To What End? When Technology and Media Seduce Politicians Into Taking Military Action

Hyperconnectivity has implications for strategic decision-making: how do ends/ways/means align when online media is constantly shaping what objectives are acceptable and technology is seducing us into using military power?

Over the last few months we have seen how hyperconnected the contemporary battlefield has become. Civilian technologies, media platforms, and data infrastructures are now deeply entangled with military operations. This is reshaping the conduct of war, seducing us into focusing on media spectacle and in the process revealing something about strategy making in digitally integrated contexts.

On Friday (6 March 2026), the White House defined victory against Iran as the moment when the President “determines Iran no longer poses a threat to the US”. Victory didn’t involve a formal surrender. It was to be decided by the President himself.

By Monday (9 March 2026), with oil prices surging, voters getting worried and threats to the economy mounting, the President declared that “I think the war is very complete, pretty much” before stepping back and saying, “we haven’t won enough”.

These rhetorical flourishes contrast with the way connectivity is reshaping how news and intelligence are framing the way war is represented and fought around the world. At the start of the campaign against Iran, for example, it emerged that the location of Iran’s senior leadership had been compromised because their bodyguards continued to carry their cellphones while on duty.

A week later, while Tony Blair was telling the British government it should have stood together with Donald Trump, the UK Ministry of Defence released a news story designed to divert the British news agenda away from its Iran policy. Unfortunately, however, the way the story had been constructed became more important that the story itself. This was because the footage taken by the Minister of State inadvertently helped the Russians geolocate a Ukrainian repair base funded by Britain.

In each of these cases, the medium had become part of the story. The bodyguards’ phones functioned as surveillance devices, generating location data that could be combined with other intelligence sources to reveal patterns of life. Similarly, the British press release created operational intelligence not because the team were connected in real time, but because they failed to consider what information the footage revealed once it was shared on social media.

In both cases, civilian technology was crucial for making military activity possible. And this is true of how the armed forces leverage Artificial Intelligence into their campaign planning. Capable of detecting patterns in diffuse datasets at a greater speed, scale and clarity than human analysts, US commanders have been using Anthropic’s Claude to help with military targeting.

For military organizations, the pressure to use AI is operational. Systems that promise to help reach decisions at speed and scale offer a solution to the complexity of modern warfare where decision-making is increasingly compressed by social media cycles. For technology companies, however, the concern is about responsibility and control. Thus, Anthropic has insisted that humans must remain in the decision-making loop. For them, AI cannot replace military judgement. This has infuriated the Pentagon who continue to want greater freedom to experiment with AI to maintain military advantage.

This disagreement points to a deeper tension. Seduced by the possibility that targeting by itself will produce strategic effects, there are risks that humans will be displaced out of the decision-making loop. This reflects a wider struggle over how much faith should be put into and strategic authority ceded to machines.

What becomes difficult to assess, particularly given the limited quality of publicly available information, is how this dynamic is playing out in the Middle East. Although the political objectives of the campaign have been articulated in different ways and with varying emphasis, their realization is increasingly framed through the rhetoric of operational success and the narratives circulating in the media environment. If acceptable regime change happens, then the mission is a success. If acceptable regime change does not happen, then the mission is also a success.

In a churning media environment, knowing what strategic success story will stick in the minds of voters is contingent on factors that cannot easily be predicted. Legacy media struggles for clicks and viewers even as social media produces dysphoria and uncertainty. Winning the narrative in this context means making a splash, going viral and speaking directly to the audience. This is reshaping how our leaders talk about war. And in Trump’s case is producing narratives while the rest of us try to understand his strategy.

The claim that the goal is “unconditional surrender” illustrates the problem. Such language shifts attention away from clearly defined political conditions and toward a declaratory end point that can be announced whenever the administration chooses. In this sense, the war ends when leaders say it ends.

Hyperconnectivity has implications for strategic decision-making: how do ends/ways/means align when online media is constantly shaping what objectives are acceptable and technology is seducing us into using military power? How might America’s allies fit into this constantly evolving spectacle when their political and strategic constraints are different from the rhetorical flourishes and military capabilities of their transatlantic partner? In these contexts, when war is no longer the last resort but the instrument of first choice, how does democratic society retain control over and hold the armed forces to account?

(Editor’s Note: This article originally ran on the author’s LinkedIn. You can find the original post here.)