In March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq with the most sophisticated military force in history. Global positioning systems, laser-guided munitions, real-time communication networks, reconnaissance drones, and bunker-penetrating bombs comprised an arsenal that seemed straight out of science fiction. The initial campaign lasted only 21 days. George W. Bush landed on an aircraft carrier under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished,” and the world believed, for a moment, that technology had changed the nature of warfare.

Eight years and four thousand five hundred American deaths later, not to mention estimates of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, Iraq was a fragmented country, plagued by insurgency, sectarian warfare, and the chaos that would give rise to the Islamic State. The technology had worked perfectly. The war, not so much.

This paradox is the starting point of this discussion. And it matters today more than ever, since the idea that technological superiority resolves conflicts, guarantees victories, and produces security did not die in Iraq. It resurfaced with drones in Afghanistan, with network-centric warfare, the idea of ​​technological determinism emerged in the 2000s, with artificial intelligence in defense studies in the 2020s, and now appears in every article promising that the next weapons system will change everything. This idea, which gives rise to technological determinism, ends up distorting how we think about security and conflict.

What is technological determinism and why is it so appealing?

Technological determinism, as a school of thought, argues that technology is the primary driver of social and historical transformation: it is the tools that shape societies, not the other way around. In its most naive version, it appears in common sense: “the internet changed everything,” “the smartphone transformed the world.” In its more sophisticated and dangerous version, it ends up migrating to areas of knowledge, and in strategic studies it takes the form of an almost always implicit hypothesis: that technological advances determine outcomes in conflicts.

This hypothesis has a long military genealogy. In 1998, Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka published the foundational article of Network-Centric Warfare, they argued that the ability to share information in real time between military units would produce a decisive and irreversible advantage over any adversary. The idea was elegant: to transform Clausewitz's “fog of war” into something manageable through technology. Information would replace uncertainty, and precision would replace mass.

The results of the 1991 Gulf War seemed, until then, to confirm the thesis. The US-led coalition destroyed the Iraqi army in one hundred hours of ground operations, with minimal losses, using precisely this combination of information superiority and guided weapons. Analysts around the world declared a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). The future of warfare would be clean, fast, and technologically determined.

The problem, as Stephen Biddle argues in his book Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern War (2004), is that technology, despite being an important part of the victory, was not the only variable in the calculation. As Biddle argues, the victory in the Gulf War did not prove the RMA, but demonstrated that an army with superior doctrine and good training defeats a poorly organized army, regardless of the technological difference. Technology amplified the advantage, but did not create it. And when, a few years later, the US applied the same arsenal against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the “revolution” simply did not work.

The allure of precision and its political limitations

FewMilitary technologies have embodied the deterministic promise more eloquently than precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and, ultimately, drones. The idea of ​​a missile that hits its intended target exactly, without collateral damage, without risk to the operator, without the moral "dirt" of conventional warfare, is politically seductive.

On the other hand, we need to confront the “paradox of precision.” In March 2003, the US targeted 13 senior Iraqi political and military leaders in beheading attacks. In every case, they came away empty-handed. Attempts to eliminate Saddam Hussein resulted in the deaths of over one hundred civilians, without hitting the target. The attempt to “obliterate” the Iranian nuclear program in June 2025, using the 14-ton GBU-57 bomb, capable of penetrating dozens of meters of rock, led the IAEA High Commissioner to warn about the risks of radiological contamination, without any guarantee that theknow-howThe Iranian nuclear facility had been destroyed. Knowledge is not a facility. It cannot be bombed.

Technological determinism in military studies makes a mistake at the level of analysis. It treats technology as an independent variable – something that acts upon war – when in reality it is always embedded in complex contexts, in which doctrine, organizational culture, troop morale, political context, and legitimacy with the civilian population are equally determining factors.

The mystique of technological victory and its ideological function

There is something that purely analytical argument fails to grasp: the fact that technological determinism is not merely an intellectual error. It is also an ideology – and it serves very concrete political and economic functions.

In his article “From the essence of technology to strategic dependence: an agenda for Defense Studies,” researcher Héctor Saint-Pierre argues that the belief in “technological victory” operates as a mystique that justifies and sustains the demand for increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. The logic works like this: the greater the technological sophistication, the greater the strategic performance; the greater the strategic performance, the greater the political autonomy. Therefore, states that want political autonomy must acquire cutting-edge technology. Saint-Pierre argues that these three hypotheses are false, and that they primarily obey the logic of the global arms supply, not the logic of national security.

It is no coincidence that each new military technological “revolution” is announced just when the defense industry needs new contracts. The RMA of the 1990s was simultaneously a strategic doctrine and a selling point for expensive weapons systems. The current narrative about artificial intelligence in warfare follows the same pattern: technology companies invest massively in defense contracts, think tanks produce reports on the “next revolution,” and governments allocate increasing budgets, often at the expense of more basic and proven capabilities.

Ukraine offers an important, albeit uncomfortable, lesson for the field. For decades, Western strategic thinking relied on the idea of ​​short wars, decided by technological superiority and precision strikes. The Pentagon planned its forces for conflicts that would be resolved by sensors, communications, and precise attacks. The result was that the US produced an average (until 2025) of about 40,000 artillery shells per month, a rate that seemed sufficient until it was discovered that Ukraine consumed them in a matter of weeks during intensive operations. The return to attrition warfare on European soil challenged this bet on quick victories.

What technology can't do

It's important to emphasize that the critique of technological determinism is not a critique of technology itself. Precision weapons systems, drones, artificial intelligence, all of these have real value in specific contexts. The question isn't whether technology matters. It definitely does. The question is whether it determines outcomes, and the answer is no.

Technology can amplify capabilities. It cannot replace doctrine. It can increase precision. It cannot create political legitimacy. It can reduce its own casualties. It cannot build trust between communities. It can destroy a nuclear facility and delay the development of nuclear weapons. It cannot destroy the knowledge of how to build a bomb. One can monitor a border with drones. It cannot solve the reasons why people cross the border.

Despite being a man of his time, Clausewitz had already identified this limitation in the 19th century: war is the continuation of politics by other means. In other words, war has no logic of its own, separate from the politics that drive it. A technologically superior army can win every battle and lose the war, as happened with the US in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and, to some extent, Iraq, if the political dimension of the conflict is not adequately understood and addressed.

The case of Afghanistan is paradigmatic in this sense. For twenty years, the US and NATO deployed the most advanced military technology available there: Predator and Reaper drones, state-of-the-art surveillance systems, precision weapons, big data analysis for insurgent identification. And the Taliban, an organization that had no air force, no satellites, whose fighters frequently wore sandals and carried Kalashnikov rifles, took Kabul eleven days after the American forces left. As John Pike had warned decades earlier: the problems were of a category that technology cannot solve.

Beyond determinism

The alternative to technological determinism is not its opposite, a kind of equally simplistic social determinism that ignores the agency of technology. It is a socio-technical perspective that recognizes that technology and social context co-constitute each other in a complex and non-linear way.

Applied to strategic studies, this perspective means a few concrete things. First, that the evaluation of military capabilities should always consider doctrine, training, and organizational culture with the same weight given to weapons systems. An F-35 in the hands of an air force with weak doctrine and poorly trained pilots is not a strategic asset, it is a costly liability. Second, that political legitimacy, before the domestic and international population, is a first-order strategic variable, not a moral appendix to be managed by the communications department. Third, that technological proliferation is structurally asymmetrical: what today is the exclusive advantage of a great power will tomorrow be available to Mexican cartels and criminal factions in Rio de Janeiro, such as those previous articles have already argued this point (see: Drones over Sudan; Criminal Militarization in Latin America).

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, the fundamental question is not “what technology do we need to acquire?”, but “what problem are we trying to solve?”. These are different questions. The first leads to an endless arms race and a self-perpetuating military-industrial complex. The second requires an analysis of the real threats, the interests at stake, and the most appropriate instruments, technological or otherwise, to address them.

The title of this article asks who will save us from technology. The answer, however anticlimactic it may seem, is: political thought. The ability to ask questions about purpose, legitimacy, and consequence before making decisions about means. It's not an answer that sells defense contracts or generates headlines about the next military revolution. But it's the only one that has any chance of working, as history has repeatedly tried to teach us.

References

Saint-Pierre, Héctor and Jonathan Assis. "From the essence of technology to strategic dependence: an agenda for Defense Studies."Brazilian Journal of Defense Studies, 2025. https://rbed.abedef.org/rbed/article/view/75416

Biddle, Stephen. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern War. Princeton University Press, 2004.

Precision Paradox and Myths of Precision Strike in Modern Armed Conflict. Journal of Strategic Studies, 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071847.2024.2343717

America's Scale Problem. RealClearDefenseOctober 2025. https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2025/10/07/americas_scale_problem_1139242.html

Clausewitz, Carl von. From WarTranslated by Maria Teresa Ramos. Martins Fontes, 1996.

Smith, Merritt e Leo Marx (eds.). Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological DeterminismMIT Press, 1994.