Whether in a neural core in an AI-enabled command post in Tel Aviv, or in Silicon Valley boardrooms inventing lethal algorithms, or in the gloved phrasing of statements from the United Nations Security Council, war today does not resemble soldiers in trenches or generals poring over maps. It looks like an interface. It speaks in code, contracts, and computer vision. War in the 21st century has not disappeared. It has simply been rebranded.
A city is not bombed, but rather targeted with ‘precision’ and ‘surgical strikes’. Civilians are not killed; they are deemed ‘collateral damage’. Famine is a ‘supply chain disruption’. Occupation is ‘buffer zone enforcement’. A child’s death is ‘statistical noise’. This is not just rhetoric — it is architecture. It is how State violence launders itself clean.
But the laundering is always incomplete.
Consider Gaza. It is true that the Israel Defense Forces utilised AI-based targeting systems in what whistleblowers described as “mass assassination factories”; but in the usage of phrases like ‘precision’, ‘real-time decisions’, or ‘algorithmic efficiency’, there is wilful moral ambiguity but not a hint of anxiety or outrage. Meanwhile, over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children. No algorithm is able to grieve, nor can it disentangle civilian from combatant in collapsed apartment buildings. Nonetheless, the ethics of communication were appeased for allies and news coverage by way of professionalising and abstract language.
A similar, benign language of conflict persists in Ukraine, where the West celebrates ‘resistance’ and ‘defensive mobilisation’ while completely ignoring the exponential growth of the NATO arms industries. According to The Economist, the war in Ukraine has created a surge in the production of Western weapons — not because of conventional wartime economies but through a distributed, profit maximisation mode of production — outsourced production — and private logistics. Defence contractors may not be able to take advantage of the war economy because of the war but because the war continues and the destruction speaks to a war economy in terms of efficiency, even innovation. In Sudan, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by armed groups working abroad even as a global silence is maintained on account of the absence of geostrategic returns. In Manipur, ethnic violence has necessitated a prolonged military presence.
All this is not happenstance. Rather, it is infrastructural.
The feminist scholar, Carol Cohn, writing in the wake of the Cold War, identified the bizarre abstraction in the language used by nuclear defence strategists and policymakers — the granular language of “penetration aids” characterised by “collateral damage”, terms that extract the bodily presence and morality from war. In 2025, we are not simply experiencing the echo of Cohn’s observation; we are witnessing its algorithmic transformation. The language of defence today is inscribed in predictive analytics, drone telemetry, biometric sketches, and the models of language themselves. Armies now outsource not only labour, but cognition.
The United States of America’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control, China’s Cognitive Warfare framework, and the Theatre Commands from India represent more than a ground presence for boots and bodies — they are systems of integration, speed and information dominance. As speed increases, scrutiny disappears. Strategic conversations now revolve around ‘kill webs’, ‘neural lethality’ and ‘autonomous interoperability’. These are not euphemisms; they are the discursive architecture for what is known as the post-human battlefield.
But the violence remains human.
In Tigray, Darfur, Myanmar, and Yemen, the people most affected by war are people of colour, often women, and are usually excluded from negotiating tables. Their suffering is compartmentalised through funding appeals or footnotes on human rights abuses; worse, they are ignored altogether. If the Global South resists, or acts, the war is styled as unreasonable — as Cohn points out, when India tested nuclear weapons, the Western press declared that it had “lost its virginity”. That metaphor, which still circulates, is not only sexist but also imperial. It feminises the Other, belittles resistance and robs the Global South of the right to talk about its own security.
And where is the use of international law in this war of language? Conventions that were potent tools of restraint in the past are now selective. The Rome Statute is blind in Gaza but hyper-vigilant in Crimea. Vetoes suspend the UN resolutions that are inconvenient to the powers that be. It is called ‘Responsibility to Protect’ in Kyiv but not in Rafah. The law is not dead but it is linguistically and operationally subservient to geopolitics.
What are we to do?
First, we must start with epistemic disobedience. We must unlearn the language that sanitises war. We must refuse to call famine ‘interdiction’ and death ‘deconfliction’. Scholars, journalists, and policy analysts must reject the urge to appear neutral through technocratic jargon. They must talk about war as war: as pain, loss, injustice.
Second, we need to radically re-describe security studies. Where military literatures are concerned, we cannot just think of sovereignty, territory, and deterrence. We must also factor in food, water, bodily autonomy, and environmental dignity. Peace cannot be the absence of conflict — it must be the presence of justice.
Third, and most urgent, we must diversify the war room. We need to invite nurses, poets, displaced mothers, and sanitation workers. We must let those who sustain the costs of war shape its lexicon. Sara Ruddick’s ethics of maternal practices is not soft idealism — it is a political strategy with roots in protection and relational intelligence. Cynthia Enloe’s demonstration of the discipline of studying “the margins” lays out the ways in which patriarchy and militarism collude at every level of the military environment, from the battlefield to the barracks kitchen.
Because war does not start the moment bombs start falling. War starts with the drop of a word.
When we describe drone casualties as ‘bug-splat’, when we applaud genocide as ‘ethnic cleansing’, and when nuclear strikes are understood as ‘deterrence strategies’, we are not merely misnaming violence, we are complicit in it. Every euphemism is a permission slip.
In 2025, the most powerful weapon of resistance may not be a treaty or a drone, but a sentence informed by clarity, ethics, and unapologetic life.
Tushar Mishra is a History graduate currently reading Law and Philosophy