Big Tech and Silicon Valley are transforming the military-industrial complex

I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper&#x27;s author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC as they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries, specifically by analyzing the impact of mobile penetration in the poorer regions of Mexico.<p>González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&amp;D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI&#x2F;JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&amp;D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper&#x27;s executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it&#x27;s history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world.<p>I&#x27;d highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton&#x27;s Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown&#x27;s Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).<p>There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain&#x27;t it.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.routledge.com&#x2F;Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security-Tour-Rethinking-Warfare-Economies&#x2F;Pemberton&#x2F;p&#x2F;book&#x2F;9780367257675" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.routledge.com&#x2F;Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...</a>

Listen I don&#x27;t like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.<p>All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

This combination should be unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Stanford.

&gt; The Pentagon also quietly launched Project Maven in 2017, an effort to use machine learning (a form of AI) for analyzing massive datasets consisting of surveillance images taken by drones in the Middle East and other locations.<p>I see a lot of huge contracts for big initiatives listed here. Maven and similar projects have had problems adapting to conditions on the ground in Ukraine at least according to a recent NYT article. [0] It would be comforting to see more ground-up projects that start from actual battlefield conditions and work from there to the tech solutions.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;ukraine-new-american-technology.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2024&#x2F;04&#x2F;23&#x2F;us&#x2F;politics&#x2F;ukraine-new-a...</a><p>Edit: added source.

Technological advances in the military sector are always very interesting and research into them is to be welcomed. From ARPANet to GPS, we have benefited greatly from this and despite the moral concerns of some, AI-controlled drone swarms and fully automated target acquisition are also very interesting and important developments that future armies will need for its defense.

Big money in MIC. Temptation hard to avoid.

It’s been happening for a long time. Meredith Whittaker left Google over their drone contracts five years ago. But I thought the kings of encroaching consolidated doom these days were private equity firms and the medical industrial complex.

I think that giant leap in Vulture Capital is just an indication that the wealthiest people are pretty sure we&#x27;re heading into war, and they want to make sure to make money from it...<p>And are even fine with encouraging it...

need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Even just good ole stalling at project management levels can work wonders.<p>Need a “jia tan”

Arguably the government was doing VC investment before he concept existed . DARPA even has the same concepts in their competitions at Defcon . Fail fast and evaluate many solutions at once.

This reminds me of the stories of industrial improvisation in WW2. Casablanca-class escort carriers and hundreds of other successful kludges changed history.<p>A few lines from the paper stand out to me:<p>* &quot;A lack of transparency.&quot; How much transparency do you expect from military R&amp;D, since that would give away US military secrets? I recall stories of the Soviets copying the US AIM-9 Sidewinder to create their K-13 Atoll. Military secrets need to be secret.<p>* &quot;Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector&quot; The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors.<p>* &quot;grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence&quot; I suspect AI will change warfare forever. Humans freak out under fire, AIs may not. A semi-competent person under fire is a rare gem that you treasure.<p>* &quot;overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities&quot; I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake.<p>* &quot;the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies&quot; The deployment of the US Military in the last century has mostly been to protect other countries. We can debate how democratic many of those countries were, but protecting other countries is the most common use case of the US Military. The last two times we let someone bomb US territory was either 911 or WW2 in the Pacific. If you have to fight, it may be preferable to defend Taiwan rather than Hawaii.<p>* &quot;a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs&quot; A strong economy that could not be bombed by the enemy won WW2 for the US. A strong economy won the Cold War for the US. If anyone has counter-examples, I&#x27;d like to see them.<p>I&#x27;m no fan of the US Military; I&#x27;d disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps.<p>But this author is just anti-American. Let&#x27;s look this guy up...&quot;Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California.&quot;<p>He&#x27;s strongly linked to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;equaljusticesociety.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;equaljusticesociety.org</a> &quot;The Equal Justice Society (EJS), California Black Power Network (CBPN), and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force ... formed a new collaboration called the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth.&quot;<p>I will not elaborate on the FARA implications.

It would be a bad story if the DoD was trying to, for example, host their own email. I&#x27;m happy that they spend a bazillion dollars on first-in-class cloud services.

I strongly believe that all computers and phones and social media have been engineered as weapons more than anything else and they are some of the strongest weapons everyone carries around. Its crazy that 20-25 years ago no one had any of these and now if you don’t have one that’s somehow crazy. Most of the tech in phones comes from military from wifi to gps etc. they just gave everyone a powerful weapon and made us want to have it.

Apparently this is the closest a post can get to discussing the in-progress genocide without being instantly removed from the front page.<p>A few other comments here are saying the Brown study is rather sparse on details or recent examples. Have a quick peak into the [flagged] graveyard and there’s plenty of examples of Amazon and Google’s projects in support of the IDF.

I clicked through to the article. I think the title is inaccurate. The paper primarily goes into detail about the Department of Defense heavily investing in startups, incubators and silicon valley. That&#x27;s the vast majority of the paper. The paper has significantly less in the way of laying out how that&#x27;s been successful, or how that&#x27;s transformed the MIC.<p>This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn&#x27;t yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets).<p>I think a more accurate headline might be, &quot;how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI&quot;?