By Kevin Seabrooke
“In 2016, I was responsible for the deaths of over 600 people. But they deserved to die—all of them. They were the bad guys, the evil of our time. History will not grant the Islamic State a redemption arc…. I don’t lose sleep over what we did. However, I still struggle with how easy it was. Technology turned warfare into a game, and we treated it as such.”
Major Brennan Deveraux is now a national security researcher at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. But from January to August in 2016, he was deployed to Iraq in a Strike Cell as a theater-level rocket artillery liaison during Operation Inherent Resolve. Brennan’s experience gives him insight into war in the 21st century that is increasingly remote and technological. The strategies and tactics of this modern warfare fill the headlines of today from the war in Ukraine and U.S. strikes on Houthis Rebels in Yemen. Deployed to combat twice in Iraq and once to the Horn of Africa,
Deveraux reflects on his personal feelings about his artillery missions that slaughtered a technologically inferior foe, “exposing the impact of ‘remote’ warfare on modern service members. Discussing the darker aspects of “push-button” warfare that he faced—racking up statistics, losing empathy, losing his humanity—and dealing with the mental and emotional repercussions when he returned from overseas.
Deveraux is an active-duty Army major with more than 15 years of service, working as a strategist specializing in strike warfare, emerging technology management, and military innovation.
Exterminating ISIS: Behind the Curtain of a Technological War (Brennan S. Deveraux, Casemate Books, Havertown, PA, 2025, 208 pp., $34.95 HC)
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