The War Me:chine

From reorganising economies to rewriting identities and redesigning nature.

I have often argued that war makes the economy programmable.

In wartime, governments can reorganise production, redirect resources and mobilise labour. They decide what becomes essential, what must be prioritised and what must be sacrificed. War provides both the justification and the machinery for extraordinary intervention in economic life.

Increasingly, though, war allows us to programme far more than the economy. Like identity.

I have been writing for some time about how security systems and hybrid warfare are changing the nature of identity itself. Deepfakes, synthetic selves, surveillance and information operations make our identities available for manipulation, simulation and deployment. In an age of hybrid conflict, any of us can become an unwitting participant in somebody else's operation. We do not have to be soldiers to find ourselves involved in warfare.

Now that same logic is reaching into biology. This time, it is the dogs.

The dogs of war

On 22 October 2026, an American defence technology company called Warhound emerged from stealth with $200 million in funding and a reported valuation of $1.2 billion.

Warhound was conceived by Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal Biosciences, and Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries. It intends to clone and genetically enhance working dogs for the military, law enforcement and emergency services, and to equip them with technology that connects them to their handlers and to wider operations, including autonomous systems.

According to reporting by WIRED and TechCrunch, Warhound has already banked cell lines from high-performing working dogs. Its initial focus is on inherited health conditions, but its ambitions extend to enhancing speed, agility and sensory capability, potentially even introducing wolf-derived olfactory receptor genes to sharpen the dogs' sense of smell.

Anduril, meanwhile, will provide protective equipment, sensors and software. Lamm has described these additions as sitting “on top of the dog, not in the dog.” The phrase is meant to reassure. But the genetic programme is, by design, in the dog.

The first Warhound puppies are expected in early 2027. Its genetically enhanced dogs have yet to be born, much less deployed. The ambition, nevertheless, is extraordinary.

We are no longer simply designing machines to imitate nature. We are beginning to redesign nature to operate within machines.

A better dog. But better for whom?

I recently published The Dog Needs No Voice, which examined a viral claim that Elon Musk had promised Neuralink would let us talk to dogs. My argument was that dogs already communicate, through their bodies, behaviours, senses and relationships with the world. The absence of human language does not mean the absence of communication.

There is a striking progression from that story to this one. First, we imagine translating animals into something our machines can understand. Now we imagine modifying the animals themselves to make them more effective within our technological systems.

It is one thing to make nature machine-readable. It is quite another to make it machine-operable.

Of course, humans have bred and trained dogs for work, including warfare, for centuries. Animals have long been harnessed to human ambition, often with appalling consequences. What is new is the means. Rather than relying solely on selective breeding and training, we can now attempt to reproduce desirable genetic characteristics, modify particular traits, and incorporate the resulting animal into an increasingly connected military operation.

Warhound's founders argue that their technology could produce healthier dogs, with fewer inherited conditions, better protection and longer working lives. The company has also invited the American Humane Society to help certify its training programme. Those commitments should not be dismissed. Reducing suffering is a legitimate objective.

But improving an animal's health and improving its operational performance are not necessarily the same thing. A dog genetically enhanced to detect explosives more effectively might be extremely valuable to a military operation. The animal, however, does not choose that operation, set its objectives or decide which risks are acceptable. Its extraordinary capacities belong to a living being. Their purpose is determined by somebody else.

That is the question - well, one of the questions - that troubles me. Are we making the animal better, or making it better suited to what we want it to do? In this case, destroy other humans.

The nature of the Me:chine

I have been exploring Me:chine as the ongoing negotiation between what is machinable and what remains unmachinable. Much of that work has concerned human identity, agency, embodiment and our relationship with artificial intelligence.

But now Me:chine is not only about me and the machine. It is also about nature and the machine.

The dog matters here precisely because its biological abilities remain so unmachinable. As Ben Lamm acknowledged in an interview with Fortune, no existing machine matches a dog's sense of smell or its judgement in complex environments.

Consider what follows from that. The machine cannot reproduce the animal's capabilities, so the ambition becomes to incorporate the animal into the machine's wider system. The dog is magic because it possesses something technology cannot yet provide. Yet rather than treating that difference as a boundary, we increasingly treat it as an opportunity for integration.

The unmachinable becomes the very reason for making the living organism more machinable.

Notice, too, how quickly the language changes. Warhound is reportedly considering a commercial model called Canine-as-a-Service, as though a dog were a software subscription: something to be specified, supplied, monitored, scaled, upgraded and replaced.

A dog is one of our most special creatures, and it has a life. It experiences the world. It learns, responds, suffers, ages and dies. Cloning its genome does not reproduce its experiences, its relationships or its individual identity. Yet the language of technological services makes it possible to think of an animal primarily as a capability to be delivered.

We should be concerned whenever the language of the system begins to obscure the living being within it.

What else will we programme?

This is where Warhound connects to a much larger transformation.

Wartime has historically given governments extraordinary powers over economic life. More recently, the expansion of security systems, digital surveillance and hybrid warfare has brought identity into the operational environment. We can be identified, tracked, impersonated, manipulated and represented by synthetic versions of ourselves. Our digital identities become both potential targets and instruments of conflict.

Biotechnology now offers to take that logic further still: not simply using living bodies in military operations, but intervening in their biology to shape what they can do before they are deployed.

We have moved from organising what we produce, to intervening in who we are, to contemplating the redesign of living beings themselves. These developments are not identical, nor is any one the inevitable consequence of another. But together they reveal an expanding ambition to make more of the world available for operational control. And my goodness, it is depressing.

The issue is not genetic engineering in itself. Technologies that prevent disease, relieve suffering or improve health can be enormously beneficial. It is the purpose of the intervention that matters. In whose interests is the organism being changed? Who determines which characteristics are desirable? Who bears the risk? And what happens to a living being when its value is increasingly measured by how well it performs within a system it did not choose?

These are questions about agency, not technological capability.

War has always demanded bodies, human and animal alike. What is changing is our ability to intervene in those bodies before they are deployed, designing their biological capabilities around the anticipated needs of an operation. And military necessity tries to supply a powerful justification for developments that might otherwise provoke far greater scrutiny.

What begins as protection can become enhancement. What begins as enhancement can become optimisation. And what begins as optimisation can become an expectation that the living organism should conform ever more closely to the requirements of the system.

The dog still has no voice

In The Dog Needs No Voice, I argued that an animal should not need to speak our language to have its own way of being in the world recognised. Warhound brings me back to that argument from another direction.

The dog cannot consent to having its biology redesigned. It cannot negotiate the purposes to which its enhanced abilities will be put. It cannot decide whether the risks of a mission are worth taking. None of those limitations is new. But our ability to intervene directly in the animal's biology is becoming far more sophisticated.

The animal may become more capable without gaining any greater agency over the circumstances in which those capabilities are used. That, to me, is the deeper danger.

War is no longer simply an occasion for reorganising economies, mobilising populations or deploying technologies. The technologies developed in its name are beginning to make living nature itself available for redesign.

The Me:chine goes to war when we stop asking machines to imitate nature and start demanding that nature behave more like a machine.

The question is no longer simply how much of nature we can put to work. It is how much of nature we are prepared to rewrite to make it work.