There is a certain shimmer to the language of the new war, the gloss of the corporate campus laid over the battlefield. We read of a “target factory” employed by the Israel Defense Forces in the Gaza Strip, an AI system named Habsora, or “the Gospel.” This system does not command armies; it “produces targets at a fast pace,” accelerating the selection of what to bomb from 50 targets a year to 100 a day. The locution is precise and anodyne, suggesting a process scrubbed of human friction, of the messy, fallible business of judgment. It suggests an assembly line. This is the new aesthetic of conflict, in which the fog of war is not so much pierced as managed and optimized by an algorithm’s unblinking gaze.

The idea of the automaton in battle is not new. The thread runs from the trip-wi

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