The new art of war: How tech learnt to kill generals first

 From Nicolas Maduro's handcuffs to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's killing, a new generation of battlefield tech has flipped the oldest rule in warfare on its head.

For as long as humans have waged war, the hierarchy of death has been remarkably consistent: foot soldiers die first.

For centuries, young soldiers fought each other across trenches, fields and jungles while their commanders watched from a safe distance.

Napoleon directed his carnage from horseback at a careful remove. Hitler cowered underground while Germans bled on every front. Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole, alive and well, long after hundreds of thousands had perished in his name.

That script has now been torn up entirely.

In the past two years, the world has witnessed a staggering parade of once-untouchable leaders meeting their ends with surgical, almost matter-of-fact precision.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for thirty-six years, was killed in a joint US-Israeli airstrike on Tehran — alongside his defence minister, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander-in-chief, and the chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.

Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, was killed in a strike on his fortified underground headquarters in Beirut. Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran itself. Yahya Sinwar was found and killed not by a massive ground offensive but by a small IDF patrol in Rafah.

And Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, who reportedly had a network of protectors, was captured by US special forces in a dramatic raid on his Caracas residence.

Clearly, the age of the invincible warlord is over.

So what changed?

Technology.

Specifically, technology developed by a cluster of companies, many headquartered in Silicon Valley, that have quietly rewired the mechanics of modern war.

Start with Palantir. Founded by Peter Thiel in 2003 and backed by the CIA’s venture capital arm, the company was built on a radical premise: fuse enormous amounts of disparate data — satellite imagery, phone intercepts, financial records, social media posts, facial recognition — into a single intelligence picture, and you can find anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The company’s Gotham platform, used by the CIA and the US military for years, is now deeply embedded in Israel’s AI-assisted targeting systems. In January 2024, Palantir signed a strategic partnership with Israel’s ministry of defence.

It is likely, for example, that when Sinwar moved, the system had some idea. And when Khamenei slept, it may well have known where.

Then there’s Anduril – founded by Palmer Luckey who built Oculus VR and sold it to Facebook for US$2 billion – which has since pivoted from virtual reality to autonomous weapons systems.

Its Lattice AI platform meshes sensor data from drones, radars and cameras into a live battlefield picture, tracking high-value targets with a speed human analysts can never match.

The US Army recently awarded Anduril a contract worth up to US$20 billion.

Add drones to this equation and modern warfare changes even more. Iranian-made Shahed drones have shown how cheap, mass-produced unmanned aerial systems can reshape battlefield economics, flooding airspace and wearing down defences.

Much more advanced American and Israeli autonomous strike drones, guided by real-time AI, can loiter, wait, identify and strike with minimal human intervention.

Let’s not forget the hypersonic missiles, exceeding Mach 5 with manoeuvrable flight paths nearly impossible to intercept, which have compressed decision-making timelines to mere minutes. No bunker is deep enough; no safehouse is remote enough for them.

Perhaps the most remarkable development is nonphysical: laser-based missile defence.

Israel’s Iron Beam system uses directed energy to destroy incoming drones and missiles — no bullets, no explosives, just photons at the speed of light, at roughly three dollars per interception compared with US$50,000 for an Iron Dome interceptor.

While this system is still early-stage, the trajectory is clear: defence may be becoming cheaper than offence for the first time in history.

Underpinning all of this is AI.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI are increasingly known within national security circles for processing intelligence at a scale no human can replicate — pattern recognition, anomaly detection, predictive modelling.

The Pentagon awarded contracts worth up to US$200 million each to these firms in 2025 for access to advanced commercial AI. So, almost certainly, have the IDF and several other major powers.

What does all this mean?

The most dangerous place on a modern battlefield is no longer the front line — it’s the command chair. Leaders who built elaborate security architectures are discovering that none is invulnerable when your adversary has near-omniscient data fusion, autonomous strike capability and AI that never sleeps.

If launching a war now means your own leadership faces acute personal risk, not just your soldiers, the incentives may shift dramatically. Perhaps this will act as a deterrent.

But there is a darker corollary: these same technologies will drive every ambitious power to develop better intelligence and more sophisticated weapons of their own. And this may not be good for world peace.

However, the message cannot be clearer: the foot soldier is not safe. He never was. But for the first time in history, neither is the general. - FMT

 The writer can be contacted at kathirgugan@protonmail.com.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.