“[D]ual use” as an idea and/or as a materially identifiable site, object, or body is a fiction of liberal lawmaking & warmaking. Drawing on the notion of ‘martial politics’ we argue that civ & mil spaces are importantly co-constitutive, co-produced & thus only ever partially disentangled, if at all.
Algorithmic targeting systems are the perfect tools to obliterate rules of engagement, as humans who are considered bottlenecks to decision making,"rubber stamp" machine decisions after seconds of deliberation, & acceptable level of collateral damage is increased to reflect expanded ability to kill.
Reuters Exclusive
"U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school."
"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East."
AI is erasing the line between civilian and military life. | https://bit.ly/4sLCPdN
Thomas Christian Bächle and Jascha Bareis argue that today’s AI is not simply “dual use”: it is inherently violent in design, and increasingly fuses daily life with geopolitics.
The legal arguments and architecture for what's happening in Iran now, and were deployed in relation to Gaza, really did not come out of nowhere.
The pre-emption and targetted assassination arguments might appear spectacular, but they were the workaday archiecture of the war on terror.
"We should worry less about autonomous robots, and more about pseudo-autonomous systems embedded in bureaucracies that enable them to do things that they used not be able to do, but with a lot of slop."
Really necessary set of essay about this moment:
www.jadaliyya.com/Details/47192
We were founded as Iraq Veterans Against the War over the devastation we saw with our own eyes when Bush claimed we were going to liberate the people of Iraq and protect Americans. That war is now referred to as a blunder but it was a crime just like this War on Iran is now. /1
"Whatever happens, though, one thing is clear – that this use of force by the US and Israel is manifestly illegal. It is as plain a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as one could possibly have."
@ejiltalk.bsky.social
www.ejiltalk.org/the-american...
“My heart is broken,” Shariatmadar said. “For Sara and for all the children we lost today. I want the world to know that the children are the real victims. Every day that passes without a solution increases the pain and the suffering for the families and for the children alike.”
apropos of nothing:
A stark reality has therefore emerged in modern warfare: ...AI is reliably providing an alibi for the prosecution of wholesale methods of killing without, in turn, provoking much by way of substantive political censure or legal accountability.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Maybe it’s because I’m a colonial historian but so many of these white nation states seem to behave exactly like they did in the 19th century: ‘your leaders aren’t right for you,’ ‘we’re only killing you/colonizing you/installing puppet leaders for your own good’
WSJ reporting that the U.S. used Claude for the air strikes in Iran. Centcom has been using Claude "for intelligence assessments, target identification and simulating battle scenarios" www.wsj.com/livecoverage...
Noteworthy that Amodei makes a distinction among humans permissively targeted in the name of democracy: "We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions ... But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values."
Together with some stellar colleagues I reflect on the implications of this very public dispute between Anthropic and the DoD about ethical red lines. Read it here on @opiniojuris.bsky.social ttps://opiniojuris.org/2026/02/26/the-pentagon-anthropic-clash-over-military-ai-guardrails/
[A]n AI model w/ more than 100 bil parameters planned & delegated the msn to smaller models w/ around 10 bil parameters running on both the ground vehicle & airborne drones Each node functioned as an independent agent...The system executed the kill sequence w/o real-time human intervention."
"Trump appears eager to follow Israel’s example, which is why some analysts say it may not be long before ICE dispatches armed drones over the skies of American cities to hunt down targets—in this case, those the Trump admin classifies 'as a threat to the safety or security of the American people.'"
This thread highlights three stories recently documented by Airwars, offering a glimpse into the loss and pain felt by civilians in conflict.
airwars.org/casualty-rec...
"The flight data showed that between 39 and 47 hours elapsed from the estimated time of the strike to when SAR operations could realistically have begun ... In maritime SAR operations, where survival times in open water are measured in hours, not days, a delay of this length is significant."
"[T]he use of AI as a weapon of mass destruction is neither an ‘error’ nor a result of acting in the heat of the moment, but the outcome of the interplay between military imperatives, new technological possibilities, and the dehumanization of victims."
The slow motion stage. Amidst the destruction and death, Israel has moved the yellow line another three hundred meters west.
Unfortunately, US mil's CHMR program has been mostly a paper tiger, even prior to reductions. Per the Costs of War Project; "Since 9/11, America’s forever wars have killed an estimated 940k people through direct violence, more than 432k [46%] of them civilians." US mil has yet to acknowledge most.
"Hegseth said Grok will go live inside the Defense Department later this month and announced that he would 'make all appropriate data' from the military’s IT systems available for 'AI exploitation.' He also said data from intelligence databases would be fed into AI systems."
Engaging and insightful analysis: "The gross imbalance between the emphasis on perpetrators’ moral character, suffering, and interests, on the one hand, and the devastating moral and physical injuries suffered by the victims of war crimes, on the other, is typically erased by war crime apologia."
1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism.
abcnews.go.com/Internationa...
1/As @nytimes.com reports, Venezuela/Honduras comparison shows this is not about drugs. It is about personal interests and those of the inner circle around Trump. Trump wants Venezuelan resources. Brologarchy wants to protect network city in Honduras.
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/03/w...
"Functions now performed autonomously include: pilotless takeoff or hovering, geolocation, navigation to areas of attack, as well as target recognition, tracking and pursuit — up to and including terminal strike, the lethal endpoint of the journey."
I fear we are going to have to say this a lot again:
Int law prohibits bombing countries for the sake of democracy. FOR VERY GOOD REASON. It tends not to work.
Attacking a country because its leader lacks legitimacy - whether as pretext or sincerely held rationale - is still just an aggression.
“the principles of international law” rather prohibit bombing countries because their leaders “lack legitimacy”.
In the last two years, Yuval Abraham @972mag.com brought groundbreaking investigative reporting on war crimes in Gaza. This podcast gives a glimpse into the work behind it - and why you should support it.
www.972mag.com/podcast-unco...
