Interview by Nell WhittakerPortrait courtesy of CAPAS

NW In the Russia-Ukraine war, and Israel’s genocide in Gaza, how is the violence conducted? What similarities are there, and what differences?

ES Both conflicts have been used by defence tech companies as laboratories for testing and “refining” their products. The conflicts are also similar – although different in proportionate terms – in that civilians largely bear the brunt of war. In Gaza, by the IDF’s own admission, between 70 and 80% of the dead have been civilians, and many more have been wounded, displaced or otherwise harmed. Similarly, in Ukraine, 53,000 civilians have died since 2022 and thousands more have been made disabled by the conflict. But Gaza and Ukraine also differ significantly. Israel’s onslaught on Gaza is a highly asymmetrical conflict. It is an urban war, which runs roughshod over questions of proportionality – the requirement to use proportionate force  in relation to military aims – and discrimination, or the requirement to distinguish between civilians and combatants. With the Russia-Ukraine war, the two sides are state parties and so are more equally matched. With the Russia-Ukraine war, the standard view has been that drones, specifically AI-enabled drones, have been instrumental to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. But to infer that drones matter more than other weapon systems, or that drone swarms constitute the inevitable future of warfare, is misguided. Anti-drone technology is developing at an accelerated pace, and drones don’t always work as well as intended if weather conditions are poor, the networks are unstable, or other adverse conditions prevail. Drones cannot be stockpiled because they become outdated quickly. This is perhaps why defence tech companies are shifting some of their attention to industrialisation efforts. Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza has foregrounded a different type of digital technology: AI-decision support systems and other AI systems that assist in discovering, finding and tracking targets. Examples of these systems include Lavender, Gospel, Alchemist and Where’s Daddy. This is AI for evaluating and processing surveillance data, AI for “preventative” action. These are not autonomous weapon systems, but systems that marginalise human agency and shift the act of killing, and inflicting damage, towards the prioritisation of speed and scale. In short, systems like these embed the human into an accelerated technological action chain, one which erodes moral restraint against inflicting violence. We’ve already observed this technology and its associated dynamics in the drone wars of the 2010s, but AI accelerates both these phenomena. These new human-machine configurations produce a shift in perspective, through which violence is increasingly prioritised and permitted. The focus on “lethality” that has dominated military doctrine in recent years is not accidental – it emerged hand-in-glove with the greater prominence and prioritisation of AI-enabled military tech and autonomous weapons. While we must acknowledge that traditional weapons – bombs, missiles – still do most of the damage, AI-enabled weapons have not resulted in less violence, but in a greater tolerance for violence.

NW For much of human history, war has been deeply implicated in social belief systems of bravery, heroism and risk. How does technology change our ideas about valour?

ES In a sense, the “warrior” ethos,  and ideas of valour and virtue in war, have always changed with new technologies. As appetite for weaponry that separates the assailant from the object increases, so does demand for those objects. However, bravery, courage and other virtues remain important, because without these notions of moral “reward”, the compulsion to engage in an activity that we are psychologically averse to – namely, killing other humans – becomes difficult to maintain. That is why ideas of nationalism and patriotism – motivators to engage in violence in the name of a state, a nation or a community – are so important. During the 2010 US drone wars the image of the cubical warrior emerged, or as Christopher Coker’s excellent 2013 book Warrior Geeks called them. When the use of violence is decided and applied from a radically extended distance, notions of bravery and courage no longer hold. During the 2010s, the notion of conducting war “well” became more prominent amongst commentators, with “well” being understood as more measured and discriminatory, like a medical professional eliminating unwanted risks. Here, then, technological processes and procedures supersede traditional ideas of the warrior ethos or spirit. Technological processes also served as a stand-in for ethical considerations – often efficiency, expediency and ethicality are conflated. Where humans have less agency on account of the technological configurations within which they are embedded, these virtues become either marginalised or rerouted. Or, they become subverted into heroic narratives of “defending the West” or quasi-spiritual narratives of “good versus evil”, as some defence tech companies like Palantir and Anduril espouse.

NW Drones shoot injured people and people with white flags. Are the rules of war disrupted specifically by technology, or were they always a fiction?

ES Warfare is fundamentally about imposing one’s will onto another political community, and inflicting damage on objects and bodies. This is why there are laws of armed conflict, or International Humanitarian Law (IHL). To some degree, technology can be used to observe and uphold these limitations, to monitor ceasefire agreements, or for collateral damage estimates, for example. But technologies also have their own seductive properties that direct our attention in specific ways. Violence enacted through our current AI-enabled systems is more easily applied and justified through its technological sophistication. The demise of ethics is followed by the erosion of adherence  to IHL. Ethics is required to ensure that IHL is not merely a fiction or, worse still, a tool of injustice, but rather that the ethos of IHL – civilian protection in even the most awful circumstances – is considered. When the logic of technology shapes our perspectives, then there is a risk that ethics becomes a technical matter. In the last year, I have spoken to many audiences, often with military backgrounds, and one question emerges with greater frequency than in the ten years or more since I started studying war: are ethics a luxury? We seem to be reaching a point where ethics is on track toward catastrophic failure in the context of war. .