The Technology Trap: Why AI Cannot Escape the Unchanging Fundamentals of War

A prominent former U.S. defense official has issued a stark warning to military planners and technology advocates: the belief that artificial intelligence, hypersonic missiles, and drone swarms will decisively determine the future of warfare is itself a dangerous form of myopia. In a new essay for Foreign Affairs titled “The Fog of Tech,” Mara Karlin, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development under the Biden administration, argues that an excessive focus on procuring cutting-edge technology risks creating a “technology trap” that obscures war’s unchanging human fundamentals.

The essay, published in the November/December 2026 issue, arrives amid an intense global race to integrate AI into national security infrastructure. The risk of being overtaken by rivals such as China is real, Karlin acknowledges. But she contends that an equally significant risk is being ignored: policymakers developing a misplaced sense of certainty about how innovations will change war, while neglecting the timeless questions of who kills, who dies, and who decides.

Key facts

The limits of the F-35 and the lessons of Ukraine

Karlin points to a specific failure of imagination in the 2010s, when defense planners believed future battlefields would be dominated by sophisticated platforms. She recalls a 2017 senior Pentagon official declaring the F-35 stealth fighter would be “a war winner,” and notes that the 2018 National Defense Strategy, drafted under Elbridge Colby (now undersecretary of defense), anticipated that advanced computing, AI, robotics, and hypersonics would “ensure we will be able to fight and win the wars of the future.”

The reality that emerged, she argues, was something entirely different: the war in Ukraine, which she describes as “World War I meets World War III.” Sophisticated Russian ballistic missiles and precision-guided glide bombs wreak havoc on cities, but at the same time, highly lethal bombs are dropped by drones carried aloft by simple balloons. One of the most effective anti-drone defenses consists of fishermen’s nets draped over security checkpoints and critical infrastructure. In the city of Izium, netting was used to cover an entire small urban area.

This dynamic, Karlin argues, reveals a critical blind spot: high-end technology works in tandem with basic tools, and cheap, accessible innovations can level battlefields in ways that sophisticated procurement plans fail to anticipate.

Why the technology trap matters now

For the ReviewArticle audience, which tracks AI tools, automation, and developer workflows, Karlin’s argument offers a necessary counterpoint to the prevailing narrative that AI will inevitably revolutionize every domain it touches. The essay suggests that the very characteristics that make AI transformative in commercial contexts—low barriers to entry, democratized knowledge, rapid iteration—also make it harder for military planners to predict when and for how long new tools will confer an outsize advantage.

Karlin draws on the military historian Michael Howard, who famously warned more than 50 years ago that future wars are unknowable. “I am tempted indeed to declare dogmatically that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong,” Howard wrote. But Karlin notes that Howard may have been too sanguine about the costs of getting it wrong. The U.S. military’s technological prowess in the 1991 Gulf War seemed to herald a new, high-tech American way of war, yet that same technological advantage could not defeat insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The human cost of technological certainty

The essay’s most pointed critique is that an obsession with technology can make war appear mechanical and sterile. Karlin invokes Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote almost two centuries ago that “war is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass… but always the collision of two living forces.” Technology, she warns, can inadvertently obscure this reality.

Her analysis carries particular weight given her role in shaping U.S. defense strategy. She served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2021 to 2023, where she was directly involved in the development of the 2022 National Defense Strategy. Her warning is not a rejection of AI or advanced technology, but a call for humility: defense planners should prioritize scaling and integrating new capabilities and developing innovative operational concepts, but they must also resist the false comfort of believing technology will provide clear answers to war’s fundamental uncertainties.

Sources and limits

This draft is based on a single analytical essay from Foreign Affairs, which is a respected policy journal but represents one author’s argument rather than official U.S. policy. Karlin’s positions are attributed directly from the published text. No additional official sources or counterarguments from other defense analysts were included in the source material. The essay’s claims about specific military operations and decisions are presented as the author’s interpretation and have not been independently verified by ReviewArticle. Readers should consult the full essay for complete context and consider it as one perspective in an ongoing debate about AI and military strategy.

Source: Foreign Affairs – The Fog of Tech