Distinguished Visiting Fellow Josef Joffe offers his views on warfare and statecraft at a session of the Hoover Workshops on Urgent Security Choices, a research project led by Botha-Chan Senior Fellow Philip Zelikow.
Ever since the birth of organized mayhem, weapons have come with “revolutionary” attached. From chariots to tanks, catapults to hypersonic missiles, such inventions did score wondrous wins. A fabled example is the Battle of Omdurman. In 1898, a British-led force armed with the Maxim, the first self-loading machine gun, killed some ten thousand Sudanese while losing only forty-eight of their own. Then the eternal dialectics of war kicked in. Quickly spreading across the world, automatic guns decimated troops on all sides—and decimated their edge. Thanks to copycatting, military “revolutions” have a short shelf life.
What about the greatest of them all, nuclear weapons? Dropped on Japan in August of 1945, Little Boy and Fat Man seemed to upend eons of warfare with the biggest bang ever. But consider what conventional weapons had wrought before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nightly, US bombers had unloaded five thousand tons of regular ordnance, leveling sixty-six Japanese cities before the bomb came along. These raids were deadlier than the Hiroshima device, with its yield of sixteen kilotons. On March 9, 1945, the most destructive bombardment in history burned down Tokyo, killing about a hundred thousand people, significantly more than died in Nagasaki. By then, Japan was already down for the count. Thus, America’s weapons from hell confirmed rather than caused Japan’s demise.
Since then, eight nations have amassed twelve thousand warheads. Spreading across the globe, this revolution ended up devaluing and stalemating itself.
While wonder weapons win battles like Omdurman, they do not change the nature of war—this is the key. Dead for two hundred years, Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian master strategist who is still taught in the world’s military academies, put it in one sentence. The purpose of war is “to force an opponent to submit to our will”—not to our fabulous hardware. A slew of “wars of liberation” illustrate the point. Those advanced colonial powers lost them because they could not break their foe’s will. Ho Chi Minh explained: “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
Technology is just a tool, not a game changer. Today’s advances are space weapons, high-precision targeting, robotics, globe-circling command and control, $500 drones killing $5 million tanks. Artificial intelligence tops the list because it processes billions of data at unmatched speed and learns autonomously. Now measure them against the current wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Real-life Star Wars technology has achieved tactical triumphs but not will-breaking victories.
High-tech promise vs. political reality
For example: in the war against Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces has used AI to generate target lists. Yet the IDF could not predict October 7, let alone deter it, because AI cannot guard against surprise, the oldest tactic since the Stone Age.
Clausewitz would marvel at Israel’s exploding-pager caper, which decimated Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon. Yet after this feat, the IDF still had to slog it out, unit vs. unit, mile by mile. The Party of God is down but not out.
And in Gaza, Clausewitz would observe that Israel still has not broken the will of Hamas, though the IDF has dominated the technological battlefield by an order of magnitude. Hamas is rising from the rubble, and Israel has not scored a decisive win. After withdrawing in early February 2025, it went in again with bombs and infantry a few weeks later. Why no decisive defeat of a third-rate army? Clausewitz would agree with Henry Kissinger on the essence of asymmetric war: “The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”
The Prussian mastermind had no inkling of another asymmetry imposed by democracy. It endows every citizen with a voice, including a veto. This is why the mighty United States retreated from Vietnam—and France from Algeria. In drawn-out, non-existential wars, the citizen’s right to “life and liberty” overwhelms strategic purpose.
Thus, the growing constraints on the IDF in the battle to recover hostages. For Hamas, Gaza’s untold casualties spelled not loss, but gain. Deliberately sacrificing its captive population by deploying in civilian structures, Hamas did not have to worry about the “Gaza street.” But Israel’s elected government did have to listen to the “Tel Aviv street,” which roared day after day: “Bring the hostages home!”
A totalitarian regime like Hamas need not worry about the ballot boxes. But this regional superpower, Israel, did have to yield to domestic pressure and accept, at one point, a lopsided prisoner-hostage exchange of ten to one.
So, at the cutting edge of yet another military revolution, the IDF has not succeeded in imposing its will on irregulars lacking AI and space weapons.
So now to Clausewitz’s well-worn “war as continuation of politics by other means.” We can grasp how Hamas has profited from a force multiplier rooted in the political setting outside the theater of war. There, Hamas could snatch survival from a most unlikely patron: Joe Biden. The United States reined in Israel’s high-tech war machine with diplomatic pressure and threats of arms cutoffs, and in the end, Benjamin Netanyahu yielded to Israel’s indispensable ally. It was a double whammy: rising defiance at home, a fickle American friend abroad. Even though Israel was serving US interests by defanging Hamas, a proxy for Iran, the political factor trumped grand strategy.
Zelensky vs. the powers
Unlike in Gaza, Ukraine is involved in a classic interstate war. For all its tech savvy and bravery, Kyiv will have to yield, however just its cause, in the face of Russia’s aggression. One reason is as old as bows and arrows. In the end, Russian mass beats moxie, while ultra-precise ATACMS and space-based intelligence on the part of Kyiv don’t add up to escalation dominance. Firepower and vast supplies, classics of war, do favor Russia. The second reason is Vladimir Putin’s new friend, Donald Trump.
Like Jerusalem’s, Kyiv’s worst foe lurks not in the field, but in the political arena where autonomous weapons don’t carry the day. Future historians will ask: “Who lost Ukraine?” Realpolitikers will point to the forty-seventh president of the United States, who browbeat and humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the world’s TV cameras. “You don’t have the cards. . . . You are gambling with World War III. . . . I want an immediate cease-fire.” Then the next blows: the suspension of arms deliveries and intelligence sharing.
Nor did Joe Biden do what geopolitical necessity demanded—this, before Trump commandeered the stage. There were no far-reaching weapons that might have sobered up Putin by disrupting Russia’s order of battle all the way to the rear.
The West’s middling powers are not blameless, either. They have given billions in cash while holding back jets and heavy armor that might stymie Putin’s armies. They have withheld long-range cruise missiles, which would have evened out some of the odds by attacking Russia’s supply lines and production facilities.
Clausewitz would feel vindicated about the primacy of politics. Europe’s angst—“don’t rile the Bear”—has dwarfed its own best interests, even if Russian divisions might end up on NATO’s eastern border.
Ukraine’s president faces a Trump who despises “free riding” Europeans. Like yesterday’s imperialist power, he wants to get his hands on Kyiv’s mineral riches and nuclear power plants—call it tribute, as exacted from the weak by the rich. “America first” downgrades Europe and Ukraine, vital strategic assets, which will once more determine the future of the Continent. Having watched the United States and the alliance while he was brandishing tactical nukes, Putin can bet on Western self-deterrence while his war machine grinds on.
It is great-power politics that threaten to inflict the greatest blow on Ukraine, notwithstanding the 1.5 million drones churned out annually. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth put it brutally in February: “Returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.” Putin will reap the fruits of aggression, which can only whet his appetite. Worse, if Trumpism segues into a US-Russian condominium, say goodbye to the benign international order guarded by a dozen American presidents since World War II. The genius of that system? The United States promoted its own interests by also serving those of its friends. It was a win-win—a unique marriage of goodness and might that made America truly great.
By other means
The lessons are the old ones. Automatic targeting by AI doesn’t win wars, least of all when the nasty politics beyond the theater dwarfs the savvy of the IDF and the Ukrainian army. The latest military revolution has not confirmed the prediction of Putin, who trumpeted in 2017: “Whoever becomes the leader in AI will be the ruler of the world.” Eight years on, he does not even rule Ukraine. Yet if he does triumph, it will be for the reasons laid out by Clausewitz: war is about Wille and Politik, not quantum computers and space assets.
As the IDF learned in Gaza, tactical wins fueled by high-tech wizardry do not translate into strategic, let alone political, victories. Israel was clearly superior on the tech front, but these strengths could not prevail in a political arena dominated by mighty outsiders. Nor could Israel’s vaunted cyberwarfare Unit 8200 fathom the treacherous political setting. As brilliant as AI and its products may be, they will never be smart enough to win the decisive political contest.
How, also, to best another foe, the globe-circling resentment of the Jewish state? An anti-Israel “Global South” is a given. But why the democracies of Europe? Is it caused by millions of Muslim immigrants from Madrid to Munich? The bizarre deification of Hamas, a death cult, on the part of progressive America? We see the resurgence of anti-Semitism dressed up as anti-Zionism, which depicts Israel as revenant of the white man’s settler-colonialism.
Grudgingly, the notorious anti-Semite Clausewitz might have offered some unsolicited advice to Israel, warning against a war of four hundred and fifty-plus days: “For all your AI, do not wade into a war whose outcome quantum computers cannot predict.” Plus: “Given the world’s predictable hostility, speed is essential.” Because, as Clausewitz would argue, “your worst foe is not Hamas, but a globe-spanning political coalition that will stymie you. Your window of opportunity will close quickly.” As it has.
Kyiv does not bear the burden of “anti-Ukrainianism,” but the politics also do not favor this beleaguered state. Without an “American deterrence component,” as French President Emmanuel Macron put it to Trump, Europe will hardly put boots on the ground to discourage future Russian thrusts. But Ukraine, to invoke Neville Chamberlain, is not a “quarrel in a faraway country” of which “we know nothing.” It is a central stake, as is the Middle East.
All told, contemporary warfare comes with a sobering message. Sophisticated weapons are but instruments; they cannot lay out political imperatives. Relying on existing knowledge, AI might draft battle plans but not plot the messy consequences when, according to Clausewitz, “war is the incalculable collision of two living forces.” Take the first step and face the unforeseen moves of your adversaries.
Reading the master’s prose, as dense in English as in German, is a hard slog. But we can grasp his key political message, as condensed here: “In the art of war, new inventions count for least and new sociopolitical realities for most.” Today, he would preach: “Cyber is clever, not wise.” Tech miracles cannot map out the moves of the mighty like the United States and Russia, which tilt the scales on the battlefield. To vary an old saw, “It’s the politics, stupid!”
