The Secretary of War is the face of America’s campaign against Iran. ‘War is hell, and always will be’, Pete Hegseth said recently. He is relentlessly focused on lethality, and decimating the Iranian military. His critics correctly point out that this isn’t strategic thinking, this is a strategy of tactics. Hegseth’s metrics of success appear to be counting sorties flown, ordnance dropped and missiles destroyed.

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This criticism has been levelled at American strategy makers throughout modern history. During the Vietnam war, the metric of choice was body count. During the global war on terror it was Taliban commanders killed.

The difference this time is that these decisions are being made in a hyperconnected battlefield. Civilian technologies, media platforms, and data infrastructures are now everywhere, deeply entangled with military AI. 

This is war in the smartphone age, where the ubiquity of phones and the infrastructure that supports them is reshaping how we come to know about and fight war. Now everyone participates, wherever they are in the world. Sharing footage as drones hit their hotel rooms or geolocating targets to make money on Polymarket, images broadcast across social media feed the same data environment that AI systems analyse to generate targets. In this loop between digital images and machine analysis, the speed of war is reshaping how strategy itself is made.

Take, for example, the US missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school in Minas that resulted in at least 170 deaths. We await the results of the American investigation but Mahsa Alimardani from the human rights organisation Witness tells us that the attack followed the appearance of an AI-generated image on Instagram that purported to........

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