The Machine That Never Stops: War, Capital and the Unending Carnage of Modern Conflict

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

~Ambrose Bierce~

“The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums.”

~Arthur Koestler~

I. The Horseman Who Never Dismounts

In 1889, Ambrose Bierce published two short stories that together constitute perhaps the most morally devastating account of war in the whole of American literature. The first, “A Son of the Gods,” follows an unnamed Union officer who volunteers to ride alone toward enemy lines – a suicidal act of reconnaissance meant to save his regiment. The soldiers watching from the hillside see him as something almost supernatural, a figure of terrible beauty moving through a landscape about to kill him. They cheer. Then they fall silent. Then the guns open up, and the young man is torn from his horse, and the regiment charges anyway, straight into the ambush, and dies. The sacrifice accomplished nothing. The mathematics of war – one life exchanged for a hundred, a thousand – turned out not to apply. The machine ate him and remained hungry.

The second story, “A Horseman in the Sky,” is even more harrowing in its quietness. A young Confederate soldier named Carter Druse deserts his Virginia family to fight for the Union. Posted as a sentry, he falls asleep at his watch – a capital offence – and is awakened by the sight of a Confederate officer on horseback atop a great cliff, surveying the Union position below. Carter Druse raises his rifle. He fires. The horse and rider fall from the cliff in what witnesses below see as a vision of impossible grandeur, a horseman descending through the sky. Only at the story’s end do we learn that the man on the cliff was Carter Druse’s own father. The son has killed his father. The Union position has been preserved. No one will remember either man by morning.

Bierce wrote from experience. He fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga, watched men die in industrial quantities, and spent the rest of his life unable to make peace with what he had seen. What his two stories share, beyond their formal brilliance, is a cold refusal to redeem the violence they depict. There is no catharsis, no transcendence, no meaning extracted from the slaughter. There is only the machinery of war grinding on, indifferent to the beauty of its victims, indifferent to the love or courage or sacrifice that individual human beings bring to it. The machine never stops. The horseman never dismounts. He only changes uniforms.

More than a century and a quarter after Bierce set down his pen, that horseman is still in the sky – over Gaza, over southern Lebanon, over the Strait of Hormuz, over the scarred earth where Iranian drones arc toward their targets and Israeli missiles arc back. The uniforms have changed. The weapons are incomparably more lethal. The machinery is the same.

II. Gaza: A Laboratory of Annihilation

The statistics describing Gaza since October 2023 have long since exceeded the capacity of human moral imagination to absorb. Tens of thousands dead – a figure that will have risen further by the time these words are read – the majority of them civilians, a disproportionate number of them children. Hospitals bombed. Refugee convoys struck. The strip’s built environment reduced in large portions to rubble indistinguishable from the rubble of Dresden or Stalingrad or any of the great ruined cities that the twentieth century produced as its most characteristic monuments.

What is being enacted in Gaza is not, its architects would insist, gratuitous. There is a military objective: the destruction of Hamas, the recovery of hostages, the elimination of a threat. These are real objectives held by real human beings who believe in them. This is precisely what makes Bierce’s vision so relevant. Carter Druse believed in the Union. The unnamed officer in “A Son of the Gods” believed in something worth dying for. Belief does not sanctify the machinery. The machinery is indifferent to belief.

What the cameras show – when they are permitted to show anything at all – is what cameras always show when war has been running long enough: the faces of survivors who have forgotten what they are surviving for. The child carried from the rubble, coated in grey dust, so still that the rescuers check for breathing. The elderly man sitting in the street before the outline of what used to be his house, not weeping, past weeping, simply present at the site of his own erasure. The young men with missing limbs being triaged in facilities that have run out of anaesthetic. These are not aberrations. They are the product. They are what the machine makes.

And Hamas, for its part, remains. Degraded, perhaps. Transformed, certainly. But the ideological conditions that produced it – dispossession, occupation, decades of humiliation, the specific topology of collective grief that is the Palestinian experience – those conditions have been intensified, not extinguished. Every child pulled from the rubble is a future fighter or a future refugee or a future corpse. The machine is also a factory. It manufactures its own fuel.

III. Lebanon: The Country That War Keeps Returning To

Lebanon is perhaps the purest example on earth of Bierce’s insight that war is never won and never lost, only ever continuing. The country has been a theatre of proxy conflict, civil war, Israeli invasion, Hezbollah consolidation, and Syrian intervention since at least 1975 – nearly half a century during which the Lebanese state has existed primarily as a fiction maintained for diplomatic purposes, while the actual governance of the country has been distributed among armed factions, foreign patrons, and the ruins of institutions that were never quite built.

The Israeli campaigns against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon – 1982, 2006, and the more recent strikes extending into 2024 and beyond – have followed a consistent pattern that military strategists call the “mowing the grass” doctrine. The phrase is instructive in its candour. You do not expect to kill grass permanently. You expect to cut it back, periodically, knowing it will grow again, because the alternative – treating the root cause of the growth – is politically impossible. And so the mowing continues, and the grass grows back, and the people of southern Lebanon rebuild their homes between campaigns, and their children grow up knowing that the rebuilding is temporary, that the next campaign is already being planned, that their lives are scheduled for periodic destruction by forces whose decision-making processes they cannot influence and whose existence they cannot escape.

Hezbollah’s fighters, meanwhile, die for a cause that is partly religious, partly nationalist, partly the specific Iranian strategic vision of the ‘axis of resistance.’ They are maimed and killed in numbers that are never accurately reported, their deaths absorbed into a narrative of martyrdom that renders individual suffering invisible behind collective ideology. The young man from a village in the Bekaa Valley who loses his legs to an Israeli airstrike is not a tragedy in this accounting. He is a martyr. The machine has its own theology, and the theology, like the machine, is self-perpetuating.

IV. Iran: The Distant Hand, the Near Consequence

Iran presents the war-watcher with a particular kind of moral complexity – a state that has, for four decades, projected power through proxies precisely in order to avoid the full weight of the machine falling on its own population. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps funds and trains Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, various Iraqi militias. The drones and ballistic missiles that periodically streak toward Israel or US bases originate, at some level, in decisions made in Tehran. Iranian strategic planners believe, with some justification, that this approach allows them to impose costs on adversaries while insulating Iranian cities from direct retaliation.

The calculation has always been precarious, and in recent years it has become more so. Israeli strikes inside Iran, Iranian strikes on Israeli territory, the slow accumulation of direct confrontation that each side’s doctrine insists it does not want but that the logic of the situation keeps producing: this is the pattern of escalation that every serious student of war recognises as the antechamber to catastrophe. The proxies have always served a function, but proxy wars have a tendency to develop their own momentum, to generate grievances and retaliation cycles that eventually overwhelm the strategic intentions of the patrons who created them.

The Iranian people, for their part, have been bearing the costs of their government’s strategic choices for decades – through sanctions that have impoverished the middle class, through the suppression of internal dissent that would complicate the war-making project, through the quiet grief of families whose sons have died in Syria or Lebanon or Yemen in the service of a regional vision that the sons themselves may or may not have endorsed. The machine does not require the consent of those it consumes. It requires only their bodies.

A strike on Iranian nuclear infrastructure – long threatened, periodically attempted through sabotage and assassination – would not end Iran’s nuclear programme. It would accelerate its political legitimacy inside Iran, harden the population’s support for the regime, and produce retaliation that would ripple across the region and potentially the world. This is known. It has been known for years. The knowledge has not prevented the trajectory from continuing. Because the machine is not operated by people who have fully internalised the consequences. It is operated by people who believe, always, that this time the calculation will be different. Carter Druse believed he was protecting a position. He was. He was also killing his father.

V. The Shareholders’ War

While the dead are counted and the wounded are catalogued and the cities are rebuilt from rubble only to be reduced to rubble again, there is a constituency for whom war is not a catastrophe but a revenue event. The arms industry – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies (now RTX), BAE Systems, Elbit Systems, Leonardo, Rheinmetall – does not cause wars. This distinction is important, and it is also, in the end, almost meaningless. The arms industry does not cause wars in the same way that a casino does not cause gambling addiction: technically accurate, morally evasive.

When the October 2023 Hamas attack and subsequent Israeli military campaign began, defence stocks rose. When Houthi attacks in the Red Sea disrupted shipping and NATO countries announced increases in military spending, defence stocks rose again. When Iranian ballistic missiles flew toward Israel and Israel’s Iron Dome and Arrow systems intercepted them, analysts noted approvingly that the interceptions would generate replacement orders worth billions. Every missile fired is a missile that must be replaced. Every interceptor deployed is an interceptor that must be restocked. The war that is also a consumption event is also an investment opportunity.

Raytheon’s CEO, in an earnings call following the outbreak of the Gaza conflict, spoke of “long-term opportunities” in the Middle East. The phrasing was not cynical in the boardroom’s own terms. It was simply accurate financial reporting. The financial markets, unlike the civilians of Gaza or Lebanon, do not experience the war as horror. They experience it as signal. Buy defence. Sell airlines. Hedge energy. The abstraction of financial instruments from the material reality they represent – the child under the rubble, the soldier with the prosthetic, the city that used to be a city – is not a failure of the financial system. It is the financial system operating as designed.

Bierce, who in his fiction stripped war of all its romance, understood this dynamic intuitively even in an era before the modern military-industrial complex had fully crystallised. In “A Son of the Gods,” the young officer’s sacrifice is observed by his regiment with something approaching religious awe, but it is the generals – the strategic operators – who ultimately decide whether the sacrifice means anything, and they decide that it does not. The chain of command that converts human lives into strategic outcomes is the ancestor of the supply chain that converts strategic outcomes into quarterly earnings. The distance between them is moral, not structural.

VI. The Body That Survives

The dead are, in one sense, the fortunate ones. They are beyond the machine. The wounded – those who survive with injuries that the medical literature classifies as “life-altering” but which might more accurately be described as life-defining, in that they define everything the survivor will henceforth experience – are left with something the dead are spared: the problem of continuing.

The amputee who was a soldier in Gaza – Israeli or Palestinian, it does not matter for this accounting – wakes every morning in a body that carries the record of a specific day, a specific moment, a specific piece of metal moving at a specific velocity. The body does not permit forgetting. The phantom limb that is not there aches with the precision of something that is. The traumatic brain injury that scrambles memory and emotion and personality does not announce itself as a war wound; it announces itself as a bad day, an inexplicable rage, an inability to be present in a room with people who love you. PTSD, which is simply the medical name for what Bierce spent his life enacting in his fiction, is not a psychological anomaly among combat veterans. It is the normal response of a functioning human nervous system to experiences that a functioning human nervous system was not designed to process.

The rehabilitation centres of Tel Aviv and Tehran and Beirut are full of young men and women who are being taught to use prosthetics, to manage pain, to navigate a civilian world that has no adequate framework for what they have experienced. The international community funds some of this rehabilitation. It funds the weapons that made the rehabilitation necessary at a ratio of approximately one thousand to one. The economics are not a scandal. They are a policy.

In “A Horseman in the Sky,” Bierce gives Carter Druse a sergeant who asks, at the story’s end, what Druse had fired at. Druse replies: “A horseman in the sky” – he cannot bring himself to name his father, to make the abstract concrete, to acknowledge what the machine has made him do. The survivors of modern war live in Carter Druse’s silence. They know what they fired at. They cannot say it. The society that sent them cannot hear it. And so the silence is mutual, and the machine is maintained, and the next conflict is already in preparation.

VII. The City as Target

Cities are the protagonists of the modern history of war in a way that is routinely under-examined. We speak of wars between states or factions, but states and factions do not burn. Cities burn. Cities are reduced to rubble. Cities accumulate the dead in quantities that require new units of measurement. The city of Gaza – which before October 2023 was already among the most densely populated territories on earth, a place of extraordinary human concentration and compression – has been subject to an aerial and ground campaign that has destroyed or damaged the majority of its built fabric.

The destruction of a city is not simply the destruction of buildings. It is the destruction of the spatial memory that constitutes a community’s identity: the street where a family has lived for four generations, the market where the rhythms of daily life were performed, the school where children learned the language of their culture, the hospital where the community’s physical survival was managed. When these are destroyed, what is destroyed is not just infrastructure but the material substrate of collective identity. The community does not merely lose its homes. It loses its ability to locate itself in history.

This is strategic, and it is not new. The bombing of civilian populations – from Guernica to Dresden to Hiroshima to the carpet bombing of Cambodia to the siege of Sarajevo to the current campaign in Gaza – has always been, at some level, a project of destroying the social fabric that gives resistance its coherence. The theory is that if you destroy enough, the will to resist will collapse. The historical evidence for this theory is, to put it gently, mixed. The populations of Dresden did not surrender because Dresden was bombed. The Vietnamese did not surrender because the Ho Chi Minh trail was bombed continuously for years. The Palestinians of Gaza did not abandon their identity because their homes were destroyed. In each case, the destruction intensified rather than extinguished the sense of grievance that motivated resistance.

This is known. The strategists know it. The arms manufacturers know it. The politicians who authorise the campaigns know it, or should. The knowledge does not change the behaviour, because the behaviour is not primarily about achieving the stated objective. It is about demonstrating capability, maintaining deterrence, satisfying domestic political constituencies, and justifying the next procurement cycle. The city burns so that the defence budget increases. The defence budget increases so that the city can be burned more efficiently. The machine is circular and self-sustaining.

VIII. The Permanence of War

Bierce understood, with the cold clarity of a man who had seen Shiloh and survived, that there is no end to war – only intervals between wars, which are themselves preparations for the next war, which is itself an interval before the war after that. His characters do not achieve peace. They achieve death, which is not the same thing, or they achieve survival, which is worse: survival is living inside the knowledge of what you have done and what has been done to you, with no hope of absolution and no mechanism of forgetting.

The contemporary geopolitical landscape – Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, the Sahel – is not a temporary disorder that will resolve itself into a new stability once the current conflicts exhaust themselves. It is the permanent condition. The conflicts will pause. Ceasefires will be announced and violated. Peace agreements will be signed and honoured incompletely. And in the intervals, the arms manufacturers will deliver new shipments, the military planners will develop new doctrines, the politicians will identify new threats, and the populations that have temporarily escaped the machine will wait, knowing that the machine is patient, that it has been running for all of recorded human history, and that it has never, not once, decided it had done enough.

What would it mean to stop it? The question is not rhetorical, but the answers are difficult to the point of appearing impossible. It would mean a global agreement to redirect the approximately two trillion dollars spent annually on military expenditure toward climate adaptation, pandemic preparedness, poverty reduction – the actual threats to actual human lives that kill more people in every non-war year than war kills in most war years. It would mean holding arms manufacturers to standards of product liability – if your product kills civilians, that is a consequence of your product’s design and deployment. It would mean treating the causes of conflict – dispossession, inequality, resource scarcity, ideological grievance – as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be managed. None of this is technically impossible. All of it is politically unavailable. The machine has too many shareholders.

Coda: The Rider and the Fall

The image that stays with me from Bierce’s two stories is not the dead officer in “A Son of the Gods,” though that image is terrible enough. It is the horseman falling through the sky in the second story – the moment before anyone knows who the rider is, when he is simply a figure of impossible grace and beauty descending through sunlit air toward a death that has not yet registered as a death. The witnesses below see something that resembles an equestrian statue animated, a vision from mythology, before the crash and the silence.

That image – the terrible beauty of violence at the moment before its consequences become legible – is the image that war always presents to the people who authorise it. The missile leaving the launcher is beautiful in footage. The explosion on the horizon is beautiful in footage. The formation of jets banking over the sea is beautiful in footage. It is only when the camera goes to the other end of the trajectory that the beauty dissolves into what it actually is: a child in a hospital with no anaesthetic, a city that used to be a city, a soldier who woke up without legs in a ward that smells of antiseptic and loss.

Bierce disappeared in 1913, at the age of seventy-one, crossing into Mexico during the revolution. His body was never found. He had survived Shiloh and Chickamauga and a lifetime of nightmares, and at the end he walked into another war and was swallowed by it. There is something in that – in the war finally claiming the man who had spent his life bearing witness to it – that feels less like biographical accident than like the machine asserting its final, irreversible logic: no one gets out. The horseman is always in the sky. The rider is always your father. The gun is always already raised.

Gaza is burning. Lebanon counts its dead. Iran and Israel circle each other with weapons that could, if the calculation goes wrong, produce casualties that dwarf anything the current conflicts have generated. The arms manufacturers publish their earnings. The soldiers lose their limbs. The cities lose their buildings and their memories and their people. The machine runs. It has always run. It will run after us.

Bierce knew. He always knew. He just couldn’t make us listen.

Principal References

Bierce, Ambrose. “A Son of the Gods.” In Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. E.L.G. Steele, 1891.

Bierce, Ambrose. “A Horseman in the Sky.” In Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. E.L.G. Steele, 1891.

Eisenhower, Dwight D. Farewell Address to the Nation. 17 January 1961.

Morris, Benny. 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War. Yale University Press, 2008.

Fisk, Robert. Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon. Touchstone, 1990.

Parenti, Michael. The Face of Imperialism. Paradigm Publishers, 2011.

Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. PublicAffairs, 2002.

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

SIPRI Yearbook 2024: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2024.