Julien Pomarde
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Oct 13 2025
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The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have reignited intense international debates over the function and use of weapons on the battlefield. The articulation between the basic (airpower, artillery) and new (drones, AI) applied sciences of battle is a central dimension of those discussions. In a current report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),War and the Modern Battlefield: Insights from Ukraine and the Middle East, the chapter on airpower evolution notes that the instruments and techniques used to carry out these capabilities [of air power superiority] are continually altering, having skilled a very speedy evolution on the battlefield in Ukraine (p. 92). Such assertion exemplifies this bigger, dominant, and but largely unquestioned, instrumental conception of weapons in strategic and navy discourse, the place armaments are routinely framed as instruments or devices used to attain political targets. This framing, rooted in classical strategic thought, particularly Clausewitzian concept, treats battle as a rational extension of politics by different means. Weapons are the means by means of which political will is enforced when diplomacy fails. Nevertheless, to name weapons instruments and even devices is to obscure their distinctive and irreversible results. Military weapons aren’t impartial entities within the arms of rational decision-makers, nor do they passively undergo human will. The capability of weapons to override human intent arises from a property intrinsic to their design and performance: they’re designed to kill, to destroy, to terrorize at an industrial scale. A hammer or a wrench doesn’t provoke cycles of retaliation. But missile strikes, artillery rounds, air bombings, computerized hearth type machine gun do.Their use doesn’t simply serve political ends. Weapons generate mass dying and destruction, and with it, a cascade of (un)anticipated penalties that no different device can produce: the hardening of political positions, the rise of vengeance, the escalation of violence.
This is exactly why the instrument metaphor is flawed and ideologically biased. More than a metaphor, it embodies a dominant imaginative and prescient of what weapons are. It perpetuates the notion that the moral and political implications of weapons violence structurally rely on how they’re used. By frequently reaffirming the opportunity of management, the device metaphor legitimizes the enlargement of navy applied sciences and infrastructures below the guise of strategic necessity. As Elke Schwarz reveals in Death Machines (2018, chapter 4), this core-concept of management in strategic pondering naturalizes the presence of weapons in political life and sustains the idea that extra superior instruments will yield higher outcomes. In doing so, it contributes to the normalization, and even theeternalization, of militarization, embedding violence deeper into the buildings of governance and technological improvement.
But if weapons aren’t merely strategic instruments, then what are they? Addressing this query requires shifting past the traditional frameworks of strategic evaluation, which are likely to seeing weapons by way of their meant capabilities or their operational effectiveness. To have interaction with the social nature of weapons, we should start not with what they’re designed to attain, however with what they constantly produce: large-scale destruction. From this attitude, my level is that the truth of weapons in fashionable warfare is formed much less by coherent strategic reasoning than by a pervasive technological fetishism. More exactly, by a political-military mystification of destruction that the technological energy of weapons induces. Contemporary scholarship on battle and armaments ought to extra severely have interaction with the proposition that the event and deployment of weapons are sometimes pushed not by rational strategic calculus, however by a extra elemental perception within the inherent worth of technologically enhanced violence. This perception manifests as a conviction that elevated lethality and damaging capability are synonymous with navy progress and the promise of victory. In this context, brute pressure is greater than a tactical desire, or a perverse impact of some conflictual configurations like attrition, however a foundational ideology of contemporary warfare, that conflates technological development with strategic efficacy, no matter its precise political utility.
In historic phrases, the valorisation of brute pressure has considerably influenced the evolution of warfare because the early twentieth century, exhibiting the depth with which human intent and management has been alienated and subsumed by the fashionable technological situation. World War I stands as a poignant and emblematic illustration of this contemporary militaristic fetishism. The dramatic escalation in firepower, notably by means of artillery and machine weapons, was each a principal reason for the strategic impasse and the proposed answer to the mass slaughter that characterised the Western Front. Although World War II witnessed a renewed emphasis on maneuver warfare, facilitated by the mixing of motorized know-how into navy operations, this shift didn’t basically alter the underlying reliance on overwhelming pressure. As Michael Sherry aptly characterised in his evaluation of US strategic bombing, these campaigns signify the triumphs of technological fanaticism (The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon, 1987). The systematic concentrating on and incineration of German and Japanese city facilities throughout World War II exemplified an strategy of maximal destruction in opposition to each civilian populations and industrial capability.
In subsequent conflicts such because the Korean, Indochina and Vietnam Wars, France and the United States largely retained this paradigm. Despite being labelled restricted or small wars through the bipolar period, the size and depth of violence deployed had been something however. These engagements had been marked by a persistent adherence to a quantitative and technological conception of navy energy, whereby superiority in firepower and superior weaponry was presumed to make sure strategic success. The US air marketing campaign in Korea was in pure continuity with the carpet bombings of WWII. As Bruce Cumings has documented (The Korean War, 2010, p. 159), American forces dropped extra tonnage of bombs on North Korea 635 000 tons than in all the Pacific theater throughout WWII 503 000 tons, concentrating on not solely navy infrastructure but additionally dams, factories, and civilian facilities. Dozens of cities had been partially or nearly-completely razed. The Korean War exemplified the continual brutal logic of whole battle, through which technological superiority was wielded for devastation.As I not too long ago demonstratedregarding the 2 Indochina wars, French and American navy practices had been formed by a technocratic imaginative and prescient of effectivity, that prioritized the statistical optimization of weapons firepower and operational tempo over political or moral restraint. This economic system of pressure rendered devastation not solely permissible however procedurally vital, embedding mass violence into the strategic material of counterinsurgency and reworking pure brutality right into a rationalized characteristic of navy conduct. However, technological escalation did not yield decisive outcomes. Instead, and as Nick Turse as extensively documented (Kill the whole lot that strikes: The Real American War in Vietnam, 2013), it resulted in extended devastation of the Indochinese setting, intensive civilian casualties and battle crimes, inflicted by means of each aerial bombardment and floor operations.
In the late-modern period, the fetish of pressure as a central organizing precept of warfare continues unabated. Although up to date conflicts involving Western forces usually exhibit higher civil/combatants discrimination and a extra cheap use of firepower than within the twentieth century, the underlying mystification of brutality stays largely unchanged. The protracted counterinsurgency campaigns related to the War on Terror had been predicated on the idea that Western technological superiority might overcome irregular and less-equipped rebel forces. Consequently, a lot of the strategic discourse surrounding interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq centred on the optimization and allocation of navy sources. This technocentric imaginative and prescient culminated in initiatives such because the troop surge in Afghanistan, which, regardless of its scale, yielded few substantive outcomes past an intensification of navy operations within the early 2010s.
More not too long ago, the battle in Ukraine has devolved right into a battle of attrition, whereby strategic success is measured by the relentless accumulation of destruction, manifested by means of missile strikes, drone warfare, and sustained artillery bombardments concentrating on each navy and civilian infrastructures. The drones trajectory is especially revealing of the sudden and damaging path that navy know-how can take. Initially marketed through the War on Terror as devices of surgical precision and moral warfare (but accountable for a major variety of civil casualties), using drones has now escalated additional. Russia is deploying huge salvos of unmanned aerial methods to bombard Ukrainian cities, remodeling what was as soon as framed as a precision device right into a mechanism of indiscriminate attrition and terror.
Similarly, the battle in Gaza exemplifies a stark utility of overwhelming pressure. Airpower and artillery fires have been used at gigantic ranges, particularly as regards to the very small geographical floor of the battle. Full-scale destruction has constituted the express orientation of the battle. Also, Gaza reveals how the fetish of pressure is now augmented by algorithmic concentrating on and synthetic intelligence. These applied sciences have been built-in right into a navy logic that prioritizes effectivity in destruction over discrimination in concentrating on. And the much-vaunted precision of AI-assisted strikes doesn’t mirror restraint, however moderately the accuracy of firepower deployed to satisfy a generalized goal of devastation. The AI promise of precision, on this context, turns into a technical advantage divorced from moral constraint, serving the fetish of pressure byaccelerating devastationrather than to restrict it.
These instances collectively underscore the persistence of a militaristic ethos that equates technological and kinetic dominance with strategic efficacy, on the expense of moral and political issues. What hyperlinks these conflicts, from the trenches of the Great War to the devastation in Gaza, just isn’t a coherent set of strategic rationales, however a persistent perception within the redemptive energy of organized violence. Strategy, within the lens of this historical past of weapons in battle, seems much less as a information to political motion than as a military-centric try to lend coherence to the relentless cascade of firepower that defines modernity. This perception within the redemption of brute pressure, nonetheless, just isn’t solely misguided; it’s profoundly harmful. The previous 110 years of steady mass devastation because the starting of WWI fairly means that the cult of technological superiority in warfare doesn’t resolve instability and struggling however moderately deepens and perpetuates them. This historic trajectory means that removed from being a corrective pressure, the fetish of pressure usually capabilities as a catalyst for extended violence and systemic destruction.
In this context, resisting the fetish of pressure requires greater than appeals to diplomacy or humanitarian beliefs. It calls for a scientific and political confrontation with the institutional, cultural, and financial buildings that maintain and normalize organized violence. The concept that diplomacy, justice, or human safety can merely be foregrounded overlooks the entrenched pursuits and strategic logics that privilege navy options. To correctly suppose battle and forestall it, we should not solely rethink weapons, but additionally the methods of thought and energy that render them central to political motion. The crucial to withstand the fetish of pressure is additional heightened by the immense environmental and well being toll of contemporary warfare. From the contamination of soil and water by explosives to the huge carbon emissions generated by armed operations and weapons manufacturing, the ecological footprint ofarmed conflictandmilitary activityoverall is staggering. And the continued international remilitarization will onlyexacerbatethe local weather disaster we’re fabricating. The instrumental view of weapons not solely naturalizes organized violence but additionally obscures the long-term environmental degradation it entails. It makes the critique of militarized technological supremacy not only a scientific and political necessity, however an eco-existential one.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
- The Remote Warfare Paradox: Democracies, Risk Aversion and Military Engagement
- Remote Warfare and the Utility of Military and Security Contractors
- Effective, Deployable, Accountable: Pick Two: Regulating Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems
- Russian Military Aggression or Civil War in Ukraine?
- Remote Warfare: A Debate Worth the Buzz?
- Why India Needs a Gender Policy for its Armed Forces
About The Author(s)
Julien Pomardeis Associate Professor of International Politics on the University of Lige (Belgium). Prior to this place, he has been a postdoctoral fellow on the Universit libre de Bruxelles and the University of Oxford (Wiener Anspach Fellowship). He is now conducting an FNRS funded analysis mission on the historic sociology of weapons in floor fight. My work has been printed in tutorial journals such because the European Journal of International Relations, Security Dialogue, Review of International Studies, Critical Military Studies, Defence Studies, Cultures & Conflits and Critique internationale.
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Drone WarfareMilitaryWeapons