War, Algorithms, and the Illusion of Neutral Power
War Without Illusion
There is a particular tone one encounters in conversations about the current conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran. It is the tone of those who begin a sentence with “everybody knows,” and end it with something that, strictly speaking, nobody can quite prove.
Let us begin there, if only for the pleasure of clearing the table.
For more than forty years, it has been a persistent perception among analysts that neutralising Iran has been a strategic priority for Israel. Equally, it has been an observable fact that successive American presidents have shown a remarkable reluctance to transform that priority into a full-scale war.
Until, perhaps, now.
Was this the inevitable moment? Or merely the latest episode in a long sequence of near-decisions, miscalculations, and carefully measured risks? History, as ever, resists simplicity.
The Small Matter of Machines
We are told, with increasing confidence, that artificial intelligence is now deeply embedded in modern warfare. This is correct, though less dramatic than it sounds.
Acceleration Without Judgment
AI does not sit in a leather chair in the Situation Room, nor does it clear its throat before offering advice. What it does is far more efficient—and therefore far more dangerous: it accelerates.
Targets are identified faster. Scenarios are simulated quicker. Probabilities are generated with a reassuring numerical elegance. Where once hesitation had time to grow, now decisions arrive pre-packaged, discreetly labelled, and statistically supported.
One can imagine the scene. A screen. A set of options. Each accompanied by a percentage—comfortingly precise, as all good uncertainties should be.
Did the machines suggest victory? Of course not. Machines suggest likelihoods. It is humans who hear promises.
Winning, in the Most Inconvenient Sense
After weeks of bombardment, one is confronted with an awkward question: what does it mean to win?
If victory were defined by immediate collapse, the answer would be simple. Yet Iran has not collapsed. It continues, adapts, absorbs, replies. In certain traditions of strategic thought, this alone is already a form of success.
To persist is to deny the opponent the clarity of triumph. To resist is to rewrite the narrative.
It is, one might say, a rather impolite way of winning.
The Question Nobody Asks
One is tempted to ask a rather unfashionable question. Not about targets—those, one assumes, have been calculated with impressive precision—but about consequences.
Beyond Targeting
Was the machinery of intelligence ever directed beyond the immediate strike? Or was it confined, with admirable efficiency, to the geometry of destruction, leaving the arithmetic of aftermath politely unexamined?
Because the real calculation, if one insists on using that word, does not end with impact. It begins there.
Prolonged conflict of this nature does not remain contained. It travels—through markets, through supply chains, through energy, and eventually, quite unceremoniously, onto the tables of those who have never heard of the conflict and yet will pay for it.
The Missing Question
One might have expected that such trajectories—financial strain, systemic fragility, the quiet slide from scarcity into something more severe—would be precisely the domain in which algorithmic modelling excels.
The data, one assumes, is not lacking.
Which leaves an awkward possibility: either the question was never seriously posed, or the answers were less convenient than the questions.
A Simple Lesson
It is, if one may permit a rather elementary analogy, the sort of reasoning most parents attempt to instil early on. Before acting, one considers the consequence.
One does not place a hand upon a flame merely because the immediate act is possible. The burn, as experience tends to confirm, arrives shortly thereafter.
States, it seems, do not always benefit from such instruction.
The Paradox of Power
More data does not necessarily produce more wisdom.
Early military success does not necessarily produce strategic victory.
And the belief that complex systems can be fully understood through models remains, at best, an elegant illusion.
The Irresistible Temptation of Intelligence Without Desire
And here we arrive at the most curious idea of all.
If human decisions are so frequently entangled with power, ego, money, and the persistent desire to impose order on others, might there exist a form of governance untouched by such motivations?
Artificial intelligence, we are told, does not desire. It does not covet influence. It does not accumulate wealth. It does not wake in the morning with a sudden urge to redraw borders or to leave its name attached to a doctrine.
One could almost feel reassured.
Almost.
The Illusion of Neutrality
Because artificial intelligence, for all its admirable lack of ambition, suffers from a more subtle limitation: it does not define its own purpose.
It optimises what it is given. It refines what it is told to pursue. It executes, with admirable discipline, objectives it did not choose.
And so the question returns, slightly altered but considerably more dangerous:
Who, precisely, is doing the choosing?
Of Vice-Presidents and Vacuum
It has been suggested, with appropriate caution, that political instability could open the door to new configurations of power—ones in which technological actors move beyond advisory roles into something resembling co-governance.
History offers a consistent lesson: where a vacuum appears, something fills it.
It is rarely wisdom.
A Modest Proposal for Eternal Peace
There is, finally, a thought so audacious that it deserves to be entertained, if only for a moment.
What if a system truly existed—one that neither desired power nor wealth, one that felt no satisfaction in conflict and no interest in domination?
Would such a system produce peace?
It is a charming idea. It has the elegance of a well-cut suit and the fragility of fine glass.
Because peace is not merely the absence of desire. It is the presence of judgment.
And judgment, inconveniently, requires values.
Values require choice.
And choice, however one dresses it, is the beginning of power.
What appears as a minor exchange exposes a deeper transformation. Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the status of a passive instrument; it is being integrated into the architecture of power itself. In the military domain, this integration extends the classical monopoly of violence into an algorithmic dimension, where decision, execution and attribution become progressively opaque. The question is no longer whether such systems are used, but under which logic they operate—and who remains accountable once action is mediated through layers of computation. The language of “feeling” does not humanise the machine; it obscures the structure of power behind it.
What appears as a minor exchange exposes a deeper transformation. Artificial intelligence is no longer confined to the status of a passive instrument; it is being integrated into the architecture of power itself. In the military domain, this integration extends the classical monopoly of violence into an algorithmic dimension, where decision, execution and attribution become progressively opaque. The question is no longer whether such systems are used, but under which logic they operate—and who remains accountable once action is mediated through layers of computation. The language of “feeling” does not humanise the machine; it obscures the structure of power behind it.
Closing Without Conclusion
We find ourselves, then, in a peculiar moment.
War is conducted with unprecedented speed, yet justified with familiar arguments. Technology promises clarity, yet introduces new forms of opacity.
And somewhere between the two, the old question remains:
Is the problem the absence of intelligence—or the nature of those who wield it?
It would be reassuring to believe that one day the answer might be entrusted to something incapable of ambition.
It would be even more reassuring to know who, precisely, will be doing the programming.
And perhaps the most disquieting question is no longer who decides, but whether we will still recognise the moment when decision has ceased to belong to us.
