Modern warfare: the furthest thing from the Homeric hero

Modern warfare seems to mark the greatest possible departure from the figure of the Homeric hero – that is, the champion – a figure which military historians trace at least as far back as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, who was ignominiously mortally wounded by the arquebus of an obscure Landsknecht infantryman who had come to plunder Rome in 1527. It was, in fact, with the introduction of firearms that the ‘master-at-arms’—with his manly and warlike valour so well expressed by the frown of Leonardo’s Condottiero, and worthy of the grandiose epics of Ariosto and Tasso—began to fade away forever, now reduced to brief, superficial news reports lasting mere minutes. From the hand-to-hand combat with the sword typical of the ancient world, through medieval axes and maces (see the chilling and now motionless armouries in museums), we moved first to the precise, coordinated, delayed action of the bow (perhaps the greatest military invention), then to the devastating power of firearms (be it gunpowder or the atom), and finally to drones, robots and AI; almost as if, along this trajectory – which one might call evolutionary were it not one of annihilation – by stylising war, it were gradually being freed from its barbaric thirst for a bloodthirsty idol that demands human sacrifices. And who knows whether, in a distant and ultimately more advanced future (though never so advanced as to do without conflict entirely), we might truly return to a contest between champions alone, perhaps in tournaments of automatons, thereby sparing both men and armies altogether, as in a sort of chess match – total yet bloodless – like the one imagined in "Ender’s Game".

Quite a few military innovations were actually designed to reduce the devastating effects of war on human beings. Gatling, for example, the American inventor of the machine gun, hoped – as a doctor and philanthropist – that by multiplying the firepower in the hands of a single rifleman, he could thereby reduce the need for men in the armies and minimise the loss of life. But, as is often the case with innovations, it all turned out the opposite way, because that deadly weapon effectively heralded the advent of large-scale, positional warfare – characterised, as in the trenches of "Paths of Glory", by long, nerve-wracking waits and ferocious assaults, or rather by ‘daredevils’ in the style of Jünger (who, not coincidentally, considered titling his war memoirs "The Red and the Grey" because of the blood on the uniforms). If anything, what survives of the hero today is the rhetoric—as romantic as it is unrealistic—of the man who triumphs over all-powerful technology. The Pasdaran, for example, take pride in tracing their lineage back to the epic warriors of the "Shahnameh" (The Book of Kings) by Ferdowsi, as if a modern European were to regard Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival with any seriousness—that is, as the utter madman who grows up feral because his mother, Herzeloyde, wishes to spare him from his inevitable fate as a catafract warrior clad in glittering armour. It is true that in war one must never confuse the weapon with the hand that wields it – or, to put it better, commit the sin of metonymy; but times have changed, and what counts is no longer the combative aggression of the fighter, but rather – needless to say – the algorithmic reach of AI and its protocols for maximising and perfecting impact. By mimicking the collective intelligence of certain animal species that operate according to an instinctive orchestration of intent (to put it plainly, the very same that governs schools of sardines, swarms of locusts or colonies of termites), war processed by AI is evolving towards swarm warfare, where every drone is at once a pawn and a king, expendable and decisive, unpredictable and surgical. In short, in the wake of AI, even in warfare, man is being superseded by his own creation: now rendered obsolete even in the act of killing. So whilst in the 1980s a Reagan looked on enviously at Rambo (“Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time’), today’s leaders dream of the machine armies from "The Matrix Revolutions" which, like black clouds laden with fire and nanotechnological death, descend upon their enemies to pulverise them and turn "jus in bello" into the most hypocritical of oxymorons.