The Trillion Dollar War Machine, page 26
Why the sudden rush? In her address to the arms makers, Hicks left no question about the motivation for the Pentagon’s new initiative—beating China. To get it done, she placed her faith in America’s tech sector:
To stay ahead, we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains—which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.
We’ll counter the PLA’s [China’s People’s Liberation Army’s] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat. With smart people, smart concepts, and smart technology, with uplift and urgency from the commercial sector.
Hicks was so high on the idea of technology influencing Beijing that she suggested that just the development of these new high-tech systems, whether or not they are ever used, would keep China’s leaders in check: “We must ensure that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes ‘today is not the day’—and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond. Innovation is vital to how we do that.”3
Hicks’s vision of a new high-tech arsenal relies heavily on developing a new cohort of companies that can develop next-generation systems with the capabilities she described, in the quantities needed, and at an affordable price. That’s why the Pentagon has invested considerable time and energy in the past decade in courting tech companies and tech talent in Silicon Valley and other hubs of industrial innovation.
This drive to sustain a military-first foreign policy in which force and the threat of force—bolstered by the development of “miracle weapons” with new capabilities—is a familiar approach, one that has failed routinely in major US conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. But the advocates of new-age warfare in industry, the financial sector, and the Pentagon have ignored a central lesson of the wars of the last six decades: Technology alone does not guarantee victory, especially in conflicts with complex social, political, and nationalist origins.
The new techno-warriors believe that it will be different this time, if only the Pentagon would place them in the forefront of weapons development, pushing aside mega-firms like Lockheed Martin, RTX, and Boeing. The tech sector’s attitude toward the old guard is outlined in depth in the military-tech firm Anduril’s manifesto on “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy.” The essay starts with an indictment of the big arms makers and an endorsement of the ability of emerging tech firms to solve the security problems of the present and the future:
Only superior military technology can credibly deter war. Since World War II, America and its allies’ lead in military technology has been the pivotal factor in preventing World War III. Today, that technological lead is in jeopardy. The incumbent defense companies are unable to build the technology we need to reaffirm our technological lead. We need a new breed of defense companies to reboot the arsenal of democracy.4
The Anduril document dismisses the usefulness of the Lockheed Martins and Boeings of the world, applauding them for a job well done in the past while questioning their relevance for the defense needs of the future:
Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better? The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need. Tomorrow’s weapons—autonomous systems, cyberweapons and defenses, networked systems, and more—are enabled through software, while these companies specialize in hardware. These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.5
The tech sector is positioning itself to make major gains relative to its larger rivals through its extensive influence over the Trump administration, ranging from the strong military-tech connections of Vice President JD Vance to the unprecedented advisory role of Elon Musk. (The implications of the June 2025 rift between Musk and President Trump will be discussed in the epilogue.)
The political clout of the tech sector is reinforced by the public fascination with new technologies and the achievements of their creators, such as the role of companies owned by Musk in developing everything from energy-efficient cars to cheaper ways to launch large payloads into space. The tech sector is seen by many Americans as more nimble, more cost effective, and more dynamic than the huge corporations that have come to dominate large parts of the US economy—and their products are seen as cooler than the standard output of Lockheed Martin or RTX.
The tech sector’s battle with the big contractors is a David and Goliath story, but in this telling the gap in size and strength is less pronounced. The defense-tech sector—today’s equivalent of David—is run by billionaires with strong connections with people in power. But Goliath—represented by the Big Five weapons makers—has advantages of its own, including more than $100 billion per year in Pentagon contracts, ample resources to spend millions on campaign donations, hundreds of well-connected lobbyists, and a strong base in Congress made up of members with military bases or factories in their states or districts. These levers of influence have enabled the arms industry to block Pentagon attempts to reduce or eliminate purchases of outmoded weapons systems or, in some cases, fund more of a given weapons system than the department even asks for.6
The winner of the coming battle of the budget—the Big Five or the emerging tech firms—will be as much a political battle as it will be the result of a careful debate about what kinds of systems best fit into an effective, forward-looking defense strategy.
As they fight for greater economic and political power, military-tech advocates are presenting themselves as a new breed, willing and able to tackle problems that were heretofore considered impossible to solve. Katherine Boyle of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, whose American Dynamism fund invests in emerging military-tech firms like Anduril and ShieldAI, has argued that leaders involved in developing military applications of AI are simply better people who have a can-do commitment to the future of humanity that resembles a religious crusade. It is a crusade with a familiar target: China.
In an April 2022 essay on “The Case for American Seriousness,” Boyle waxes poetic about the superior nature of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:
There’s a common question in Silicon Valley about what makes an extraordinary entrepreneur. Perseverance. Grit. Overcoming adversity. Hustle. Innate genius. A good childhood. A bad childhood. Luck. But the trait that is most meaningful… is the fire in the eyes, the ferocity of speech and action.… It is the belief that God or the universe has bestowed on you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you. It is a holy war waged against the laws of physics.”7
Boyle elaborated on her vision of new-age militarism in a May 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed coauthored with her colleague David Ulevitch and titled “Venture Capitalists Should Bet on America.” Boyle and Ulevitch are selling a high-tech version of “mom and apple pie,” suggesting that cashing in on weapons development is the ultimate act of patriotism:
As leaders of one of the largest venture-capital firms in the country we believe it is time to invest in America… [the] war in Ukraine, rising tensions in Taiwan, and global supply-chain fragility have reminded our entrepreneurial class that America’s dominance isn’t guaranteed. But more founders are building technology companies in areas that Washington cares most about: aerospace, defense, manufacturing, supply chain and physical infrastructure.8
Boyle and Ulevitch have a “let the private sector do it” approach to funding emerging weapons technology, dismissing US government efforts while noting that “to access needed technology, the Defense Department has experimented with start-up incubators and trusted capital markets for small and midsize companies. We believe many of those initiatives are unnecessary, because venture capital is better able to assess talent and risk as companies form and grow.”9
Finally, Boyle and Ulevitch applaud the growth of VC investment in rising arms companies: “The two largest venture capital fund-raises of the past year… SpaceX and Anduril… are American aerospace and defense companies building solutions for the Pentagon. That would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.”10
Boyle’s grandiosity, if taken seriously by policymakers, could pose a grave risk to the very future of humanity by accelerating the development of dangerous technologies without adequate deliberation or safeguards. As noted above, Boyle and her allies believe that they will be the central players in shaping the future of the planet, a frightening prospect given their messianic view of the wonders of AI-driven weapons.
Although there are some doubts in the middle ranks of the Pentagon about rushing full speed ahead with AI-driven weaponry, the approach favored by firms like Anduril, Palantir, and Andreessen Horowitz has had strong support at the highest levels of the DoD.
Still, the new marriage between the Pentagon and the tech sector is a work in progress. Silicon Valley has had an up-and-down relationship with the DoD. Many of the technologies that have fueled Silicon Valley’s growth—from advanced computing to the internet—got their start with military funding. But as the tech industry matured and established huge commercial markets, working with the Pentagon became a less and less attractive option. Defense Department contracting is a slow, bureaucratic process, and new military specifications can be imposed as a project goes along, leading to slower innovation and less timely funding than the emerging tech firms could get in the commercial sector. On top of that, many of the scientists and engineers working for top Silicon Valley firms objected to doing military-related work.
Silicon Valley’s aversion to embracing weapons development posed a serious problem for the Pentagon. Commercial tech firms had far outstripped the department’s usual roster of contractors in the development of fast, affordable, and capable computers and software. Beginning during the Clinton administration, there was talk that the Pentagon was no longer a major source of spin-offs to civilian industry. To the contrary, the arms sector needed to “spin in” superior civilian technologies and adapt them to military uses.
Now, the Pentagon’s quest for allies in Silicon Valley is finally paying off as a new generation of pro-military leaders takes charge at new firms focused on next-generation technology. One such leader is Palmer Luckey. At first glance, he seems an unlikely character to be spearheading a revolution in military technology. But at thirty-two, he is a multibillionaire and the founder of Anduril, one of the most important new entrants in the weapons sector.
Luckey became a billionaire in the wake of his sale of his Oculus virtual-reality headset, a novelty item that was all the rage when it was first released in 2012. Luckey sold it to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for more than $2 billion in 2014, when Luckey was all of twenty-two years old.11 From there, Luckey considered a bizarre series of possible businesses, including a chain of private prisons that would get paid only if convicts didn’t return after their first stint there and a company that would produce snacks from petroleum sucked out of the sewage system.
Luckey seems to be blissfully unaware of the long history of hype about miracle military technology followed by real-world failure. He thinks that the new systems that will come from firms like his will be so intimidating that no country will dare take military action that is contrary to US interests. At times, Luckey almost makes military technology sound warm and fuzzy, as if it offers the key to promoting universal brotherhood. For example, in response to a question at a conference, Luckey said, “Can weapons bring people closer together? I think yeah because you stop fights from happening.” CEO Alex Karp of Palantir went a step further when he made a claim that could have come straight out of George Orwell’s 1984, asserting that companies like his, which were providing military systems to Israel to enable its campaign of slaughter and war crimes in Gaza, were “the true peace activists” but that advocates of a ceasefire “are war activists.”12
Even as he heads up a firm that produces next-generation killing machines, Luckey has retained his obsession with gaming, so much so that he is “the owner of the world’s largest video game collection, which he keeps buried 200 feet underground in a decommissioned U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base.”13 In a June 2024 interview with Sam Dean of the Los Angeles Times, Luckey would not “confirm nor deny his ownership of that site, but he did say that he’s in the process of collecting the entire U.S. ground-based nuclear-deterrent system. His goal, he says, is to turn it into a vast museum.”14
Jeremy Stern has aptly summed up Luckey’s contradictions, describing him as “a vengeance-seeking icon of counter-elite Americana, the aspiring rebuilder of the arsenal of democracy, the black mullet-, chin beard-, Hawaiian shirt-, cargo short-, sandal-clad possible savior of America.”15
In an interview with Logan Paul on the widely viewed Impaulsive podcast—live from the “Classic Tetris World Championships” at the Pasadena Convention Center—Luckey waxed poetic about the pros and cons of video games new and old, and ways to build new and better ones. Luckey still produces and markets new video games, and he has expressed his desire to buy up designs from video games that never received enough financing to see the light of day and produce them now. As an aside in the interview with Paul, Luckey said, “Oh, and I also make autonomous weapons,” a little joke that he and the hosts found incredibly humorous.16
Presumably, Luckey knows the difference between a war game and a real war, but his obsession with all things military suggests that he should not be allowed to influence US military strategies of the future. But that is exactly what he’s trying to do, from holding fundraisers for Donald Trump to hiring Christian Brose, the primary theorist of the military-tech revolution, as his company’s “chief strategy officer.”
In moving beyond the fantasy land of gaming, Luckey settled on starting a military-tech company, Anduril, named after a sword featured prominently in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Luckey started Anduril with financial and moral support from the controversial Silicon Valley military contractor Peter Thiel. Thiel is one of the founders of Palantir, another firm that takes its name from an object in The Lord of the Rings, in this case indestructible stones that can predict the future.
While Luckey’s quirks can be immensely entertaining, the products that his firm produces are deadly serious. Anduril makes airborne and underwater drones, as well as advanced communications and surveillance systems. Its most ambitious product is the Lattice, an information-gathering system that is supposed to fuse data from all available sources and put it in the hands of military commanders in short order. Or, as the company puts it on its website, “Lattice accelerates complex kill chains by orchestrating machine-to-machine tasks at scales and speeds beyond human capacity.”17 Putting the techno-babble aside, the bottom line is that, if not handled with care, the products being produced by the new-age military-tech firms could pave the way to a dystopian future where wars are waged by robots with little or no human control but with large numbers of human casualties. In other words, the worst parts of the Terminator movies.
Yet Luckey is not shy about promoting techno-militarism. “The first page of our first pitch deck,” bragged Luckey to Dean during their interview, “said that Anduril is a company that will save Western civilization by saving taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars per year as we make tens of billions of dollars per year.”18 And to make sure there’s no confusion, Luckey has made it clear that he has no qualms about producing weapons of war: “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims.… You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”19
Anduril’s activities have generated a fair amount of controversy in its brief lifespan. Among other things, the company has drawn fire from immigration activists for its role in building surveillance towers on US bases along the US-Mexico border. Jacinta González of Mijente, which has led protests against tech companies that are enabling harsh immigration policies, excoriated Anduril and other tech firms: “Assisting in that cruelty, facilitating that cruelty, making sure they have access to more people to be cruel to, it makes the whole situation worse.”20
Other Anduril projects include a contract with the Special Operations Command for nearly $1 billion for work on a “counter-unmanned systems” project. The deal was heralded as a sign that other defense-tech start-ups could cross the “valley of death” between initial research and development funding and a major Pentagon contract that would allow the company to survive and thrive rather than fading away for lack of a stable financial base. As Bill Greenwalt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has worked on defense industrial policy at the Pentagon, put it, “This is hugely significant in that it sends a signal that startups and non-traditional companies can actually succeed in the federal marketplace.”21
Anduril is also central to the AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) submarine deal, which has been criticized by arms-control advocates and strategic realists alike. This is because AUKUS will share sensitive technology with Australia that could be used to develop nuclear weapons and also because providing attack subs to Australia will likely provoke China into expanding its naval capabilities in response.
