Western security experts have recently questioned the wisdom of continued investment in military power built on massive-scale extractive infrastructures and expensive weapons platforms like tanks and fighter jets. They argue that these vestigial tools of industrial war, with their bloated procurement schedules and carbon-intensive supply chains, will not win tomorrow’s conflicts. Rather, the future will be fortified by agile, energy-efficient, economical, and automated weapons flowing through securitized and sustainable supply chains. From negotiating new sovereign AI blocs, to on-and-allyshoring silicon chip production, to rapidly expanding the construction of hyperscale data centers, the logistical architecture of this martial imaginary relies on an unquestioned belief in the value of precision.
In this paper, I explore how the concept of precision—as it relates to both the technical tools of death distribution and the energy demands and climate impacts of nominally lighter bootprint military infrastructures—sits at the core of a spatial sleight of hand that obscures the shifting geopolitics of risk and varied ecological contours of global militarism. Taken together, the deployment of AI tools like those used by Israel in Gaza, automated drones in Russia and Ukraine, and the increased volume of US-based security narratives advocating for amplified scales of mass production of these ‘smart’ tools illustrate that the availability of precision weaponry does not guarantee accurate targeting or a shift toward less extractive military practices. Indeed, the focus on the precision of tools erases the human and environmental impacts that underlie the spatial redistribution of war's harms.