Today’s weapons systems run on reams of software coursing through stacks of silicon chips. Daire Ní Chnáimh reviews the history of semiconductor warfare and considers how we can grow the movement against it.

When the Israeli military ran out of computing power in October 2023, they ran to US tech multinationals to sort them out with bigger AI capabilities, leading to “a dramatic increase in the purchase of services from Google Cloud, Amazon’s AWS, and Microsoft Azure.”¹ Data centres and digital infrastructure not only enable ‘cloud storage’ of vast surveillance data on Palestinian people, but crunch algorithms with names such as ‘Lavender’ and ‘The Gospel’ to generate ‘kill lists’, supposedly precise lists of which Palestinians it is legitimate to murder.²

Old stereotypes of war evoke scenes of soldiers fighting a fair fight for Western liberalism and reaping the reward of industrial prosperity back home. This Hollywood trench-glamour is a far cry from the reality of war in the 2020s.  Here in the imperial core, raising the arms budget means slashing funds for public healthcare, education, and any hope of decarbonisation before the planet burns, while working class people are getting poorer. In Palestine and Yemen, ordinary people in their homes live in fear that an automated decision to end their life by smart-bomb or drone strike will be waved through by an imperial lackey who never has to look them in the eye. All while a military-industrial complex sells more and more weapons systems to states which are supposedly each other’s enemies.³

This article offers a short history of how warfare went digital, followed by three materialist perspectives on semiconductor technology which could be applied to other technical systems to help understand them and build a more powerful movement against the military-industrial complex. It aims to encourage further research and aid discussions about why demilitarisation is essential on a burning planet.

Semiconductors: wars with and within

During World War Two, the US developed methods of analogue computation to chart ballistics and predict the effects of bombs. The research and production of machines to crunch numbers persisted through the Cold War. With much public investment into private industry, a new commodity was figured out, which today is as important to global warfare today as oil: the semiconductor. In the 1950s and 1960s, the bosses of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry focused on selling to the US military. 95% of the circuits produced in 1965 went to military and space applications; 20% of all integrated circuits went into one guided missile programme.⁴

The first military aggression that depended on computerised technology was the 1990 Gulf War, when semiconductors in the wings of ‘smart’ explosives tore through Baghdad and took thousands of human lives. A headline in the New York Times read “War Hero Status Possible for the Computer Chip.” The article’s author described how “smart weapons with tiny computer “brains” are zeroing in on targets with deadly precision.”⁵ As has been made clear by two years of accelerated genocide in Gaza, if ‘targets’ means virtually anyone alive, what purpose does it serve to say they are hit with technological precision? Only to make the murderers seem so scientific in their lab coats that they couldn’t possibly be barbaric.

Society legitimises the use of computational tools and lately of AI, which power our communications, transport and increasingly our medical technology. Materially, these involve the same type of semiconductors and data centres which are needed by the Israeli military to compute their ‘kill lists’ and targeting systems. Is it possible to delegitimise the technologies that militaries deploy as tools for mass murder?  This history of military technology provides us with three ways to think about this.

1. What kind of labour is dead in this commodity?

US media pundits make much of the risks facing America because 75% of global chip production is located in Taiwan and China, but few pause to ask why this concentration happened. In 1963, when Fairchild Semiconductor chose to relocate semiconductor production from the US to Hong Kong, their simple calculation was that wages there were a tenth of those in California. When they found they could pay even lower wages in Singapore and Malaysia, they opened factories there.⁶ Low wages are irresistible to capitalists, which is why the Silicon Valley bosses created today’s ‘security problem’ of offshored production. Technology is produced when it makes profit-sense. Capitalism’s ‘spatial fix’ means that jobs are located in places where an hour of human time is deemed to be worth less than in the imperial centres. Onerous work is also relocated in accordance with neocolonial logics.

In the 1910s and 1920s, with industrial processes becoming more technologically complex, a new school of ‘scientific management’ sought to break the power of skilled workers by slicing the components of industrial production processes into ever more tiny and mundane slivers.⁷ Today TSMC, the world’s largest semiconductor producer, employs over 80,000 people. A recent report on labour conditions in its factories described one person’s job as feeding thousands of chip parts into a cleaning machine.⁸ The work often involves exposure to hazardous materials and dangerous processes. In a single plant in Taiwan this year, there were “four major industrial accidents in a two-month period, resulting in two deaths and two serious injuries.”⁹ In these factories, technology is used to organise human lives to put cheapened ecological resources through high-energy processes and make expensive products sold in richer parts of the world. Years of people’s lives are spent on this gruelling work that is deliberately hidden from view.

In writing that “War Hero Status [is] Possible for the Computer Chip”, the New York Times journalist unthinkingly endowed metal and silicon with human agency. Similar rhetoric has become more prevalent in the era of ‘autonomous’ drones and AI. Like all commodities, technology is not human but is the congealed product of human labour, land and resources. Machines are not “simply an innovative means of harnessing energy, with no detrimental implications in terms of the social distribution of resources.”¹⁰ They are a particular form of social organisation. Although it seems an intractable part of the current global order, and our laptops and smartphones encourage us to acquiesce to this reality, we can’t forget that “modern technology is not primarily a way of harnessing nature to work for humans but a way for some humans to harness other humans to work for them.”¹¹

2. Who shifts the sands of wartime?

Leidos is a US tech multinational with an office in Glasgow’s Skypark. One of their many contracts involves making digital infrastructure for the Israeli military. In 2020, they said in a blog post that the data centres they helped to create for the Israeli military were “making the desert bloom”.¹² This staple phrase of settler colonial arrogance was first spoken by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Painting a picture of agricultural fertility over a project of ethnic cleansing never made sense. However, applying the image to military data centres in the occupied Negev, where for years the Israeli military has stopped Palestinians from growing food, raises the hypocrisy to even dizzier heights.¹³

Data centres require massive consumption of sand and water. They invariably destroy land rather than making it bloom. Resources used to build today’s data centres were formed over hundreds of thousands of years. We’re now ripping out the bowels of the earth faster than ever. This long gestation time contrasts sharply with the supposed rapidity of war, but the production, testing and of course usage of military technology creates long-term destruction that will stretch generations into the future. Every kilo of silicon involves blasting roughly 2.6kg of specially quarried sand with intense heat.

Laleh Khalili’s new book Extractive Capitalism details some of the dynamics at play in global sand mining. After water, sand is the world’s most consumed natural resource by volume. 50 billion tonnes are used annually, compared to 4 billion tonnes of oil. Sand is mined illegally from beaches and riverbeds in the Global South, where “people whose livelihoods are destroyed by exploitation and debt work for a pittance to haul away sand from their own places of habitation.”¹⁴ Most of this goes to the construction industry, but the creation of new data centres and the endless replacement of semiconductors in existing data centres mean that earth is continuously disembowelled from places that could otherwise be used to sustain life. Silicon chips and water from the desert are poured into data centres to prop up the Israeli genocide economy, damaging the agricultural prospects of others.

The idea of ‘precision warfare’ ignores the indiscriminate collateral damage caused by the toxicity of mining and munitions residues, and the environmental costs of running and cooling high energy data centres in areas of water scarcity. The War and Geos research project has published work on these hidden timespans of war’s extraction and pollution.¹⁵ They write that the ‘slow’ ecological effects of weapons production aren’t experienced slowly by those whose perspectives are most important, the people whose health is ruined by the poisoning of their home. Rather, these timelines all overlap, creating long-lasting destruction across multiple places.

3. How is production chained together?

As disruptive actions at many ports and factories have shown over the past two years, the pipeline of weapons production spans the globe. Actions across the supply chain are effective because supply chains are so complex and convoluted. In the case of semiconductors, several thousand companies contribute components to extreme ultraviolet lithography machines which are used in the factories where low-paid workers produce today’s silicon chips.¹⁶ Disrupting any of them would disrupt the chain.

The US military invented the modern shipping container during World War Two, which was fought as much with logistics as with military tactics. The idea that value is produced across a circulatory system of supply chains was developed in the 1950s, to factor the cost of distributing parts into the cost of producing weapons for the US Air Force.¹⁷ It makes sense to think of supply chain infrastructure, including transport, as means of the production of a given weapons system. Arms giants Lockheed and Boeing factored logistics into their own production costs from the 1960s. The US Transportation Worker Identification Credential (TWIC) is used to determine who can handle shipping containers in the police-military grey zones of securitised ports. This policy, which Deborah Cowen describes as “the refusal of workers’ rights in the interest of trade flows,” is operated by Lockheed Martin.¹⁸

The military-industrial complex has redefined borders to support the ‘frictionless’ movement of commodities, whilst people who need to move are restricted and forced to make perilous journeys. The cool modern image of supply chains is a mask for the securitised corridors of imperial violence. Raw materials are taken at artificially low cost and shipped to production sites for processing by low-wage labour, by companies who will sell the final product as a high-value technology. This smooth flow could not continue without rough threats of violence at the slightest delay in the schedule. This violence is promised by state police, private security, the military, or a mixture of all three. Where national security once meant the safety of people within the nation, it has evolved to mean the safety of the supply chain, or the flow of goods. This slippage means that disrupting the flow of commodities can be warped into a case of terrorism, even if no people and only property are harmed. This is why we can have comrades imprisoned for a decade just because they broke a few windows. But the hysteria about national security masks the reality that these straggling supply chains are as fragile as a spider’s web.

Conclusion

The militarised industry of high-tech computation is above all a system of social organisation that severely damages our social fabric whether or not the smart-bombs are dropped. Is it possible to wrest the planet’s computing power back from the military, and reserve it for use in healthcare and communications? Or is the imperialism, exploitation, and ecological degradation at the level of the chip something only a Luddite response can resolve?

The biggest movement against the arms industry right now is focused on ending the supply of weapons to Israel. Effective disruptions have been achieved by striking dockworkers, the occupation of transport sites and entrances to factories, and damage to production facilities. Could the perspectives above add anything to these existing efforts?

The difficulties faced by any campaign against the arms industry stem from the same severing of workers’ labour from the final product that was instituted by the US scientific management advocates in the 1910s. Opaque production processes have been combined with classified and convoluted supply chains, to ensure that no rank and file worker can grasp the place of their labour within the totality of the weapons system. Shadowy subsidiaries and a gargantuan network of parts manufacturers make it very difficult for anybody to trace the destination of a given piece of weapons technology. A movement for workers’ power against the military industrial complex could begin by restoring workers’ knowledge of the weapons systems they produce.

Concretely, supporting the practice of workers’ inquiry at all points of the supply chain could enable workers to build a picture of the significance of their labour in producing a given weapons system. Research into ‘sacrifice zones’ created to make weapons at sites of mining and weapons testing, and a reckoning with the fact that a weapons system couldn’t exist without these, could link land defenders with anti-war campaigners in a more holistic internationalist movement. Rhenium, to take one example, is a rare earth mineral which is predominantly used to make high-speed jet engines. If the extraction of this resource was prevented, new F-35 jets would become impossible to produce. Labour movements and land defenders could combine research efforts to understand the oily chains linking stolen sand to stolen land, and data centres to nuclear test sites. Such deeper perspectives on technology could foster greater solidarity across borders and movements, and greater efforts to research and communicate, so we can find ways to build ungovernable organisation across working class constituents of the global arms industry.

Daire Ní Chnáimh is a member of rs21 in Glasgow.

1. Yuval Abraham, ‘Order from Amazon: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war’, +972 Magazine, 4 August 2024, https://www.972mag.com/cloud-israeli-army-gaza-amazon-google-microsoft/ ↩︎
2. Yuval Abraham, ‘Lavender: the AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree’, +972 Magazine, 3 April 2024, https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ ↩︎
3. On how the US arms industry can’t help but sell weapons to China, see Vijay Mehta, The Economics of Killing, Pluto Press, 2012 ↩︎
4. See Chapter 27 of Chris Miller, Chip War, Simon & Schuster, 2022 ↩︎
5. William J. Broad, ‘WAR IN THE GULF: HIGH TECH; War Hero Status Possible for the Computer Chip’, New York Times, 21 January 1991 ↩︎
6. Miller, Chip War, 53-55 ↩︎
7. See Chapter 4 of Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: the degradation of work in the twentieth century, 1974 ↩︎
8. Hsiuwen Liu and Michael Beltran, ‘Workers Describe Abusive Treatment in Taiwan’s Semiconductor Factories,’ Rest of World, 4 June 2025. https://restofworld.org/2025/filipino-workers-taiwan-chip-industry/ ↩︎
9. Charlotte Trueman, ‘TSMC announces 15 new Taiwanese chips fabs as safety administrator suspends work at Chiayi site following death of two employees’, Data Centre Dynamics, 22 July 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/tsmc-announces-15-new-taiwanese-chips-fabs-as-safety-administrator-suspends-work-at-chiayi-site-following-death-of-two-employees/ ↩︎
10. Alf Hornborg, The Magic of Technology, Routledge, 2023, 137 ↩︎
11. Hornborg, Magic of Technology, 233 ↩︎
12. Zack Silverman, ‘High-tech data centres “make the desert bloom” in Israel’, Leidos Website, 24 November 2020, https://www.leidos.com/insights/high-tech-data-centers-make-desert-bloom-israel ↩︎
13. Mustafa Abu Sneineh, ‘Israel’s crackdown on Palestinians in Negev threatens Bedouins and its own government’, Middle East Eye, 13 January 2022, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestinian-negev-forestation-crisis-government-collapse ↩︎
14. Laleh Khalili, Extractive Capitalism, Verso 2025, 26 ↩︎
15. See Mark Griffiths and Kali Rubaii, ‘Late modern war and the geos: The ecological ‘beforemaths’ of advanced military technologies,’ 18 October 2024. https://warandgeos.co.uk/scholarship/ ↩︎
16. Miller, Chip War, 228 ↩︎
17. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 35-40 ↩︎
18. Cowen, Logistics, 176 ↩︎