In 1970, the United States Senate convened hearings on what was then described as the “electronic battlefield,” a computerized system used to automate surveillance and targeting along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam. The phrase came from the program’s chief advocate General William Westmoreland, who, in an address for the Association of the United States Army a year prior, had characterized the future of war this way: “enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data […], computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control […] with first round kill probabilities approaching certainty” (Quoted in Paul Dickson, The Electronic Battlefield (1976), pp. 220-21). From the mainframe computers located at Nakhon Phanom during the Vietnam War to the current machine learning models behind Palantir’s Gotham, the promise of AI-enabled warfare has always been increased accuracy, objectivity, and total surveillance. This issue takes its title from the latest version of that promise—the synthetic battlefield, where combat itself is a simulation, with targets generated by models, combatants distinguished from civilians by algorithmic confidence scores, and territory rendered from data rather than observed from the ground.

The five essays in this issue are a case in point. They are sharp, skeptical, and deeply suspicious about a new generation of artificial intelligence-enabled weapons and the claims made by the frontier AI labs who develop them. What’s more, each essay is centered on, or draws core evidence from, the use of AI in the conflict that has become this generation’s defining case—the war on Palestine. Natalie Kim’s “Israel’s Wolfpack System” traces the architecture of the IDF’s Wolfpack surveillance network across its three constituent applications, showing how a system built to collect biometric data on Palestinians represents an unprecedented collapse of surveillance and targeting into a single system. Ariana Amiri’s “The Ratifier’s Gap” reframes the accountability gap that has dominated scholarly debate on AI warfare, arguing that the AI targeting systems used in Gaza have not removed the human from the loop but, rather, emptied the role of any meaning by converting the decision-maker into a “ratifier” who signs for a judgment that was never actually made. Erin Zhang’s “Where Judgment Lives” argues that the literature on human control in AI warfare has been looking for the decision in the wrong place, relocating the point of human judgment upstream, not to the operator reviewing a name on a screen, but to whoever set the classification threshold that put the name there. Bella Zhao’s “Hermeneutical Asymmetry and the Accountability Crisis” argues that meaningful human control, the field’s leading answer to the accountability problem, rests on an assumption it cannot sustain by drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutics to show that a human operator and an AI system lack the shared interpretive framework that genuine understanding requires. Ava Deakin’s “Territories and Targets” goes further upstream still, arguing that the maps and sensor data feeding military AI systems are not neutral inputs but political documents, shaped by centuries of colonial cartography and now accelerated by corporate mapping platforms.

IN THIS ISSUE