06 ISSUE XI
MAY 2026
MAY 2026
the american war machine
The wars of the 21st century are leaving behind something different that will shape civilian life in indescribable ways.
By Ye Eric Huang
The United States eliminated the Ayatollah of Iran without a single military boot on Iranian soil. What once would have been a grand operation was orchestrated and swiftly executed in one singular bombing. Zero US casualties. For the warmongers, regardless of external suffering, conflicts are becoming implicitly more separated from the guilt and dread of past wars. Modern warfare is comfortable.
Image via U.S. Army Pacific/Facebook.
Historically, conflicts demanded armies. Its costs were impossible to ignore. Families felt it, and the suffering echoed throughout society in protests and generational pain. That accountability became a brake on war.
Modern warfare removed that brake. It destroyed the accountability that came with war. When an enemy can be dismantled from a comfortable cubicle with little to no personal repercussions, it becomes easy for those waging it. War becomes easier to authorize and repeat, and invisible emotionally to the public that funds it.
The demands of these new, foreign, “easy” wars are drastically different. For example, intelligence has far superior value now than sheer headcount. The “soldiers” changed from ground troops to desk workers. But perhaps the most dramatic change in this new era of warfare is the infrastructure required. When wars become foreign, so does everything else they build.
War infrastructure was never designed with the public in mind, but it had always been a remnant of conflict. A byproduct that, eventually, outlasted the very battles that produced it. War, for the most part, had been a physical human experience that demanded physical infrastructure. All the roads and bridges were tangible things that might’ve had strategic importance once, but now survived and could be repurposed and used.
The military case for the Panama Canal was made when an American warship needed to circumnavigate South America to reach the Caribbean during the Spanish-American War. Originally justified as a strategic asset, the eventual economic and humanitarian payoff for the US and Panama was enormous. A canal built for warships positioned a small country at one of the centers of world commerce.
When Eisenhower witnessed the German Autobahn and its effectiveness during WWII, the president pushed for the Interstate Highway System on the back of defense justifications: to move troops quickly, and to evacuate civilians under nuclear threat. Thankfully, those justifications never came to fruition, but the infrastructure benefits did. Cities across the Sun Belt grew from desert towns into metropolitan areas like Las Vegas and Phoenix. The entire country became connected.
Forts were established at strategically important locations during times of conflict. These temporary settlements grew into major cities like San Antonio and Chicago. Despite all the war’s destruction, what it left behind was eventually rebuilt into the infrastructure of everyday life.
That is no longer true, because at the core of modern warfare’s success is not something physical and tangible but algorithmic infrastructure. The production and funding that gave everyone highways and canals has migrated to technology corporations centered around data and surveillance.
Palantir is a software company that provides advanced data analytics to militaries and corporations. Having built its reputation on a broad intelligence infrastructure, the company has embedded itself in domestic life with little public resistance. The NYPD uses Palantir's software. Los Angeles and New Orleans deployed their predictive analytics to guide police activity. ICE signed a $30 million contract with Palantir to track migrants' movements and backgrounds in near real time.
Such infrastructure, if one could even call it that, does not trickle down to the common person. Whereas GPS and radar eventually became public tools, the systems being built now, such as license plate readers and facial recognition networks, have no civilian conversion. There is no version of a mass surveillance platform that accidentally benefits the public. This infrastructure was designed for control, and that’s all it can really do.
The same weekend as the strike on Iran, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, with its tool Claude, became another casualty of this shift. Operating under the Pentagon, the company refused to lend its AI technology for mass domestic surveillance of American citizens and to arm fully autonomous weapons systems. Within hours, the Pentagon declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security and banned any military contractor from doing business with them.
The entire episode lasted just a single day. The speed says everything about how military needs for modern warfare have shifted. The companies that win wars now write code and train algorithms, and the ones that refuse to remove the human from the equation get cut off.
The wars of the 21st century are leaving behind tools of state power and control that are increasingly seeping into domestic enforcement. Mass data collection and policing tools are things the average person can never use or benefit from.
The engine has not stopped, war is still building, but what it builds has changed, and who it builds for has changed with it. For the first time in modern history, the infrastructure emerging from conflict is not a byproduct. It is the product, and it is not good for anyone else but the warmongers. The machine has stopped building for us.
ye eric huang is an architecture student at the New School exploring how design intersects with politics and infrastructure.