Big Tech and Silicon Valley are transforming the military-industrial complex | Hacker News Reader

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

watson.brown.edu

67 pointsqp1174 comments

I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper'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.

González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&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's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it'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.

I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton'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's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).

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't it.

[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...

>I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC

...

> 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

So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations?

is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.

Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.

While there are quantitative Cultural Anthropologists (UChicago, UC Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have good researchers working on this), Roberto González is not one of those.

Furthermore, the truly interesting things to dig into w/ regards to the MIC are more Economics, Finance, or Commercial Law driven - namely digging into how fair or unfair RFCs are, analyzing changes in procurement regulations, actually testing whether anti-competitive measures in the Defense industry have a positive or negative impact on efficacy, differentiating between different types of budget spend (Cloud/Infra Security research vs foundational ML research vs simulations reasearch), etc.

These are questions that need a quantitative background in Business, Law, Politics, and Technology.

Also, not naming Nvidia is a MASSIVE red flag, as they are balls deep in the Defense R&D space (that was the only reason they were able to survive the dot com bust).

Finally, how STEM Innovation works in the Military/Defense space is entirely different from how it works in much less regulated spaces, due to the limited set of buyers and the massive impact that asymmetry can potentially have.

> you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone

I agree! There are a lot things to disagree about w/ regards to the MIC, but the questions and problems González surfaces aren't new nor unique to the Tech industry. This feels less like a research paper and more like a surface level op-ed.

He brings up very good points about the impact CNAS (and more specifically Eric Schmidt) and other peer think tanks (imo CSIS is not that hawkish) is having on the vision of innovation R&D on the Hill, but that is an entirely separate investigation (and something that absolutely needs to be done), and the larger paper seems to ignore that.

> Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.

I do both quant and qual research. I generally find my qual peers more methodologically rigorous, more thorough, and more trustworthy.

As far as I know there is no qual equivalent to Numeracy/precision bias.

Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

> Listen I don't like the ring of it either but we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

The US is the largest weapons manufacturer already with the largest military-industrial complex. How many more drones and bombs do we need?

> All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.

You act like we do.

Doesn't the US already spend more on military than all our rivals and allies combined?

We need a lot more. Actual US manufacturing capacity is very low. We can't even supply Ukraine with enough regular artillery shells

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-she...

The Navy's fleet is actually shrinking because we lack shipyard capacity, and can't even maintain the ships we already have.

https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbu...

There is like the middle ground of both don't do ads and don't do war, too.

Unfortunately, our enemies also get a vote. Perhaps you can convince them not to do war? Because telling them not to hasn't worked.

https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-moscow-r...

That is not an example of "don't do war" policy of the Biden admin going horribly wrong. Rather the opposite.

Is there no third option here?

Regardless of what side you are on the "warfighting software good" or "warfighting software bad" spectrum, what we really need as an industry is more individual software engineers questioning and judging the ethics of the use cases they are supporting with their software. Too many techies just want a "challenging problem" to work on, and as long as the technical problems are complex and challenging, that's where their judgment ends. We should be more willing to look at the end uses of our creations and refuse to work on things that go against our own ethics.

I have quit a job where I knew that my software was going to be used by the military and law enforcement in order to target people, among other reasons. Yes, I am lucky and privileged to be in a financial position where I am free to up and quit a company, but I'd like to think that even if I weren't I'd do the right thing and refuse.

> we need less engineers building adtech and more engineers building drones and bombs.

Nope. I'll be doing neither.

So our options are either "consume consume consume" or "kamikaze drones".

We're fucked...

Fascism won

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

Enlighten me. Looking for some weekend reading.

Steve Blank's "Secret History" gives a pretty good overview, starting with Terman and WWII, and going heavy on Cold War R&D.

<https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>

Something of an HN favourite as well:

<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>

The best book on this is:

Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Desc: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.)

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/survei...

Perhaps ambitious for a weekend but Chris Miller’s Chip War will enlighten you quite a bit about both Silicon Valley’s history and the current politics around semiconductors.

San Fran and the greater bay area were huge Naval installations and grew massively in WW2, and much of the early silicon valley was directly funded by US Fed'Gov R&D efforts.

ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA

I'm sure there are lots of reading options but this is a very good presentation on the topic (of Silicon Valley and Stanford).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

A great book on exactly that subject:

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

by Malcolm Harris

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto

mkultra?

> 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.

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.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-a...

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.

I'm somehow unconvinced of the moral superiority of (basically) advancing deepfake technology for money, or selling lootboxes to 12 year old boys.

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're heading into war, and they want to make sure to make money from it...

And are even fine with encouraging it...

Cheap money dried up -> move to defense pork.

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.

Need a “jia tan”

> need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage.

Out of curiosity, how do you see that playing out if the U.S. ends up relying on these technologies for its national defense? Would you still be okay with sabotaging them?

I think you're bumping into a more fundamental problem: it's not clear how to enable the military for highly effective defensive missions, without also making it useful for offensive military adventures.

The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain. It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. And ocean based threats are also probably obsolete. Send a bunch of carriers and destroyers against any modern nation, and they're going to go pop. This, famously, is exactly what happened in a wargame over a hypothetical war with Iran! [1] So if another country ever attacks the US, it's going to be in the form of a massive nuclear strike. Conventional military forces have been largely relegated to invading non-nuclear nations, or engaging in proxy wars against other nations.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

> It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat.

For what it's worth, I agree with your argument, but I want to point out that the only reason we have the luxury of never allowing a neighboring nation to join alliances is because we have such massive military and technological advantages that aren't being sabotaged from within.

How do you define "defensive"?

The US has repeatedly been involved in wars to defend our allies from external attack.

If you are invaded by another country, then you are in a defensive war. Beyond that, countries often will claim they are in defensive wars, when reality is somewhat more ambiguous. Imagine Mexico announced plans to enter into a military alliance with China, which would entail setting up nukes right on the US border. We would invade Mexico approximately 0 seconds later, to ensure such an outcome never happened. The closest we ever came to intentional nuclear war happened over this exact sort of scenario with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is that defensive?

Let's say we're slightly more subtle with the above. And we 'compel' a region in Mexico to declare their independence and announce an association with the US; we immediately acknowledge their independence. Mexico predictably seeks to shut down said rebellion and invades. We then come to their aid, and start a war against Mexico. Is that defensive? What if said independence seeking was completely organic instead of compelled?

I'm not speaking rhetorically. These questions are difficult, if not impossible to answer. So when I say defensive war, I am speaking literally of the most basic form imaginable. Otherwise, you end up with a million scenarios where the line between defender and invader often come down to one's perspective, instead of some objective qualification. You also risk recreating WW1 where a Bosnian Serb assassinating an Austro-Hungarian royal results in Brits killing Germans over it, and everybody has a plausible claim of behaving defensively, somehow.

I'm always irked to no end when someone omits the context of the cuban missile crisis.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.

(according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis and countless other sources)

They were just a response, tit for tat. And were only removed after the USA removed theirs.

Secretly, the United States agreed to dismantle all of the offensive weapons it had deployed to Turkey. (same source)

That aside, what about some conventionally armed IC/SLBM-swarm advising via ADS-B: NONUKE/JUSTTNT/KINETIC/GODSRODS/HELOKITY/WHATSUP/DIPLOMAT/COURIER/MESSAGE/AIRMAIL/DELIVERY/BLOWME/FORFUN?

Let's call it the W69-MK6...maybe deployed by some LongDong YeeHaa...

>The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain.

It should be pretty clear by now that the next actual war won't be boots on ground, it will be fully digital.

The fact that in 2024, a large number of people are going to vote for Trump if he makes it to the ballot is pretty much an indicator that a country like China can use the existing AI technologies to pretty much throw US into a civil war and then take over economically if there is no active defense against it.

[deleted]

The USA's strategy for national defense is "offense is the best defense".

Less "offense". America's modern foreign policy doctrine has centered around "strategic control" of key infrastructure and chokepoints. Economical, Informational, Militarily.

I don't know, executing heads of state qualifies as offense in my book. If that doesn't then what does? Nuclear war?

“Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about orders” - Simple Sabotage Field Manual

Basically lean-in on what management was likely doing anyway. Brainstorming, consensus building, endless meetings, risk aversion, empire building, horse trading, stack ranking etc.

The main thing keeping us free from would be fascist overlords is their own lumbering burocracias. What I fear more than nuclear weapons is effective management science.

Prior to 2016, I wouldn't have blamed you for having this sentiment, as its an indicator that a country has done exceptionally well in developing its defensive/deterrent capability since you grew up without knowing what strife actually looks like.

But now, given that US got massively weaker with Trump being in power for 4 years, and a mentaly ill madman with access to nukes straight up murdering civilians in Ukraine in the name of nationalism, you have to be living under a rock if you don't realize how important defense spending is. If not for US, then for countries that don't have the talent/funding to develop it themselves.

So Trump's presidency has convinced you that America should lean more into being world police?

Yes. Even though not illegal (or at least not enough info to claim it was illegal), its pretty obvious that Trump had ties with Russia. Who knows what kind of info he leaked.

US is basically the worlds police already btw. We effectively subsidize R&D for Europe military, and have bases all over the world.

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.

A few lines from the paper stand out to me:

* "A lack of transparency." How much transparency do you expect from military R&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.

* "Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector" The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors.

* "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence" 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.

* "overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities" I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake.

* "the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies" 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.

* "a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs" 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'd like to see them.

I'm no fan of the US Military; I'd disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps.

But this author is just anti-American. Let's look this guy up..."Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California."

He's strongly linked to https://equaljusticesociety.org "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."

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'm happy that they spend a bazillion dollars on first-in-class cloud services.

Can't tell if you're kidding bc my first thought was that if DoD can't host their own email, how can they do anything else correctly?

Hosting their own email is just a headache and adds overhead and takes resources away from the actual real stuff they are doing?!

92% of what the DoD does is normal business junk like ordering pencils.

I knew a guy who worked on a VR war the room for the DoD. Not like a VR battlefield simulator, but like... simulated folders being passes across simulated desks.

The point being that they're innovating away from the pencils. The future is digital pencils.

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.

I most phones are weaponized against the people who carry them, not weapons in service of the people who carry them.

Apparently this is the closest a post can get to discussing the in-progress genocide without being instantly removed from the front page.

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's the vast majority of the paper. The paper has significantly less in the way of laying out how that's been successful, or how that's transformed the MIC.

This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn't yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets).

I think a more accurate headline might be, "how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI"?

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