By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-03-15 13:00:00
There is an Israeli military strategy called “smoke procedures.” This unofficial rule, first used during the Second Intifada, requires soldiers guarding military posts in poor visibility conditions to fire shots into the darkness, on the theory that an unseen threat may be lurking.
It is violence licensed through blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it a deterrent. With the advent of AI warfare, the same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and given to a machine.
Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” – the first war in which AI systems played a central role in drawing up Israel’s list of alleged Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters to attack. Systems that processed billions of data points to rank the likelihood that a given person in the territory was a combatant.
The darkness in the watchtower was a given of the terrain. The darkness inside the algorithm is a…
