplomatically. Kissinger’s handling of Vietnam, including the Paris Peace Accords, reflected an awareness that wars are ended through political settlements, however imperfect. Realism, embodied by Morgenthau and Kissinger, valued prudence over certainty, judgement over the illusion of control. Kissinger had it that, in the end, McNamara “repeatedly implored” him to negotiate an end to the war.

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Though the US withdrew its combat troops in 1973, the war’s epilogue was written not on the battlefield but in the halls of Congress. Under the Case-Church Amendment, Congress cut off funding for further military involvement, and in 1975, South Vietnam — lacking US support — succumbed to a full-scale North Vietnamese invasion. Yet even as Saigon fell, McNamara’s rationalist methods endured, resurfacing in later military strategies and institutional management, continually exposing the limits of quantitative rationalism.

The strategy, and its failings, endured into the 21st century. Following 9/11, US responses in Afghanistan and Iraq repeated past technocratic errors. Databases became a cornerstone of counterinsurgency efforts, cataloguing everything from drone strike targets to population movements. Advanced surveillance tools allowed the collection of vast amounts of information, and algorithms promised to detect patterns and identify threats with precision. While these systems provided tactical advantages, they exposed rationalism’s limits in asymmetric warfare. Metrics like insurgents killed or districts cleared echoed the body count metric used in Vietnam, but took no account of the ethnic grievances fueling the insurgencies. As a result, these tools yielded tactical victories but strategic stagnation. The deeper causes of hostility remained untreated.

Beyond battlefield strategy, the technocratic emphasis on theoretical efficiency, often measured through projected cost savings and unified platforms, has persisted in American defense procurement — to America’s detriment. We can see this in the development of the F-35 joint strike fighter. Conceived as a universal platform intended to streamline production and serve multiple military branches, the F-35 instead faced significant delays, cost overruns, and design compromises, all of which stemmed from its attempt to satisfy varied, often conflicting, operational requirements. The program became a case study in how theoretical efficiency, pursued through complex system integration, could result in a product that was over-engineered and operationally challenged.

The contemporary reach of technocratic rationalism extends beyond military hardware, shaping education, climate policy, and public health. Educational policy increasingly rests on standardized testing and performance metrics, numerical indicators designed to capture student achievement and institutional quality. Such metrics promise clarity and accountability but frequently incentivize reductive practices — teaching to the test, narrowing curricula, and prioritizing quantifiable short-term outcomes over actual educational attainment. Similarly, the global response to climate change hinges on carbon accounting and emissions targets, quantifiable benchmarks intended to guide environmental stewardship. Yet these numeric frameworks, focused solely on domestic figures, can foster practices that are both superficial and deceptive. “Carbon outsourcing”, for instance, allows a nation to lower its reported emissions by shifting heavy industry abroad, while continuing to import and consume the goods produced there.

Such maneuvers meet the quantitative target but merely displace the environmental cost, creating an illusion of progress rather than reducing net emissions. Perhaps most vividly, the Covid pandemic highlighted the limitations inherent in the technocratic approach, as policymakers leaned heavily on epidemiological models to dictate broad social measures. Although models provided important guidance, their reductive assumptions about human behavior and societal response fostered rigid policies that induced political polarization, economic harm, and social fatigue. The Trump administration’s tariffs program is itself a response to an over-reliance on simple metrics. The architects of Nafta had economic growth in mind when they designed the project, but did not fully understand the resentment that would arise as a result of the consequent relocation of manufacturing.

Amid these challenges, leadership remains central. To wield quantitative tools effectively, a leader must master them, not be mastered by them. Leadership is not defined by the sophistication of systems but by the use of them toward chosen ends, requiring competence beyond the technical. Great leaders adapt, innovate, and operate beyond established scripts. Franklin D. Roosevelt, confronting the abyss of the Great Depression, improvised the New Deal not from orthodoxy but from experimentation, forging new institutions to match the crisis at hand. Dwight D. Eisenhower, wary of rigid doctrines during the Cold War, balanced deterrence with diplomacy, crafting a strategy of containment without cataclysm. In a different era, Václav Havel, playwright turned president, navigated Czechoslovakia’s peaceful transition from communism with strategic clarity and imagination, showing that leadership could be both principled and inventive. Such figures continuously improvise, foster tight coordination, and explore uncharted territory. Unconstrained by prevailing models, they wield tools creatively within a larger vision, guided by wisdom and foresight. Leadership demands flexibility, vision, and the courage to pursue paths not yet mapped.

The allure of legibility — of reducing the world to what can be measured, managed, and optimized — remains potent. While McNamara left government in 1968 and assumed the presidency of the World Bank, the US military continues to operate within the framework he helped to establish. As illustrated by Afghanistan and the F-35, the armed forces still rely on the methods McNamara championed even as these tools repeatedly fail. The history of these efforts challenges us to reconsider the relationship between data and decision-making, efficiency and effectiveness, tools and leadership.

In the end, the persistence of rationalism confronts us with a question as urgent as any McNamara once charted on a graph: how do we harness analysis without becoming captive to its illusions? The answer is not more data, but deeper discernment, a leadership that sees beyond the spreadsheet, hears what the numbers cannot say, and resists mistaking clarity for truth. In every era, the temptation endures to confuse the map with the territory, the metric with the meaning. If McNamara’s story warns us of anything, it is that legibility is not understanding, and that wisdom begins where the numbers end.

On 9/11, we learned that trillions of dollars of American defence spending could be overwhelmed by $5 boxcutters for sale in any hardware store. On Israel’s 9/11, we learned that a $60 toy drone, a $600 rocket and a $6,000 paramotor could overwhelm the world’s most formidable defences, including Israel’s billion-dollar Iron Dome. Hamas managed to evade detection by Israel’s multibillion dollar intelligence capability simply by turning its electronics off and by not deviating from its daily routine. Going dark beat going high-tech; analogue beat digital.

As Israel’s tanks mass on Gaza’s border, the world awaits the start of a chain reaction to the massacre of Israeli civilians. This is like witnessing a Jujitsu match where leverage matters more than size. Hamas wanted to provoke Israel into deploying old-fashioned, highly symbolic weapons, such as tanks. Are tanks the best tech for rescuing the many Israeli hostages? For imposing the greatest damage on the perpetrators? No. But Israel will use them because it wants to create a visual show of force. Hamas is betting on this, knowing that in an Instagram world, Israel’s tanks will generate endless images appearing to show Israel’s brute force, which Hamas believes will increase support for the relatively defenceless occupants of Gaza.

Hamas, however, is far from defenceless: it has 3D printers, laser-sintering devices, and manufacturing facilities in their tunnels, which churn out guns, bullets and more. Perhaps this is why Israel’s surveillance systems didn’t pick up on the drones, ammunition and paramotors that Hamas used to transport humans across the border: they weren’t imported, but were manufactured underground in Gaza. Their essential components, after all, are not hard to come by. As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has observed, Hamas uses unexploded ordnance, rubble, and discarded or damaged metal and wiring to recycle materials and parts into new weapons. “The irony here,” he wrote, “is that the IDF’s operation indirectly provided Hamas with materials that are otherwise strictly monitored or forbidden altogether in Gaza.” Hamas, it seems, has brought new meaning to the term “circular economy”.

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For the West and Israel, the deeper problem here is that we cannot unlearn our faith in technological prowess. We still believe that having nuclear weapons is always the answer, even though we’ve already discovered that it is impossible to use them in response to Putin’s old-fashioned ground war in Ukraine, or even to his direct nuclear threats. The game is not worth the candle.

At the heart of our cognitive dissonance is the fact that an old mathematical formula has been disrupted by modern technology. Harald led the first study on Anti-Ballistic Missiles for the Joint Chiefs under President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. This project was later popularised by President Ronald Reagan as the Star Wars Initiative. When Harald began his study, his task was to determine what it would cost to build an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system that could counter an incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from the Soviet Union before it reached American airspace. The question was this: would an ABM system alter how the Soviets calculated the cost of Mutual Assured Destruction? In other words, could it make it too expensive for the Soviets to keep up? Drawing on the ideas of his associate, Tom Schelling — who later won the Nobel Prize for his idea of game theory — Harald concluded that for each dollar spent on a hypothetical ABM system, it would cost the adversary roughly seven dollars to penetrate it.

Of course, it would not matter whether the ABM system actually worked. It is incredibly mathematically difficult to successfully target and hit a super-fast moving inbound ICBM mid-air. The leverage math was easy, though. The Russians understood the 7:1 calculation. When Reagan announced the Star Wars Initiative, the Soviets understood that they’d be forced to spend far more than the country could possibly afford. The overwhelming cost played no small part in bankrupting the Soviet Union, though its demise came from the fear of running out of the cash needed to keep up with Star Wars, not from the damage inflicted by Star Wars itself. This brought the Cold War and the Soviet Union to an end, and left a lasting impression on America’s leading military thinkers including Richard Perle, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who deployed the ratio everywhere from their various powerful roles in American defence policy.

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Today, Harald’s ratio has inverted. It’s at least 1:7 now, and probably much more. This is evident not only from 9/11, but also from the events in Israel. Hamas deployed absurdly cheap rockets against the Iron Dome. It did the maths: by one estimate, the Hamas missiles are 100 times less expensive than the $50,000 Tamir receptors in the Iron Dome, which can defend Israel against 96% of the projectiles thrown at them. So Hamas simply launched many more rockets — and they got through the 4% window because many more were fired. Simple.

None of this means we can rule out that Hamas didn’t have the support of advanced technology. Days before the massacre in Israel, on 27 September, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard successfully placed a third Noor satellite into orbit. Was this a total coincidence? The Noor-3, with vastly better cameras than Noor-1 and Noor-2, gave Iran the ability to monitor events on the ground in Israel and Gaza with much greater accuracy and coverage than before. It allowed Iran 24/7 coverage. What if that camera footage was made available to Hamas? And if facial recognition technology was used on that live feed or video? The aim of that tech is not so much to recognise a particular person but to determine the emotional state of groups of people. Could this have been used to determine that the Israelis on the ground were relaxed and obviously not expecting a problem? Such tech is certainly capable of this — and while it isn’t cheap, it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Nor are its uses simply defensive. Over the past year, the Ukrainians have been forced to become experts in drone warfare. On the one hand, they have learned that holding a $5 yoga mat over your head blinds satellites to the human heat signature, allowing them to sneak up on Russian assets and destroy them. On the other, they have also developed their offensive capacity, making not just drones but underwater drones. In the Black Sea, for instance, the Russians had to move their fleet after Ukrainian “experimental” and unmanned “Sea Baby” drones wreaked havoc, damaging subs and the undersides of sizeable superpower vessels.

If Ukraine can operate this kind of technology, Hamas probably can too. This week, the US moved two aircraft carriers into range of Israel. This raises the risk of another USS Cole situation. In 2000, two suicide pilots in a cheap rubber Zodiac-type boat ripped a 40-foot-wide hole in the Cole, killing 17 American naval personnel and injuring another 40.

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For now, though, Hamas’s use of drones will continue to be associated with its recent reliance on paramotors with parafoils. These are usually found at beach resorts and so appear perfectly innocent. No doubt Israel has every airport and landing strip around under observation, but modern drone tech no longer requires such assets. In 2014, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Intelligence Service, Shin Bet, had discovered that Hamas was receiving paragliding training in Malaysia. But it never seemed to have occurred to anyone that paramotors and parafoils could be used to transport an armed human over the heavily surveilled Gaza border.

Elsewhere, cheap toy drones played a large part in disabling and destroying Israel’s expensive surveillance system on the Gaza border. Hamas used them to dazzle, damage or destroy the expensive optical sensors that Israel relied upon to detect inbound threats. The Israelis should have understood this technology. After all, Israeli-made drones helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh just last month, while Turkish drones have profoundly shifted the balance of power in the ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. People are clearly understanding the tech but are yet to realise the inversion of the leverage ratio.

Closer to home, we can see this in the US’s continued enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regime, in the mistaken belief that all or most valuable tech originates in America and must not fall into the hands of opponents. Awkwardly, it seems that many of the guns Hamas used in the siege had been lifted from the piles of weaponry the US left behind in Afghanistan and Iraq. Failing to consider their intellectual property value, the US ditched them because they were too expensive to destroy and too old to bother returning home. The US saw old broken guns without enough usable ammo. Did Hamas see an opportunity to create CAD (Computer Aided Design) models, which would let them 3D print or laser-sinter parts to repair and even replicate these weapons? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, those who want to change or damage the balance of power in the world at an already fragile moment will continue to deploy technologies that we ignore or laugh at. And this dangerous form of complacency is not just a problem for Israel. Once those tanks drive into Gaza and the conflict metastasises further afield, it will be a threat to the entire West.

A similar case can surely be made for war and social media. In an essay written before the Ukraine war, I argued that the conjunction of social media with high quality drone footage from the wars in Syria and Karabakh had created a fusion of online enthusiasts with technology, so that “Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground”. The Syrian war, like the Spanish Civil War before World War Two, can be considered an armed rehearsal for the Ukraine war, a rough draft of processes and technologies that would later reach their full, terrible potential. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the conjunction of brutal drone footage with social media, and of mass deaths with vigorous online fandoms.

With over 100,000 battlefield dead on each side so far, the Ukraine war is already the bloodiest war in Europe since World War Two. But by one grim milestone, the conflict surely surpasses any war in history: it must hold the record for the greatest number of individual human deaths captured on camera. Through the ubiquity on both sides of cheap consumer drones, used for battlefield reconnaissance and target acquisition, the trenches of eastern Ukraine are surveilled to a hitherto unimaginable extent. And by rigging the drones to drop grenades with pinpoint accuracy — a tactic initially pioneered by Isis in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq — both sides can hunt down, chase and kill individual soldiers with the ease of a video game, sharing the HD video footage for their rival supporters.

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The effects on the soldiers themselves are easy to imagine. The knowledge that your every move is being watched by an inescapable whining sky robot waiting to kill you is pure horror. But it is the effect on those sharing the footage that is surely most remarkable. The nature of the clips is unlike anything ever seen from any previous war: hovering a short distance above the victim, the drone’s footage is unbearably intimate: in his final seconds of life, the target looks up at the camera — at you, straight into your eyes. You look down at him: you are the drone. It creates the illusion you have been granted the power of life and death, skimming over the muddy trenches of eastern Ukraine like the angel of death. There is something obscene and terrible in being granted access to these final, miserable moments of human life, a nagging sense that this is something that ought not be seen, let alone enjoyed.

And yet to follow the Ukraine war on a platform like Twitter means your feed is interspersed with the lovingly zoomed-in deaths, shared with crass jokes by Western enthusiasts, of human beings, perhaps unwilling conscripts. Niche online communities like Reddit’s DronedOrc share videos with names such as “Drone drops grenades on orc without pants”, or, “Grenade dropped on orc makes its helmet pop”, for the enjoyment of its subscribers. Scrolling Twitter brings up posts such as “18+ The drone operator drove the orc to suicide,” in which a lone Russian soldier, cornered by a drone, shoots himself. “Last seconds of an orc’s life after catching a grenade from the drone in his rat hole,” gloats another. To fully erode the distinction between themselves and the drone, distant internet consumers of the Ukraine war can even donate 3D-printed fins for their grenades via Twitter, inscribed with their own message, like “Hope this hurts XO.”

Brutal as they are, these videos tell you little about the Ukraine war: one contextless video of a human dying in an anonymous ditch is much the same as another, for all it tells you about the conflict’s progress or outcome. The only difference is for online connoisseurs of individual deaths — praying, pleading, helpless, resigned, crawling away in a trail of blood. This online subculture, a fringe subsection of those following the war, serves no analytical function whatsoever. Instead, it more closely resembles crowds in Roman arenas gawping at the deaths of the condemned: they too, after all, were viewed as criminals, beyond the bounds of human sympathy. The propaganda value of these videos, for the Ukrainian cause, is surely doubtful. For the avoidance of doubt — or rather, to avoid being accused of pro-Russian sympathies by enthusiasts of this strange and awful new content — I want Ukraine to win the war. I understand that to do that, the Ukrainians will have to kill and keep killing thousands of Russian soldiers: that’s what war is. But I don’t particularly need or want to see each individual death. The fact that many apparently do tells you little about Ukraine, but much about human nature and the still-dimly understood nature of social media.

Perhaps, then, conflict and the creation and destruction of enemies is what social media is actually for. In its first heady days at the beginning of the century, the internet’s Arab Spring, the prevailing narrative was that social media was born to bring people together, technology and the human need for connection fusing to progress humanity’s upward arc. Yet anyone who uses social media observes the precise opposite: there is a natural tendency for the medium to produce enemies, often from the slenderest of causes. The most popular content on Twitter by far is that which focuses on the destruction and humiliation of political foes: careers are built from it, fortunes made. There is a curious lacuna in the anthropology of the internet on this easily observable process, one anyone who uses the internet swims in every day without a second thought. The uproar that Musk’s ownership of Twitter has caused among liberals, though never explicitly articulated, is the product of precisely this dynamic. If social media were not primarily a weapon, they would not fear that it is now in the wrong hands, ready to be turned against those accustomed to wielding it.

If war and social media are now inextricably intertwined, fused by the gut satisfaction of watching and sharing clips of your enemies being destroyed, then the peculiarities of America’s own internal conflict are explained. Both sides of the cold civil war hate each other with gut passion, yet open conflict is — except for periods of heightened tension like elections or the BLM protests — unusually rare. In Syria a few years ago, I met an American volunteer who had been driven to the country’s distant battlefield, on the side of the Kurdish YPG, through engagement with America’s own 2016 political ferment. After the Isis war was over, he went back home, taking part in Seattle’s CHAZ experiment, before being jailed for making a social media “call to arms” against Republicans. For him, perhaps the virtual and the real, Syria and America had become too uncomfortably merged: like the Capitol protestors on the other side, who confused Trump’s media-wrought simulacrum of a coup with objective reality, by making the implicit explicit, he moved too soon.

Instead, each side sublimates its hatred for the other in random acts of violence, carried out by unstable proxies, to be pored over, shared and discussed on social media. American conservatives can watch and share footage of IRL proxies such as Kyle Rittenhouse kill and wound their political enemies, and turn him into a hero of their cause, rewarded, as is the nature of American conservatism, with all manner of lucrative sponsorship deals. Had the fatal tussle’s outcome been different, American liberals would no doubt have rewarded their own virtual paladins. In doing so, their desire to take up arms themselves abates: the virtual simulacrum relieves the urge.

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Even the most random of America’s deaths by shooting, vastly outpacing Syria’s current death toll, are immediately and obsessively analysed for clues as to which, if any side of America’s civil conflict the killer can be attributed — is he a Hispanic White Nationalist, perhaps, or a radicalised transsexual? The deaths that do not feed this war of interpretation are meaningless, and quickly ignored: it is only the online narratives into which they can be forced that give the killings purpose. Twitter is alive, pulsing with palpable energy, in the immediate aftermath of each atrocity, as each side waits and hopes the blame can be conclusively pinned on their online foes. Like Baudrillard’s Gulf War, America’s civil war is both real and not, a conflict in which, as Baudrillard argued, “the virtual has overtaken the actual” and where “we are already all strategic hostages”, trapped in an internet battlefield, “the screen on which we are virtually bombarded every day”.

Published just before the Ukraine War began, Radical War by the academics Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins warned that the fusion of smartphone technology and modern warfare meant that “war is principally about managing the attention of populations and different audiences” in a “media spectacle” where “it is not possible to locate these emergent forms of warfare within existing models of representation and ways of seeing the world”. The smartphone and the drone camera have changed war entirely, “replacing the rifle as the weapon of choice for those engaged in mass participation in war” and “collapsing the boundary between those who observe war and those who engage in it”.

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But the Ukraine war has collapsed the boundaries further still: you too can now donate to kill a Russian soldier, and watch and share his death, all from the smartphone nestled in your hand. Similarly, it is impossible to use the internet in 2023 without being, in some way, a participant in America’s cold civil war: just as Americans regroup themselves into opposing lines, waiting for the great culmination which may never come, the still largely virtual conflict’s contours shape almost every thought expressed online. It is a constant, almost impossible task to force yourself not to care about the latest skirmish in America’s culture war: the path of least resistance, across the world, is simply to embrace the dying hegemon’s last compelling cultural product.

Trapped in the internet, we are all of us participants, willing or not, in a great, globe-spanning war without end. As it has with every new technology, war has brought out the latent power of the internet and social media, hardened them and fashioned them into weapons of terrible power, whose true potential we are only beginning to understand. Only now are they coming together, like the Titanic and the iceberg, in their fatal, predestined embrace.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By Aris Roussinos

By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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By Aris Roussinos

From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Could we win a war in China?

By Aris Roussinos

Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

Many are arguing that global warfare is changing; but is it really, or is this part of a much longer cycle?

Small-scale attacks are usually a deliberate strategy by less powerful actors who do not have a choice: rebels and insurgents, global protest groups, and weaker states such as North Korea or Iran. Often, they seek to challenge America and her traditional allies, but to do so in a way that sits below the threshold of overt warfare — by operating in the so-called “grey zone”, as the Chief of the Defence staff, General Sir Nick Carter, outlined his annual address to the Royal United Services Institute. These actors do not want to provoke a response, particularly a military one.

For a minimal outlay, a small player (relatively speaking), can have an outsized impact on an adversary, where it otherwise could not. In warfare this is known as asymmetry. General H.R. McMaster, former US National Security Adviser, once said: “There are two ways to fight the US: asymmetrically and stupid.”

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But, in fact, asymmetry is a key, if not the key, dynamic that all sides try to utilise in warfare. It is the most effective way to have a psychological effect on (or to send a message to) your enemy. This, throughout the ages, has been the whole point of warfare.

There are two types of asymmetry: with overt military power (tanks, infantry, and suchlike), one wants to amass as much force as possible against a weaker enemy force to shatter its cohesion (think of the D-Day amphibious operations in 1944). With covert, or non-traditional military activities, one is trying to generate a large impact, often against a big target, with a small outlay. The best example of this in recent times is, of course, the attacks of 11 September, 2001 in New York, which reportedly cost al-Qaeda $400,000 to carry out (compared with the $6tn cost of the “Global War on Terror”).

The question of which type of asymmetry predominates waxes and wanes through the ages. Critically, it depends upon the types of technology used in warfare and their relative costs (and not necessarily military-specific technology, either), and not just the overwhelming dominance of one actor.

Today you can, for example, buy drones on Amazon, and shut down major international airports, as Extinction Rebellion threatened to do to Heathrow. You can also write malware in your bedroom, and cripple governments, as Ukraine found to its cost in the ‘Petya’ malware attacks of 2017. This is an accelerating trend: malware attacks against states have doubled from 2018 to 2019.

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Why we now know the pity of war

By Douglas Murray

Eras that have a democratic availability of technology lead to fragmented patterns of violence and warfare where it is hard to distinguish who is attacking, or what the psychological message is that they are trying to deliver.

This hasn’t always been the case. For much of history, the cost of technology, and hence its concentration in the hands of a few, made warfare an elite sport. The cost and complexity of dreadnoughts, huge battleships with extensive firepower, at the turn of the 20th century, meant that only a few states could compete. On land, the perfection of the chariot on the Russian Steppes from around 2000 BCE had a similar effect. The elite nature of warfare meant that who was fighting, and what messages they were sending, were clear. Warfare tended to be clear and concentrated.

But is this of more than passing, academic interest?

It is, because fragmentation in warfare makes it hard to make sense of what’s going on. And if you can’t make sense of what is going on then it is hard to make decisions. And wining in war is a question of wartime leaders making good decisions, in good time, about how to respond to the enemy’s moves.

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The War was not Our Finest Hour

By Peter Hitchens

It is very hard to make decisions in warfare and international affairs at the moment because we are in an era of ultra cheap and available technology. For the next 20 years or so this trend is likely to accelerate: think of 3D printers churning out weapons systems remotely; nano-drone swarms paralysing automatic air-defence systems; or mega-cheap genome sequencing enabling actors to create organisms that can make a city’s water smell of, say, pear drops, or turn it purple — what better way to create a psychological effect on your enemy?

It will become increasingly hard to pick apart actors and motives, leading to confused decision making and, most likely, strategic errors on the part of large, rich countries. This is already happening: look at American and European paralysis over Syria, or the inability of governments to respond effectively to the multiple protests that are occurring around the globe currently.

But where does this process end? Most probably with the complete reshaping of warfare brought about by artificial intelligence. Advanced proprietary AI — the type that rich governments are investing heavily in, assuming that it will give them the edge in conflict — will help to make sense of the fragmentation in the contemporary strategic environment; it will enable better decisions to be made with clarity; and warfare will become an elite sport once again.

When you consider war like this, the recent pledge not to develop lethal artificial intelligence (AI) weapons systems signed by 236 organisations and 3010 individuals, including Elon Musk and the founders of Google DeepMind, seems odd. Or rather, it seems pointless and self-aggrandising. Others — individuals, organisations, and countries — will continue to do so. That these individuals choose not to develop weapons capable of “selecting and engaging targets without human intervention” because they pose serious moral and pragmatic issues does not mean that others won’t.

AI will change warfare to such a degree that war will be unrecognisable from its current (and historical) form. AI will almost certainly be the single most important technological innovation in the field of conflict, altering not just the methods with which we fight, but also the very foundational dynamics of conflict.

Here is what I mean: not only will AI enable a country to develop swarms of interlinked micro-drones—a very useful and relatively cheap method to, for example, defeat an enemy aircraft carrier battle group —but when that AI-controlled swarm faces an opponent that also has an AI-controlled offensive system, we have no idea how one system would defeat the other in combat. The unknowns in the sphere of AI warfare are huge.

These technological uncertainties come as the world experiences an era of increased geopolitical tension: India-China; Russia-Europe; and further out, Russia-China. But it is between the United States and China that these tensions will most obviously play out. And it is in this conflict that AI in warfare will come to fruition, much like nuclear weapons in the second world war, or the tank in the first.

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AI will change war in unimaginable ways

By Mike Martin

China knows this, and is preparing accordingly: a July 2017 State Council document makes it official government policy for China to become world dominant in AI by 2030. Of course, policy and outcomes are different things, but as an authoritarian government with technology companies that are closely linked to the state, China is in a good position to make it reality.

All private companies in China, for instance, are obliged to have their own Party Committees, and the three biggest Chinese tech firms — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — all have joint R&D labs with the government. The relationship is highly lopsided: the Chinese government recently forced an apology and a crackdown on ‘undesired’ content from a video sharing platform called Toutiao.

Finally, China has the resources — money, people, and data — to make it happen. This is not just state funds being invested in tech firms, but also the tax breaks and other advantages associated with special economic zones like the Xiongan New Area, built to showcase President Xi’s vision of a state-led digital city. It is the thousands of digital engineers trained each year who work ‘996’: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

But most importantly, it is data: China is the biggest homogenised data-rich economy in the world. Mobile payments, for instance, are fifty times what they are in the US. All of these transactions generate data, and data is what AI systems ‘train’ on to feed their development. China’s data advantage is huge, and this is only beginning to be understood by Western governments.

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In the race to become the AI superpower, Europe is losing to China and America

By Peter Franklin

Where does this leave countries like the US with independent tech sectors, barely controlled by the government? Or worse, in some cases, where tech leaders with strong libertarian ideals openly advocate for technologies like block chain to reduce permanently the power that governments have over populations? Where does it leave countries like the UK that have crippled their defence budgets by buying aircraft carriers of dubious military value? And what about countries where the leading lights of AI sign pledges to state that they will not work on military AI?

Perhaps a better way of framing this question is where we want to get to eventually. I would argue that we want to get to a global arms control agreement on the use of AI for military purposes. Indeed, that is what Musk and his fellow pledgers called for, asking governments “to create a future with strong international norms, regulations and laws against lethal autonomous weapons.”

The problem, however, is that a brief look at other arms control agreements – of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or of missile technology – demonstrates that this is unlikely to work. History tells us that such agreements come about when all sides feel that they have too much to lose by developing or deploying a particular technology. In other words, that all sides are in a potentially mutually hurting stalemate. The quickest way, therefore, to get to a global arms control agreement on the military use of AI would be for the United States and its allies to develop world-class systems – this, more than anything else, will force a global consensus to emerge on their highly destructive use. This idealistic pledge stands in the way of that.

The news came as no surprise. Francis has long maintained that the death penalty is “contrary to the Gospel.” Last October, to an audience of cardinals and ambassadors marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of the Catechism, he said “however grave the crime that may be committed, the death penalty is inadmissible because it attacks the inviolability and the dignity of the person.”

So far, the announcement has garnered little reaction, though is generally seen as welcome. Those for whom the announcement is not welcome – the governments of the fifty plus countries that retain the death penalty – have largely remained silent. After all, the Pope’s pronouncement does not have the force of international law, and, as Stalin once pointed out, the Pope has no “divisions”.

But is their silence entirely cynical? The much respected Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, Vice President of the US Conference of Bishops, in welcoming the change added that “many good people will continue to believe that our society needs the death penalty to express its moral outrage and to punish those who commit the ultimate crime of taking human life.”

Those same people would probably already have been at odds with Pope John Paul’s revision of the Catechism in 1992, which stated that the cases in which the death penalty was absolutely necessary in order to protect society were “practically non-existent.” As the then Cardinal Ratzinger (subsequently Pope Benedict XVI) pointed out, disagreement did not place them seriously at odds with Christian teaching. That, however, was ultimately because the Catechism permitted the theoretical possibility of the death penalty being necessary, and therefore a matter for the civil power, whose duty it was to protect society.

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Free Minds: Robert Sarah, the dissenting cardinal, seeking to save his Church

By Allan Mallinson

That theoretical room for manoeuvre has been removed with Pope Francis’ revision – and it has huge implications. For a start, it appears to put the Vatican on a collision course with those countries who retain the death penalty, not least the United States, but also China, where Pope Francis has been making a major – and controversial – effort towards rapprochement.

Catholics in China are divided between those in the ‘underground’ community who recognise the Pope, and those who belong to the state-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA), whose bishops are appointed by the government. The change in the Catechism puts the underground bishops at direct odds with Beijing, and compliant CPA bishops at odds with the Vatican.

Is Pope Francis saying therefore that previous doctrine was wrong? No: he is saying that the change is a “development of doctrine”, taking account of new possibilities and understanding.

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The 1992 Catechism was at pains to emphasise that the “Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime… The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude… recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.”

In 1992 the Magisterium, “the Church’s divinely appointed authority to teach the truths of religion” (vested uniquely in the Pope and the bishops), believed that at that time there were still states which might not have the means “to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive [by death] the one who has committed it”. Now it believes that there are no such states.

But there remains the possibility that the threat, character and purpose of crime may change, in which case, in logic, a further development of doctrine may restore the admissibility of the death penalty – or even permit it under existing provisions. It is significant, for example, that Pope Francis has proposed no change to doctrine regarding war – or, as the Catechism has it, “Safeguarding Peace.”

All citizens and all governments are obliged to work for the avoidance of war, but “as long as the danger of war persists and there is no international authority with the necessary competence and power, governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence, once all peace efforts have failed.” In this case, the civil authorities “have the right and duty to impose on citizens the obligations necessary for national defence.” The Catechism is not specific as to what these obligations are, or the penalties that are admissible in order to enforce them. But the death penalty is not specifically excluded, nor indeed is it made inadmissible for war crimes.

What, therefore, if “crime” is used by an aggressor to wage war against a nation in what is known increasingly as ‘hybrid warfare’: a blend of political, cyber and conventional warfare, plus other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy and electoral intervention? What if the aggressor is not another state, but a subversive movement within the state, either a political force or an essentially criminal one such as a major drugs cartel using paramilitary tactics to establish a ‘narco-state’?

One of the Catechism’s requirements for recourse to war to be legitimate (“Just War” theory) is that the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation “must be lasting, grave, and certain”. Immediately after the announcement, President Duterte of the Philippines, around 80% of whose population is Catholic, and which suspended the death penalty in 2006, said that it was “still the priority of the administration to re-impose the death penalty for serious drug-related offences.”

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Will this place him seriously at odds with Christian teaching, with the country’s bishops and 80% of Filipinos? Not necessarily. Duterte speaks of the country’s “war on drugs”, believing the threat to be lasting, grave, and certain. He might rightly point to the Catechism’s assertion that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defence”, all peace efforts having failed, which only the government has the capacity to decide.

Pope Francis’s development of doctrine has the potential to sow considerable dissension within the Catholic Church if it is applied without discernment. The Catechism asserts “the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict”; the fact of war having broken out “does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.” But we cannot know the future character of conflict, and we cannot therefore know the consequences of inaction – such as staying the use of the death penalty.

Pope Francis is a Jesuit; he is well-versed in subtlety of thinking. I believe, we can expect further “development of doctrine.”

Today, the question is: what lessons from history are we ignoring? 

Victoria Schofield: Protectionist policies can lead to hardship rather than prosperity.

The lesson in history is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff enacted by the US administration of Herbert Hoover in 1930 and which intensified nationalism in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Initially framed to protect American farmers, its enactment – against the advice of over 1,000 economists – had the reverse effect. Although not directly responsible either for the Great Depression or the outbreak of war, its passage contributed to a substantial decline in global trade which provided those who were willing to attempt to alter the politico-economic status quo ante, notably Germany and Japan, with a reason for doing so.

We may like to think that we have learnt from the consequences of Smoot-Hawley with the introduction of the World Trade Organisation and a general commitment to open trade. But with nationalism on the rise and the slogan of America First emanating out of the United States, the mood can again change; President Trump’s new protectionist initiatives have already sounded an alarm bell, as witnessed by the over 1,000 economists who have now written to him. For us in Britain, as politicians argue about the exact nature of our trade and investment policy as a  ‘third country’ outside the EU, we should remember that tariffs and quotas aimed to appease some political interests serve to make the world poorer.

Paul Lay: Military investment goes hand-in-hand with technological innovation

Peace dividends are superficially attractive. Which government would not wish to lavish greater sums of money rewarding its supporters and bribing its opponents?

When the Cold War came to an end – along with, as some suggested, history itself  – and before the eye-opening atrocities of 9/11, when Monica Lewinsky was the biggest thing in the news cycle, humanity appeared to be on course for verdant, postbellum uplands. But, as the historian David Edgerton suggested in his 2005 study Warfare State: Britain 1920-1970 and reiterates in his latest magisterial work, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, technological innovation and a well-funded fiscal-military state go hand in hand.

Part of the return, in addition to enhanced security, is prosperity. It is no surprise that the two most technologically innovative and advanced countries on Earth – the US and Israel – should also be ones who spend serious money on the military, the source of such transformational technologies as the internet. And China is advancing on that front, too, aided by an expanding, scientifically literate workforce. The parlous state of British investment in its armed forces and the apparatus that surrounds it is a far greater challenge to our future prosperity and security than Brexit.

Britain has been a major military and intelligence player for centuries. It should not stop being one when, all around us, we see growing uncertainty, fragmentation and instability. The era of the fiscal-military state is not over yet.

Allan Mallinson: There are limits to military force.

Tacitus’s famous “And where they make a desert, they call it peace” was not a bad warning that the sword has its limits. Insurgencies can be mitigated by strong military force, but force does no more than buy time, during which statesmen may employ other means to deal with the root causes of the trouble. Everyone seems to agree with this in theory, and yet, in practice, military force is too often the first recourse, and then politicians, bereft of ideas or will, come to believe that the military alone will achieve a result.

The problem of first resort to force is further exacerbated where that force is “stand-off” – that is (usually) airpower. The problem with airpower is that while it can be extraordinarily precise, the targeting of its air-delivered bombs and missiles – the product of intelligence gathering – is reliant on people on the ground. And people on the ground, unless they are your own, are ultimately not very reliable.

The other problem is that airpower looks impressive, a substantial contribution to the battle; aircraft are inherently awe-inspiring, as are explosions on the ground, whether monitored from the air or witnessed on the ground. The danger is that it can quickly seem sufficient.

Eliot Cohen: History teaches us nothing.

History has no lessons.  Context, yes, and indeed, if read widely and well, a kind of wisdom and insight into people, places, and events, but nothing directive. As Sir Hew Strachan once said to me, politicians want answers, and they some times hope that historians can provide them. But what historians can really provide is good questions. That should suffice.

Two years later Mutsuhito took the imperial name Meiji: “enlightened rule”. As we begin another year of the so-called Asia century, it is worth reflecting on the “Meiji Restoration”, for it underpins Japan’s self-image today.

“Enrich the country, strengthen the army”

For almost seven centuries Japan had been ruled by a shogun (military dictator[1.  Shogun is the short form of Sei-i Taishōgun – “Supreme general for subduing the barbarians”, a title dating back to the 8th Century and the campaigns against the Ainu in Northern Japan.]), the emperor himself having only nominal authority. Motives for what was in fact a revolution were decidedly mixed, and not always what meet the eye. The Meiji Restoration has come to be identified with the rapid political, economic, and social change brought about by subsequent Westernisation, but the initial impetus for revolution was actually a fear that efforts by Western powers to “open” Japan, beginning in the 1850s with the acquiescence – encouragement even – of the shogunate after more than two centuries of near isolation, would subject the country to the same imperialist pressures observed in China.

The leaders of the restoration movement were mostly young samurai (warrior class) from hans (feudal domains) historically hostile to the shogun’s authority. Under the slogan “Enrich the country, strengthen the army” (Fukoku kyōhei), they sought a nation-state capable of standing equal to Western powers. (As in China, there were a number of “unequal treaties” to which they had specific objection.)

After the 3 January declaration, Yoshinobu, the ousted shogun, made war on the imperial faction, taking to the field with his larger and more modern forces, including several ironclad warships and French advisers. In the confusion of the fighting which followed, Royal Navy warships and marines found themselves in action against both sides as they tried to protect British commercial interests. However, the “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary”, Sir Harry Smith Parkes, who had been in post since 1865 with twenty years’ experience in China before that, had earlier shown his distaste for the shogunate and encouraged instead the more progressive elements of the imperial party.

Although it had been the United States, with the American Civil War barely over, that had prised open Japan fifteen years earlier (Commodore Matthew Perry of the US Navy had sailed into Tokyo harbour with a squadron of warships to demand trade access) in 1868, Washington’s attention had not yet turned properly to the Pacific. German, Italian and Russian interests in Japan were not yet matched by muscle, and so Western involvement in the Boshin War was effectively limited to Britain and France.

France, with a large number of serving and former army and navy officers already acting as advisers to shogunate forces, appeared hostile to the restoration, while Britain, thanks in large part to Parkes (and the young diplomat Ernest Satow), appeared to support it. When Yoshinobu surrendered to imperial forces the following year, Britain was well placed to consolidate her advantage. The emperor had already decided to move his capital from Kyoto to Edo (Tokyo), seat of the shoguns, where Parkes had been looking for a site for a new legation building. When the emperor abolished the old daimyo (feudal system), land in the imperial Chiyoda ward – Ichiban (Number One), indeed – became available, and he granted it to Parkes. The legation was completed in December 1874, though it was severely damaged in an earthquake after the First World War, and rebuilt in grander style. During the Second World War it was left in the hands of a caretaker, and when reoccupied in 1945, according to legend it had just a single broken window.

“A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist”

In retrospect as well as at the time, the new Meiji government’s reforms were ambitious. Against much opposition – from the samurai, many of whom had given the emperor his greatest support in the civil war – the daimyo was broken down and the country restructured into prefectures, largely on the French model. Compulsory education was introduced, again based on the French system, then later the German. Universal conscription was also introduced, and a new army modelled on Prussian lines, while the navy was re-equipped and expanded with advice from the Royal Navy and contracts with British shipyards and armaments factories.

Although the economy continued to be largely agriculture-based, industrialisation was made the priority, especially transport and communications. The first railway was built in 1872, just four years after the first steam locomotive, an “Iron Duke” class, had been brought to Japan from Britain by Jardine, Matheson & Co, and by 1890 the country had more than 1,400 miles of railway. Telegraph lines linked all major cities by 1880, and a European-style (largely British) banking system and currency was progressively introduced after 1882. The textile industry grew fastest, and remained the largest Japanese industry until the Second World War. Political reforms culminated in 1889 with the proclamation of a European-style constitution and a bicameral parliament, the Diet.

Yet these reforms did not come without a price: there were several samurai insurrections, some of which the army were only able with difficulty to put down, and a severe economic crisis in the 1880s resulting from public-sector overspending. In part reaction to the pace of change, there was a revival of conservative and nationalistic feelings from the mid-1880s, including worship of the emperor (a revival that in part inspired Gilbert and Sullivan to write The Mikado[2.  “Mikado” is the ancient, alternative name for the emperor, “Tenno” being the more usual. The part-heading “A more humane Mikado…” is the first line of the Mikado’s famous song in the G&S operetta, which Gilbert decided to cut after the dress rehearsal but reinstated after protests from the cast. Although set entirely in Japan, The Mikado is a satire on English society not Japanese.], and, later, Puccini to compose Madame Butterfly, a story based on Madame Chrysanthème, an autobiographical novel of 1887 by the French naval officer Pierre Loti).

The Rising Sun and the rule of Britannia

Growing competition with China in Korea led to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, a victory from which Japan received Formosa (Taiwan), but was also forced by Russia, France and Germany to return other territories. This so-called “Triple Intervention” spurred even greater Japanese rearmament, however, and new conflicts of interests with Russia in Korea and Manchuria led to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, a resounding Japanese victory which further increased the country’s influence in Korea (which Japan annexed fully in 1910: https://stage.unherd.com/2017/08/brutality-followed-brutality-followed-brutality-welcome-korean-history/ ).

Most importantly, the emergence of Japan as a serious military power led to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902. The treaty was primarily directed against the shared threat posed by France and, more realistically, Russia in the Far East. It obliged either power to remain neutral if the other found itself at war with a third power. However, should either Britain or Japan be obliged to fight a war against two or more powers, the other signatory was obliged to provide military aid. The treaty thus played a part in keeping both France and Germany out of the Russo-Japanese War.

It was renewed and expanded in scope twice, in 1905 and 1911, and was the basis for Japan’s declaration of war on Germany on 23 August 1914. Indeed, the Imperial Japanese Navy, by releasing Royal Navy warships from the Indian and Pacific oceans, played a significant if indirect part in Britain’s gaining superiority in the Atlantic and North Sea.[3.  From 1917 the Japanese navy played a direct part in the Mediterranean. By 1917, German and Austrian submarines operating were sinking Allied shipping at an alarming rate (a quarter of Allied shipping losses 1914-18 were in the Mediterranean). Japanese cruisers and destroyers provided a significant reinforcement for convoy escorts.]

Back to the darker ages

However, Emperor Meiji had died in 1912, and with him “enlightened rule”. In the post-war period a regressive militaristic gene took hold in Japan, bringing her into conflict first with Russia and then with Britain and America – with cataclysmic results: the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Japan’s surrender led at once to complete disarming of the country, the United States taking responsibility for security, which was later enshrined in the new constitution. This was modified in 1954, however, allowing the raising of “self-defence forces” to enable more US troops to be withdrawn from Japan to take part in the Korean War.

Today, the Jieitai (Japan Self-Defence Forces) have more than 225,000 active-duty troops, a sophisticated navy (by some measures, the fifth largest in the world), and an air force with over 300 fighters. The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has consistently raised defence spending and public support for the forces. Indeed, though less brash, and far from isolationist, his policy echoes the old samurai-Meiji slogan Fukoku kyōhei: “Enrich the country, strengthen the army.”

As Kim Jong-un defiantly pursues his nuclear weapons programme, and China increasingly flexes her muscles in the region, British and American military engagement with Japan is once again increasing. In this, the British embassy’s proximity to the Imperial Palace may well prove to be one of the more useful of the Foreign Office’s Victorian legacies.

Together with a hundred other signatories from the high-tech world, he has called for a ban on “autonomous” weapons – weapons that can operate without humans to make the decisions.

According to The Guardian, Musk and the other signatories say these “morally wrong” weapons should be “added to the list of weapons banned under the UN’s convention on certain conventional weapons (CCW), brought into force in 1983, which includes chemical and intentionally blinding laser weapons.”

Earlier, Musk had pointed out that AI presents a unique problem:

“Normally the way regulations are set up is when a bunch of bad things happen, there’s a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry. It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilisation.”

The campaign to stop killer robots

Meanwhile, a new global effort based in the UK has been launched to bring together robotics/AI experts and mainstream campaigners. They too are looking to the United Nations for action. Here’s part of their manifesto.

“Giving machines the power to decide who lives and dies on the battlefield is an unacceptable application of technology. Human control of any combat robot is essential to ensuring both humanitarian protection and effective legal control. A comprehensive, pre-emptive prohibition on fully autonomous weapons is urgently needed….through an international treaty, as well as through national laws and other measures.”

A committee room in Washington, nearly a decade ago

On 19 June, 2008, I was sitting in a committee room in the United States House of Representatives. It was a hearing of the Foreign Affairs Committee – specifically, its Sub-Committee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade. The topic was a little out of the ordinary: “Does the technological enhancement of humans represent a new arms race?”

As the hearing opened, Congressman Brad Sherman, a Democrat representing California, laid out a clear case that the “weapons of mass destruction” of the 20th century – nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons – are being joined in the 21st by a whole new generation of weapons focused on enhancing human performance that are leading us into a “new kind of arms race”. He quoted futurist Christine Peterson:

“[in 25 years] we are going to live in a sci-fi movie, we just don’t know which one.”

The prime focus of the hearing would be genetics, though a variety of emerging technologies are granting us increasing super-powers. Countries around the world would use these powers for military purposes.

What’s more, said Chairman Sherman: “There is one issue that I think is more explosive than even the spread of nuclear weapons: engineered intelligence.” The Ranking Member (the term for the senior committee member of the minority party, in this case the Republicans), Edward R. Royce, endorsed Sherman’s approach:

“We are dealing with the early stages of a very grave proliferation issue.”

In my own evidence to the Committee I focused on the inter-related character of 21st century “emerging technologies.” A key reason genetics is moving ahead by leaps and bounds lies in the use of information technology to power research. And the “engineered intelligence” referred to by Chairman Sherman (artificial intelligence, as we more usually call it) is increasingly driving everything.

That was true enough in 2008. Nine years later, as Alexa and Siri and Cortana have become a key part of most of our lives, it’s no exaggeration to say that artificial intelligence is all around us. And whatever is true of us as individual citizens and consumers will be yet more true of those working in the defence and security industries.

Sadly, Sherman’s hearing did not lead to action at the United Nations, on the part of the United States government, but it was a prescient effort to track the momentous implications of the steady advance of still-new technologies for global security – while the entire focus of the international community remained on the need to contain the “new” weapons of the 20th century – nuclear, chemical, and biological.

The testimony and full transcript of the hearing is available here.

A UN view

In response to recent efforts, a senior United Nations official, Angela Kane, High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, has had this to say:

“A new type of arms race is underway and its outcome will shape the future of our planet. This race is not one between two countries. It is between the “tortoise” of our slowly changing legal and institutional norms and the “hare” of rapid technological change in the arms industry.”

The case of lethal autonomous weaponry—what many now call killer robots—offers a classic example of this larger challenge.

The stakes could hardly be higher, which may be why large countries are not jumping on the bandwagon of some kind of global ban. Because as President Putin has stated:

“Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”

***

FURTHER READING/RESEARCH

Transcript of the US House of Representatives hearing on human enhancement technologies.

Professor Sharkey of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots make his case at TEDx Sheffield:

DISCLOSURE

Noel Sharkey and Christine Peterson are professional friends of the author, although neither was interviewed for the purpose of this article. As noted, the author was invited to testify to the US House hearing in 2008.