*Originally published in 2025 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered directly to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have reignited intense global debates over the role and use of weapons on the battlefield. The articulation between the ‘classic’ (airpower, artillery) and ‘new’ (drones, AI) technologies of war is a central dimension of these discussions. In a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), War and the Modern Battlefield: Insights from Ukraine and the Middle East, the chapter on airpower evolution notes that “the tools and tactics used to perform these functions [of air power superiority] are constantly changing, having experienced a particularly rapid evolution on the battlefield in Ukraine” (p. 92). Such statement exemplifies this larger, dominant, and yet largely unquestioned, instrumental conception of weapons in strategic and military discourse, where armaments are routinely framed as ‘tools’ or ‘instruments’ used to achieve political objectives. This framing, rooted in classical strategic thought, especially Clausewitzian theory, treats war as a rational extension of politics by other means. Weapons are the means through which political will is enforced when diplomacy fails. Nevertheless, to call weapons ‘tools’ or even ‘instruments’ is to obscure their unique and irreversible effects. Military weapons are not neutral entities in the hands of rational decision-makers, nor do they passively submit to human will. The capacity of weapons to override human intent arises from a property intrinsic to their design and function: they are designed to kill, to destroy, to terrorize at an industrial scale. A hammer or a wrench does not provoke cycles of retaliation. But missile strikes, artillery rounds, air bombings, automatic fire form machine gun do. Their use does not just ‘serve’ political ends. Weapons generate mass death and destruction, and with it, a cascade of (un)expected consequences that no other ‘tool’ can produce: the hardening of political positions, the rise of vengeance, the escalation of violence.

This is precisely why the ‘instrument’ metaphor is flawed and ideologically biased. More than a metaphor, it embodies a dominant vision of what weapons are. It perpetuates the notion that the ethical and political implications of weapons’ violence structurally depend on how they are used. By continually reaffirming the possibility of control, the ‘tool’ metaphor legitimizes the expansion of military technologies and infrastructures under the guise of strategic necessity. As Elke Schwarz shows in Death Machines (2018, chapter 4), this core-concept of control in strategic thinking naturalizes the presence of weapons in political life and sustains the belief that more advanced tools will yield better outcomes. In doing so, it contributes to the normalization, and even the eternalization, of militarization, embedding violence deeper into the structures of governance and technological development.

But if weapons are not simply strategic tools, then what are they? Addressing this question requires moving........

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