The reductive nature of military process

Abstract Modern warfare is a reductive pursuit shaped by digital technologies that promise an idealised, precise conflict. Martial cultures aspire to hyper-surveillance systems driven by advanced technologies and outsourced expertise they covet and themselves lack. Martial cultures assume digital tools can deliver perfect representations of enemies for precision-guided destruction, believing datafied, optimised war ensures swift, decisive outcomes by targeting the opponents’ material foundations. Martial cultures are captured by a managerial ideology (see Klikauer, 2015; Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo, 2020) enacted through supporting technologies of datafication. It deifies rational managers and engineers as architects of streamlined processes and in warfare, it feeds into a techno-centric belief that conflict can be rendered predictable and efficient. Its intent is to flatten and shift expertise away from military actors and into private sector hands. However, it has failed to reduce the human cost of war or accelerate its resolution. Instead, digital technologies perpetuate an illusion of optimised warfare, periodically reinvented but strategically limited. By analysing technologies used in the War on Terror, this article argues that war itself has become incidental to an obsession with managerialism. The connection between state and the purpose of war is broken and must be reconstructed for the sake of taking conflict seriously as an issue that has brutal consequences for those subject to it.