I have worked with DARPA and the Navy in the past. Now I’m in Silicon Valley. However my experience with the defense industry has shown me that unless Silicon Valley teams up with the Pentagon, the US will be destroyed.
We are very behind in terms of cyber warfare, and our position is incredibly weak in a post Snowden world, where all our defense strategies were leaked.
Our critical infrastructure is sorely in need of software updates - many devices don’t have authentication so one can just shut down a power plant if they get onto the same network.
China has been slowly pulling ahead by installing black doors in all the hardware manufactured there. Russia is flexing their muscles with excursions against neighbors critical infrastructure. The US is falling behind rapidly.
Despite incessant talk about ‘impact’ and ‘saving the world’, Silicon Valley engineers build glorified slot machines for phones. Refusing to work with the Military sounds like something the ultra privileged would say - they don’t care about the people in this country. When the lights go out because China has taken out power across the US, and Google is no longer working, I wonder then if those ‘3000’ engineers will think twice about the importance of national defense, or if they will continue to sit in their ivory towers and lecture the rest of the world about how they are making the world a better place for selling digital cigarettes. If engineers want REAL impact, there is no where better than cyber defense.