Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
costsofwar.watson.brown.edu
costsofwar.watson.brown.edu
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
Silicon, GPS, the Internet, nuclear power, most of rocketry and space etc., I think most would believe was worthwhile.
Building cruise missiles, or 'Civilian Monitoring Tech' - that's a different question.
I don't think that DARPA, the internet, or NASA etc. count as 'Military Industrial Complex', but Anduril of course does, and Palantir pretty much does as well.
That's 'new' for the Silicon Valley at least, it has mostly not been building 'defence tech' but rather general tech that has key defence use.
But of course the space race proceeded from work on missiles. ICMBs are rockets that go high and fast and then happen to complete less than one full orbit.
And my understanding is that early ICs were for missiles because it was acceptable for the ICs to be very expensive in exchange for them being very light and small. Only a context that was optimizing for a tiny package (b/c extra weight also required more fuel) and was relatively cost insensitive would justify them at first. The point is building weapons sometimes _does_ turn into tech that can be used more generally. Does that justify the risk?
Much of the modern pushback seems to come from the new blood companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, businesses that deliberately blurred the line to obscure which side they stand on. These companies all collude with the US government to some extent, but their desire to hide that cooperation creates a rift in what they say and do. You could have boycott Google and Apple technology to protect Americans[0] from warrantless surveillance. You could have boycott Starlink to thwart Starshield[1] and future bids on the Golden Dome. Information on all of this behavior is classified because it is obviously upsetting and creates the potential for dissent. But hiding the behavior also creates a dam-burst effect once you tell people the truth, including employees. The Snowden files were a legitimate surprise to most people working in FAANG at the time.
It's upsetting to think that American NOBUS abilities[2] hang like a Sword of Damocles over the so-called Free World. When you import American technology, you also import the surveillance and opinions of the American government. It has developed in a new and insidious way that doesn't fully resemble what we saw in WWII or the Cold War, unique to the information age.
[0] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_smartphone_...
They are very large tech companies which will invariably have some relationship with every industry.
Apple had some early contracts in defence, Google's early research grands were National Science Foundation, but that's not defence companies.
'Boeing' blurs the lines definitely - they are 35% defence contractor mostly civilian airline agency and didn't really start as military.
It's important to understand that every company of a certain scale exists a bit differently than others, and in some industries, like aviation, will be considered 'strategic' and they're going to work with 'national interests' in a lot of ways, that may involved some kind of defence contracting.
For Microsoft, the first and largest contract mentioned in the table just below the fold on that page is for an IVAS system. Microsoft had been basing this off their HoloLens system but was a distinct product (they weren't just sending over the normal HoloLens and expecting that they were gonna work in the field). This contract was then transitioned to Anduril. But just saying of Microsoft that "they are not defence contractors in any way" is hard to reconcile with the facts of having a large contract to _develop a new product_ for the military ... even if it turned out to never have been used.
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/07/08/...
https://www.army.mil/article/290020/ivas_a_solution_to_a_tri...
I understand that technically, it's a project that can be used for defence, but if you say that MS is a 'defence contractor' - then you also have to say:
MS is an 'Investment Bank' - almost 50% of MSFT's Operations are financial. Their financial opts are bigger that most investment banks.
MS is a 'Healthcare Company'
MS is a 'Gaming Company'
MS is an 'Entertainment Company'
MS is XXX, YYY and ZZZ etc.
better: "MS is a Tech Conglomerate that sells Windows (OS), Office, Outlook, Sales and Ops SaaS, and has Bing some other services, with XBox as major subdivision. They have a major financial footprint, and also have research activities in other sectors."
Palantir is partially Defence contractor even if a minority of their business is defence, it's a strategic business line for them, and it's material to their existence.
No, it's a project commissioned by and built for defense needs. It's not that someone at the DoD saw how to creatively re-use an existing civilian project.
And yes, some weapons systems are just ... 'weapons related' ... and the dual-use comes later, so it's more nuanced. Some of it more obvious (radar), than others (cruise missiles).
But I think it's important to characterize these things.
They are completely different things.
'Tech' that can be used by the military', and 'weapons' are not 'arbitrary labels'.
HN is the only place in the world where someone would try to conflate the two to make a point, I don't think it's reasonable.
Given that, consider consulting with another actual human being, or even your favourite AI to help ground yourself a bit in those ideas.
And CDNs are by nature distributed, even if their ownership is not. Just as it's unreasonable to expect a site operator to maintain their own global network backbone, it's unreasonable for every site to deploy global infrastructure for efficient content delivery. Which is not to say that we wouldn't be better off with a more diverse and distributed-in-the-ownership-sense market of CDN providers.
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo...
That being said, I feel like a lot of the web-based tech, device tech etc came out of the liberal/leftist university environments, i.e. BSD unix, CERN, linux ish type projects. Berkeley/Stanford/MIT etc. So the culture of a lot of people who were rank and file and enthusiastic about this stuff from had this mindset.
There's no "seem" about it, what you're saying is true, and it was because of changes in federal law. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Mansfield#Mansfield_Amend...
At the same time, when I helped with research in a cognitive psychology lab in school (much closer to the present than to that law), our PI said our funding came partly from a grant from the US Navy. We worked on Bayesian models of human learning and reasoning -- so "direct or apparent relationship to specific military function" has perhaps at times been interpreted somewhat loosely?
I'd speculate the Navy had perhaps more discretion over how it spent its research funding. For example, they funded polywell fusion research for years.
Teaching individuals quickly and at scale is a core necessity for militaries. Whether not or it gets used, the US Army usually has access to whatever is near the edge there (as in some unit or officer somewhere was promoting the method, and had the sign offs necessary to disseminate it, but culturally it was not fully put in place).
But prospects for a positive outcome where probably always slim.
IMO, it is particularly dumb when there is a full scale conventional war happening in Ukraine.
A good chunk of the human population has never known a "Pax Americana" and regions such as East Asia are clearly better off due to declining American hegemony.
Also if the other is Iran, lol at “stopped supporting respective belligerents” as if the US itself was not one of the major belligerents.
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
They also have nukes.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
https://earth.google.com/web/@31.31022959,34.24130746,30.076...
(south is the only thing google is not misrepresenting on the aerial imagery)
This is preferable to carpet bombing, yeah? How?
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
Yeah, it's artillery bombardment by more-modern means. The "modern" bit being planes.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
So all in all if they send 50 of F-15s fully loaded they can drop 350 bombs. Which is about 3x their normal day in Gaza the whole 2 years after oct 2023. If this is carpet bombing, they were carpet bombing Gaza for 2 years already.
I don't care what anyone thinks IL could do if they developed the capability. I'm telling you what they can't do because they don't have it now. They don't need it either, because it's not worth it.
Not enough for anything close to what WW2 or Vietnam war like area bombing operations were done with.
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
[1] https://www.indembassyisrael.gov.in/pages?id=nel5a&subid=7ax...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/22/which-countries-tra...
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
The latter was Trump's innovation so that he can pretend he is upholding some foreign policy campaign promise without materially changing anything.
I’ll accept Starlink as US support despite their back and forth on supporting Russia, because they are a large corporation requiring on government assent the same way Wildberries is for Russia.
The indirect one you’ll have to sell me on as support. We’re selling shit, and like to make money. Someone buying our shit to give to Ukraine doesn’t count as support or antagonistic to me but as a neutral position.
Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Philippines would very much disagree.
But specifically yes america has been directly attacked 20 times in the last 40 some odd years... so averaging once every other year.
I have no problem if the US navy wants to tool around shipping lanes for the good of global trade. I take issue with everything else.
In the past couple of years, the US has implicitly used the strength of its military to threaten the sovereignty of Greenland, Panama, Canada, Mexico, and Cuba. Abducted a foreign head of state. Started a war. Bombed drug runners and fishermen.
The death toll for the Iraq war is heavily contested, but the numbers are somewhere in the region of 200k to one million dead. All under the guise of WMDs.
Like any large organization, there is a mixture of good and bad outcomes.
But yeah thats only if they wanted to try and spend the money to support a nuclear program. As they sat they were unreliable at best case.
War Is a Racket is almost a 100 years old and it's about one man's feelings towards his manipulation in the banana wars [1] + middle east interventions. You can go back every century and see what damage colonialism has done both abroad and at home.
Personally, I view “Department of War” as more honest, because War has always been its business.
The mission of the Department of War, which was its name pre-WW2, and the mission of the Department of Defence (post-WW2) is completely different: this is evidenced by the number of military personnel in the two time periods (and the draw-down in personal post-1990, after the Cold War ended):
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066986/us-armed-forces-...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_military_personnel_and...
WWII demonstrated wars of conquest don't work in the industrial age. When America and its Department of War and Navy were founded, invasion and conquest could still be done profitably. WWII showed that was no longer true–industrial machinery and skilled workers are destroyed by invasion and even base resources quickly become useless when surrounded by people who hate you. (Nuclear weapons sealed the equation.)
The Americans who fought in WWII saw that lesson firsthand and seem to have genuinely pivoted away from wars of conquest and annexation towards something closer to status quo preservation. We, of course, still went to war. But it was generally to help the current leader repel something or the other. The case in point for this is the truly devilish stuff having been shifted to the CIA's clandestine portfolio.
Renaming the DoD the DoW basically says all that clandestine stuff wasn't shameful, it's good. It's a real message being written by idiots who don't know history or war and are mastered by their own insecurities.
Someone being invaded should lay down arms because invasion and fighting an invader are morally equal?
> that changing one word in a bureaucratic ensemble of Departments is going to change meaning of what it means to go to war or the reality of war itself
Department of War celebrates an era when wars of conquest were profitably fought. It explicitly embraces the notion that war is good and accretive to America. Renaming something the Department of War means we're going to have more wars. America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
The morality of a war is not easily encompassed in small words like “war” or “defense”.
> America being America, they're mostly going to be offensive.
America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war. Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”.
It's not. But you're avoiding the question. If you claim all war is morally equal, then a defender is equally at fault as an invader, and we're going to fundamentally disagree. If you don't believe that, I'm still curious about your position.
> America being America, any war fought by us not in direct defense of American people & territory is by definition an offensive war
Agree.
> Doesn’t stop us from calling wars fought elsewhere “defense”
We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
I think we agree that renaming the DoW the DoD didn't reduce American military adventurism. What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
I didn’t make this claim. War is war, but the morality of our actions is found not in the act of war, but in the why & how of war.
> We still call them wars. Nobody calls what we did in Iraq or Vietnam or Korea the defense or whatever. We call them wars.
Of course we still call them wars. That was not mutually exclusive with politicians justifying it as “defense”. The mantra is defense abroad rather than defense at home, which is a fine enough mantra if you’re selling a war, but I’m not going to nod along & pretend that it’s not actually offense.
> What I'm saying is returning the DoD to the DoW absolutely presages a difference in attitude that is more dangerous and more violent.
The election of more dangerous & more violent politicians presaged that. Turns out America is more dangerous. As to whether we’re more violent? TBD. The President’s unwillingness to actually put boots on the ground abroad despite trying to talk a dangerous game makes this part less objectively clear to me.
WWII demonstrated it. America learned the lesson sort of, for a while. The USSR, arguably, did not. At the end of the day, the security infrastructure the USSR had to deploy to subdue its conquered poopulations (and its nonsense with China, to say nothing of its own idiocy in Afghanistan) pretty directly lead to the economic uncompetitiveness vis-à-vis its adversaries.
And no, America wasn't running around annexing foreign territory. Where we were trying to do so indirectly, through puppets, one, that's categorically different from annexation-aimed conquest, and two, we did it clandestinely and–I'd argue–in a way that in the long term was almost never accretive to American power and interests.
Before WWII, the Mexican-American war, the German unification, the Prussian unification, Japan's conquest of Manchuria, Japan's invasion of Taiwan and the Russo-Japanese wars were each pretty definitively winning moves for the instigators.
Since WWII, the only wars of conquest that may have yielded the victor more than it cost was arguably Israel's six-day war and, for a short time, Russia's conquest of Crimea. Both subsequently undid those gains by trying to double down. (I'm not counting India's invsasion of Bangladesh as a war of conquest since nothing was annexed. Same for America and the USSR intervening everywhere without annexing.)
People keep attempting wars of conquest, or to work clandestinely and find a loophole. Nobody has. It doesn't work. It absolutely used to. Acknowledging that might help prevent empire-ending mistakes like Iraq and Iraq 2 Trump in Iran Boogaloo.
What we choose to call things *is* important.
Like Venezuela: we definitely did things that a neutral observer could fairly & reasonably call Acts of War by conducting an aggressive military operation that ended in the result of us arresting Maduro. Yet the net result is that we did not actually fight a war in Venezuela, and we are still not fighting a war in Venezuela. So if a tinpot socialist dictator gets arrested in a forest & none of the invaders/law enforcement are left to shoot at when the smoke clears, was it really a war? Apparently not.
As to Iran, the only moral differences I see between our operations in Iran conducted by the US Department of War & our operations in Iraq conducted by the US Department of Defense 23 years earlier, is that 23 years earlier, the politicians actually bothered to try & make a convincing case to the American public first & the the invasion of Iraq was executed more competently. I definitely wouldn’t call either operation “defense”.
The department of defense is not equivalent to the pre-1947 War Department. The War Department was in charge of just the army. There was a separate Department of the Navy. There was no over-arching department for all of the US military.
Post WW2 the US military was restructured to organize all of the branches (including the newly-formed Department of the Air Force) under a united civilian leadership. This was done in the National Security Act of 1947. The new structure was initially called the National Military Establishment and then renamed to the Department of Defense.
So the department of war name going away wasn’t a PR thing. It was because of military parochialism. If they had called this unified structure the Department of War it would have seemed like the Army was now taking over the other branches! And I promise you today’s Admirals understand that history, even if the secretary of defense doesn’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649394
I just don’t want to copy & paste the same answer in multiple places.
No, it was not. Tom Nichols, professor emiritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College:
> It is almost impossible to overstate the inanity of this move. The United States has a Department of Defense for a reason. It was called the “War” Department until 1947, when the dictates of a new and more dangerous world required the creation of a much larger military organization than any in American history. Harry Truman and the American leaders who destroyed the Axis, and who now were facing the Soviet empire, realized that national security had become a larger undertaking than the previous American tradition of moving, as needed, between discrete conditions of “war” and “peace.”
> These leaders understood that America could no longer afford the isolationist luxury of militarizing itself during times of threat and then making soldiers train with wooden sticks[1] when the storm clouds passed. Now, they knew, the security of the country would be a daily undertaking, a matter of ongoing national defense, in which the actual exercise of military force would be only part of preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies.
> In 1949, after two years that included a massive reorganization of the U.S. military (and the establishment of an air force), Truman christened the new United States Department of Defense, which consolidated elements of the previous War and Navy Departments. […]
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive...
The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.
I wanted to address this though:
> The Department of War had a different function for a different geopolitical outlook that no longer matched reality in the post-WW2 world.
The reality of the post-WW2 world is that those who were most responsible for bringing big messy & complex wars to the world were no longer able to litter their own little subcontinent hanging off the western edge of Asia with as much ordinance as they could manufacture. It was too expensive & they were either too occupied or too preoccupied with the rather expensive operation of trying to maintain their hold on their colonial enterprises. We could afford to pretend that all of our wars were “defensive” because our goal was to make sure they couldn’t pull that shit again & there was only one or two relevant powers at a time we were in direct competition with that was otherwise keeping us busy. Telling the UK & France to fuck off during the Suez Crisis was approximately a phone call.
But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
Except it wasn't just a change in the name in the department: the Department of War actually became the Department of the Army, the DoNavy was merged with, the Air Force was split off from being with-in the Army (USAAF -> USAF), creation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA, etc:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_of_1947
> But whether a war was actually offensive or defensive still came down to what story we wanted to tell ourselves at the end of the day.
And sometimes a war does not happen because someone has a big enough stick that other people don't want to risk it being used on them. It's not like the 'other side' was passively sitting around:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_empire
There needed to be various measures done (on a spectrum from more to less 'active') to keep things in check:
> The USA was the largest supplier to Israel in 2021–25 (accounting for 68 per cent of Israeli arms imports), followed by Germany (31 per cent). [0]
0. https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2026-03/fs_2603_at...
Some of them, esp in central/eastern Europe, were rudely woken up in 2022 when Russian tanks rolle into a neighboring country. Others still have their heads buried in the sand and will not wake up even when Chinese robots march in Taipei in a few years.
As an aside, I emailed my congressman (blue) about one of the proposals (bipartisan) to essentially force device age verification and his office emailed me back well after it passed with a few reguritared sentences about protecting the children. I bet if I called a lobbyist in Maryland and had him meet the congressman for coffee to express my view he might be more willing to listen.
Is there room for ethics in military research and procurement? Absolutely. An AI company might say, "We will help you choose the best targets when under time pressure, but we won't provide an oracle that lets you justify indiscriminate killing of civilians." An explosives factory might say, "We'll build precision missile warheads for you, but not white phosphorous or cluster munitions, because these kill civilians indiscriminately.". People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money. e.g. If you're currently doing anything to help develop the IDF's Lavender or "Where's Daddy" programs, it's pretty hard to argue that you have a functioning moral compass.
It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work. You might make less money, but you'll almost certainly sleep easier.
Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
Predatory monsters exist. A wealthy society that demilitarizes learns the lesson Europe is now. (If Ukraine didn't have a domestic defence industry, it wouldn't have been able to fight the fight it has been able to.) Put another way, you'll sleep easier, but it's a false security, even if it's one that may last for the rest of your own life.
I'd also note that you can absolutely contribute to parts of the military where you actions are highly unlikely to directly result in anyone dying. Air-defence radars and munitions, for example, particulalry those designed to take out missiles and ballistics.
As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world. All of modern and ancient history up to this point seems to suggest it is not.
There are a whole lot of decisions that need to be made to get from "strict pacifism" to total war, so I don't know why we need to flatten this into a binary.
Nobody reasonable would. Russia started a war of choice. That's the opposite of pacifism.
Strict pacifism would be Ukraine refusing to fight after being invaded. Someone saying all war in all circumtances is evil and should not be contributed to, directly or indirectly, is sort of endorsing that view. The folks calling for nuclear disarmament, or no first use policy, are pretty far away from that.
Yes, that was my point. The person I replied to stated a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". As a response, I pointed to a country that many would call "a despotic regime" who seems to operate with at least some consideration towards the ethics of war even if that is due to external pressure.
You might put your life savings on the street in front of your house for a day or two without someone stealing it, but sooner or later someone unscrupulous is likely to come along based on the evidence we have
Weapons can only act as a deterrent if your opponent believes you're willing to use them and there are some weapons that no one is willing to use. And if no one is willing to use them, it's probably a waste to develop them in the first place.
I never made that argument. My original comment was refuting the idea that taking a singular option off the table is equivalent to pacifism. Ukraine didn't feel the need to develop a nuclear program, that doesn't make them pacifists.
> It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime". Basically, the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world.
This person equates not "do[ing] it" with "strict pacifism".
beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity
sophacles- stupidly thought this was an "If I dont, someone will" argument
Ajedi32- clarifies "the question is whether strict pacifism is a tenable national policy in the real world"
The point is some level of defense is required. This point is completely compatible with not taking a maximalist approach to military. It is also compatible with the fact that even Russia doesn't take a maximalist approach to military.
The whole point of the chain is that citizens should not fixate on if companies or people participate in the military-industrial complex because it is good an necessary, but rather what those actors actually doing.
>beloch and jump- advocated for some level of national defense as a practical necessity
I don't think this an accurate summary of the nuance contained in beloch's comment. I'll specifically highlight what I think was lost by the people who replied:
> People working for companies that do defence work have a moral obligation to observe how their labour is used and refuse to give it if the results are unethical. It's no different from soldiers having a moral duty to refuse illegal orders.
>To answer your question, I'd say that participating in the defence industry can be justifiable if you remain guided by ethics, and unjustifiable if you abandon them for money.
Once the choice is either a yes or no, this nuance is lost. If you set up the choice as between pacifism and military capability, you're tacitly endorsing any form of military capability including nuclear weapons.
It seems obviously possible, and your arguments support it.
Where is this tacit endorsement you see coming from? It seems like nobody thinks that way with respect to their employment or support.
Anyways, this seems to be more about semantics than substance at this point, if you are arguing it is not binary, and I'm arguing that nobody said it was
Ukraine giving up its Soviet nukes in the 1990s was, with the benefit of hindsight, a mistake that has cost over a hundred thousand Ukrainians their lives. Even if Ukraine just had the missiles in a basement, the possibility that it had cracked the control system–or shortened the runway to reprocessing the warheads for a domestic platform–would have likely deterred war.
Once again, nuclear weapons can only be a deterrent if your enemy believe you will use them and everyone knows that no nation state has the stomach to use them. Russia doesn't have to fear MAD and yet it is still deterred from using nuclear weapons. What makes you think that Ukraine would choose MAD over their current predicament? Because if Russia doesn't believe Ukraine is willing to commit to MAD, Russia can still invade. It certainly changes strategy, but over the years many nuclear powers have been involved in arm conflicts without using nuclear weapons, including in conflicts against other nuclear powers.
> Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department?
I contend that unless you want your government to be toppled by a foreign invader, companies contributing to your nation's military capabilities is something you should generally be in favor of.
>As for "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument). That's true of a lot of things, and I sleep great at night choosing not to steal from people even though I know others will choose to steal. It turns out I don't have the ability to choose their actions for them, only my own.
This is from your response:
>It's more like "if I don't do it then I better hope somebody else will, otherwise my whole country will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime".
Are you now claiming that all those "I"s are really "companies"? You think you were having a conversation about how "[companies] sleep great at night"?
Just to be clear, the conversation so far:
> beloch: It's also completely fine to say, "I don't want to deal with moral grey zones" and refuse to work for companies that do military work.
> JumpCrisscross: Idk, there's something unethical in outsourcing ethical grey areas [working for defense contractors] to other people while reaping the benefits of the peace (or war far from your home) it brings.
> sophacles: "someone else will do it if i don't".... (aka your argument)
> me: That's not the argument. It's more like "if I don't [work for defense contractors] then I better hope somebody else will. [Because strict pacifism isn't tenable.]
You then somehow interpreted this comment as me saying "a nation taking actions off the table "will inevitably become subservient to a despotic regime"", which wasn't at all what I said, so I jumped back in correct that. Then the whole conversation went off the rails.
Yet by the time you replied, those three paragraphs of nuance were flattened. It was no longer a question of which military programs and actions can be morally and ethical justified, it is now simply a question of whether they are done or not. And once it is flattened into a binary yes or no, all that nuance of potentially unjustifiable uses of the military in beloch's comment fall into the "yes" category. Making it into a binary reduces the issue to pacifism versus total war.
Also, it's questionable whether Russia's nuclear arsenal would even work reliably. The USA and other nuclear powers spend enormous amounts every year just on nuclear weapons maintenance and testing. Those munitions can't just be stored in a warehouse indefinitely like rifle cartridges and pulled out when needed; they require periodic remanufacturing in order to remain operational at all. Russia is a relatively poor and highly corrupt country so I suspect many of their nukes wouldn't deliver the rated yield if used today. From their perspective an attempted strike resulting in a fizzle would be even worse: all of the diplomatic disadvantages for no military gain.
Nuking Kyiv, Odessa and Lviv would probably force Ukraine to surrender.
> use of WMDs would invite economic sanctions from key neutral trading partners such as India
This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Or if we want to take nuclear options off the table because Russia values infrastructure, they aren't attacking population centers with bioweapons.
>This is the real constraint. There is still the credible threat of being economically isolated by America, Europe, China and India. (Neither China nor India wants the normalisation of nuclear bombardment normalised. They both have border disputes with nuclear-armed neighbours.)
Ethics enforced by external pressure are still ethics in action. The comment I replied to was basically arguing that we have to do this unethical thing because if we don't our enemies will. Well here is an example of our ostensibly unethical enemy not doing something because of ethical pressure. So why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Putin doesn't care about infrastructure in Kyiv. He wants the natural gas and resources in the east. A nuked rump Ukraine isn't a threat to his power.
> why would this pressure work for nuclear weapons and not this new military tech?
Because the normalisation of nuclear weapons has global consequences in a way conventional warfare does not. The most problematic aspects of Trump's Iran war for India and China are that it raises oil prices.
And you don't think that has any chance of applying to some hypothetical yet to be developed future military tech?
More than likely Russia is ostracized to the point that other countries will treat it with active hostility.
And the most likely possibility is Putin is assassinated and the government overthrown due to internal opposition.
The same thing that would happen to America if Trump acts on his musings about tactically nuking Iran.
Enjoy.
It really depends on who's using them and what they're used to defend.
As a category, I think it's safe to say that defensive weapons tend to be more morally defensible than purely-offensive ones. Of course the circumstances matter. But that doesn't mean we can't make generalisations.
The least ethical people I know seem to sleep the soundest. We need to study if there is a correlation there.
Genuinely want to read more about this. Do you have a good source?
I'd always assumed cluster munitions had no legitimate use.
https://static.rusi.org/lessons-learned-ukraine-offensive-20...
https://www.csis.org/analysis/seizing-initiative-ukraine-wag...
They limit the ability of an attacker to mass vast forces in an area for a brute-force assault. Soviet doctrine was notorious for this kind of attack, so cluster munitions were developed as a solution. Russia still uses this kind of assault, so cluster munitions still work against their forces. Other militaries (e.g. the US) use doctrines that render cluster munitions ineffective.
Just about every weapon invented was developed to address a specific scenario where it is highly effective at shaping the battlefield. Some have become obsolete because those scenarios don’t occur in modern warfare, but there is still a lot of diversity in the practice of warfare.
The current UA/RU front is a 30km deep kill zone crossed by FPV craft (and discarded optic fibre cables) in which the largest effective group size might be four or so soldiers. Tanks are all but useless as sitting ducks.
Reuters made a surprisingly good infographic / interactive feature on this this past July:
<https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/KILL-ZONE/zn...>
The modern version of this allows the same soldiers to command heavier, better weaponry via remote control that is asymmetric to their logistical footprint, enabling them to shape a battle space that would not have been possible historically.
Of course these things ebb and flow. I imagine the solution to this problem is something like autonomous drone swarms with advanced sensors that can systematically sterilize an area of any hidden soft targets. Sparsity would not be much of a defense in this case.
What are the (current?) foreign policy goals of the country in question? If it leans more defensive, like Japan, that's different than a country that may have a more interventionist bent.
Also what product(s) is the company developing or offering (field hospital equipment or are we talking about Palantir)?
Sure, you save some lives. Then the military realizes they can apply violence far more liberally than they ever could before. Subsequent conflicts result in a whole lot more death for the losing side. Maybe a lot more "militar-aged men" end up as cannon fodder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Or... do those lives not count? Depends on your definition of "evil," I guess: I'm using the Christian one.
Tell me more about lives, Christianity, and war.
Then your new target selection approach is used specifically to target a school, and you just made the weapon more accurate.
You dont get to build shit for the military AND determine what its used for.
Every problem is meant to be solved by what corporations do or do not do.
Depends if they do evil shit or not. The USA does a lot of evil shit. If you wanted to not be evil, you wouldn't help people to do evil shit.
People should ask the same question in the likes of Russia, Israel, North Korea, Iran. But in most countries, defense actually means that.
There isn't a shred of reality to support the notion that software is materially different than any other industry, and 'The Silicon Valley' starts with 'Silicon' - and then went through 'Hardware' - it wasn't software dominated until the 1990s.
I would go so far to say as Software is less involved than hardware.
Defence has almost always been a 'physical' industry and most defence contracts are for gadgets, not software.
Obviously - there's a ton of 'intelligence' going on that is software oriented, but they're generally not massive contracts, but bespoke stuff.
The NSA is not spending $100B on single procurement. They're relatively small.
(FYI - one middle sized defence program is bigger than CIA/FBI/NSA budgets)
Or what drove the demand for silicon in the first place.
As for "transforming", that happened some time during the Vietnam war when the laser-guided bomb was introduced. Been a smooth sailing ever since.
In 2015, I told my son I would disown him if he went to work for Facebook. Several years later, he told me he was doing a contracting gig for Meta, on a project that would "definitely never see the light of day". Given the amount of engineering time that was squandered in the early 2020's, I chose to believe him.
- google founders’ research was funded from federal grants.
- federal grant was administered by National Science Foundation (not DoD) with funding from DARPA (yes DoD) and NASA (not DoD?).
Google itself was fully funded by private investors, only the research was *partially DoD funded.
Microprocessors as a whole were a result of the US military industrial complex. The first large scale use of integrated circuits was the Minuteman II ballistic missile guidance system. The lineage that leads to the modern smartphone starts with Texas Instruments winning the contract for that military guidance system (first as a subcontractor to North American, then fully on their own).
Similarly, the first production use of a charge-coupled device for digital camera technology was the KH-11 spy satellite.
Funding some key technologies is not the same as 'funding the valley'.
Military related funding is probably less than a few % of the financing behind startups.
There are a few strategic foundations, but it's not a defence industry.
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
There has to be a viable lawsuit in there somewhere. One of the last remaining tools of us plebs...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/06/microsoft-isra...
It is when it's an intelligence agency for a country that's actively committing genocide.
Answer a question for me: is the lesson you took from the Holocaust something like "if there are going to be holocausts anyway, I want to be the one committing them"?
this conflation is extremely unhelpful
also, there was conflict between Jewish Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians long before the Holocaust. Zionists were trying to take over in the late days of the Ottoman Empire.
As I said, it's mystifying that the conclusion from being targeted for genocide is "...therefore we must commit genocide against others." I suppose it is consistent with biblical commandments, though.
Attempted genocide better describes Hamas, who slaughtered a 1/4 of the civilians in the first villages they got their hands on, before being pushed back.
> a neighbor sending rockets my way, would make me sick to my stomach
Israel has been murdering Palestinians since Nakba. They literally eliminated whole cities in Gaza. I think that makes most people in the world sick to their stomach.
Guess it doesn't matter now when they have full on defense orgs.
man imagine when you learn about what MS did to all Americans phone conversations, emails, meta data, and basically all digital communications flowing in and out of the US for the NSA.
I've debated exiting tech fully but I do have people to support. I think that's kind of an excuse though. I also tell myself that anywhere I go, if you follow the money far enough up the chain, it will be unethical. That's also kind of an excuse.
I'm not brave, but I do feel trapped. I think we need some sort of reckoning as an industry, a country and possibly a planet. I don't know what will happen but I'm trying to balance living in 2026 with making choices that I can live with in the future.
“Education level” is probably also an indication of social ills and a social ill itself given that most people are not suited for higher education. Most “higher education” in the US is abject slop and partying for 4 years. College used to be restricted to the aristocracy and particularly promising students.
If you take a young person who is already not of an elite quality and subject them to slop and partying, campus meal plans, basically unproductive day care for 4 years that also fills their heads with nonsense that is obviously going to do a lot of damage to them, especially young women who are especially impressionable.
It’s also worth noting that while Israel does have universities, as a societal intuition they function very differently. Young people serve in the army first for 2-3 years or they do university with a deferral and then serve in specialized roles in the army based on their degree. It’s not slop and partying for 4 years starting at 18. And it’s normal to not go to university at all.
Because that's a bit easier than quitting or turning down a job when you need the income.
Since you say you're still working and have people to support I am guessing it was more the latter, but maybe the "very high paying job" gave you the runway needed to make that choice? I quit a high paying software job under different circumstances. The company wasn't doing anything unethical (that I know of) but I was just sick of how they managed people and projects. It had reached the point where I sat in my car for 15 minutes (or longer) every morning just trying to summon the willpower to get out and walk into the office. So I finally just quit. But it was easier as I had stashed away enough money to give me time to find a new job without having to jump on the first offer. I ended up freelancing a bit to extend the runway even longer.
Congrats on getting out of a toxic situation btw, that's hard to do too if you're getting paid well. In a way I was similar, every morning started to be a real struggle for me.
I don't see how it could have gone any other way. The internet became too pervasive, too embedded into too many people's lives, for it to not be weaponized by governments and large companies.
People working at big tech are complicit in the destruction of communities and the mass depression and suicide of our youth, compared to that wanting your country to have the best military tech is altruistic. Military tech isn’t the problem foreign policy is, you can’t say the same about slop factory builders.
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/microsof...
---
Also thank you for your bravery, it is not easy leaving well paid jobs. If you haven't already, I'd start donating some time with your local mutual aid groups. It's very therapeutic to spend time with people that believe similar things while helping others.
Nothing is ever enough, all the top tech companies, it's not enough that the conquered the global market, not enough that they dominated commerce, media, automotive, cloud, space ...
it's not enough that they have the largest headcounts on the planet (outside India / China).
they always need to do more and bigger the next quarter.
no morals, no core market, no other guideline, simply more, and I have to do it because else someone else will.
I really hope the Chinese keep killing everything that gets too big to fail.
endless growth is the same as cancer. unnatural destructive.
Be careful what you wish for. What happens when China gets too big to fail?
Taiwan would like a word.
Okay, Taiwan. They are the losing side from the Chinese civil war from over half a century ago and proclaim themselves as the true Chinese government. I'm not saying China has the right to crush them, but the tension is at least understandable.
A comparison with the democracies and lives destroyed by US FP is ridiculous. If Taiwan would like a word with China, well, half the world would like a word with the US.
We already see China deploying debt traps and surveillance technology to developing nations. They are building surveillance states which feed back into China. With that, I feel that we have yet to see how China is going to exert its power.
What we do know right now is that the US has been a poor hegemony, inflicting a century of suffering around the world, and China has not. They might end up being worse, but given the last hundred years of history, I find that unlikely.
I'll take the risk of surveillance and debt traps a thousand times over something like Operação Condor.
This appears to me to be unrealistic or performative, except if you mean pushing back in the sense that anyone could, as a voter for example. Boycott of defense work won't work; attempting to claim some special authority in debate won't work either.
Too many nihilists in the tech industry with the attitude “if I don’t do it someone else will”, and here we are as a professional class actively making the world an objectively shittier place. The VCs can’t do it without us.
This is one of my personal bugbears. I keep making this point on HN but devs want to LARP as professionals so they usually don't want to hear that they have more in common with retail workers than they do with carpenters, engineers, or accountants.
Previously:
I’d be willing to pay a few hundred dollars a year to be a part of a professional organization that maintains ethics requirements at this point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
There are allegation that Microsoft changed Skype architecture (after buying Skype for $8.5 billion) to make wiretapping easier.
" In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism; "
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...
I’ve concluded that most people care far more about appealing to the crowd than actually thinking by anything through.
Sometimes people aren't in a position to be secure enough to act. Sometimes different issues are more effective at resonating enough to break through previously cached unconsidered patterns of thought. Sometimes people don't know all the things that are going on, and act once they've learned about them. Whatever the reason, if your reaction is "took you long enough" rather than "welcome", you discourage people from acting.
Don't punish the behavior you want to see more of.
(Also, OP is not even an instance of what you're decrying; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647687 .)
You’re making money from venture capitalists and tech firms, MS, Meta, X, Google, etc… which of them is any better than MS? They’re all awful in different ways.
I can't tell if your actual goal here is to be dismissive of the entire concept of people caring about ethics, or if you don't think that quitting is an effective means of acting in concert with those ethics. If it's the latter, then I'd suggest that it's a start, not everyone is in the position to do even that much, and some people who do so will be able to go further. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, particularly if someone is taking a step in the right direction.
Ironically, you are doing your own preaching in your comments. It could even be described as "performative."
Talking about doing something on a 4 month old account is not the same as doing it. I give credit to people for doing things, not claiming to do them in an anonymous forum they just joined. Cynical? Perhaps, but maybe if people were just a bit more cynical about believing any text on the internet just because it feels better to believe it, we'd be better off.
Not berate them because they didn't make it sooner.
There's tons of things you can do to make people on visas more empowered to push back at work without them become citizens; and in many cases cutting ties to their original countries.
We should want people who want to stay here long term, because then they have a stake, an incentive to stand up to bosses that want to wreck the place.
As sympathetic as I am to the desires of somebody who wants to come for a while and then leave, I think a better policy would deprioritize such candidates.
Why do you think the elite business owning class wants to replace you with desperate and malleable foreign workers from countries where morals and human rights are suggestions at best?
The other thing is, you built your nest egg taking Microsoft's "blood money" for a few years giving you the luxury to quit on a dime, but there's a lot of people on the planet or even in your country, wishing to do as you did.
You can't just pull the ladder after you and expect everyone make the same sacrifice as you except without their own nest egg. If you want to start a moral and egalitarian society then what about a higher tax on the wealth of tech bros, to finance the lives of the non-tech bros to accept humane jobs?
There's survivor bias in that observation. There are plenty of "foreign born employees" who choose not to work for companies that explicitly violate their values by choice. (I phrase it that way because of the whole "no ethical consumption under capitalism" issue.) I know because I'm one, and I have friends with the same mindset.
If you want to get into parsing out who is “white” or not you can do that but it’s really something better done on 4chan and also not even sensible as a concept or relevant to this discussion.
this is legit hilarious.
As a first-gen immigrant I can say that what I witness is that yes, a lot of what I've been told about America were lies. But a quite few things actually weren't. I made a choice where to live so I accept the whole package, and on the balance it's a much better deal than pretty much anywhere else.
I understand everyone has their moral compass, and they act accordingly. But, I find it hard to not ask myself, if this is not OK, why is this other related thing Ok? how do I decide what's Ok and seems when you ask the question you get downvotes and lots of judgement instead of answers.
The concept of “No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and the moral framing of later seasons of The Good Place give good representations of how.
Ultimately each person makes a mark of what they can and cannot care about, and caring about literally everything is a fast-track to total impotence.
Some situations are (relatively) easy:
* Harry Potter is a relatively isolated (though formative for many)
franchise.
* Nestle creates a HUGE amount of the food we eat.
* Amazon powers half the internet
* Microsoft is the backbone of a huge number of corporate sites.
Excel makes the world go round.
* Bad news: "Voting with your wallet" is actually pretty ineffective. Big companies know it, diversify around it, and they're happy when consumers are neutralized and busy infighting with one-another over consumptive purity, instead of...
* Good news: Organizing politically does work, and is so much more-effective that you can arguably redeem any evil taint on your shopping list by engaging in it.
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-05-21...
But all well, glad you can feel good about yourself by leaving so that someone with less concern about these ethical issues can fill the void and assert their own influence on the company instead.
Following your line of thinking, why don't you join microsoft and effect such change? I guess it's easier to leave a moralizing snarky comment and feel good about yourself.
This isn't how companies work or are structured. If you have the CEO's ear, potentially. If you don't, the only ethical thing to do is to quit. (I don't personally have an issue with the military per se. I have other issues with several tech companies which would make taking a job there something I couldn't do.)
Why are so many people supposedly principled but not militant about it? A principled militant would use their role in m$ as an opportunity to be an anchor to the efficiency of the operation that they do not agree with. They will fight to keep their position such that a more effective less moral person might not take it over and get the project moving.
One has to wonder how many projects in the world are in such a holding pattern, protected by people who had the foresight to think two steps ahead, attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can.
But you won't be doing it. Companies are run top-down. If you're within the organisation you're advancing the goals of those at the top. You aren't going to change that by complaining internally (unless you have a direct line to the CEO).
It's fine to disagree with something and just not contribute to it. If you want to be principled and militant, staying is hypocritical. In that case, you should whistleblow.
> attempting to keep their body holding that door shut as they possibly can
Unless you're conducting sabotage, which within this context seems like a gross overreaction, you aren't holding any door shut. (Again, assuming you don't have a line to the CEO.)
I am saying you should conduct sabotage if you feel the work is immoral and against your principles to such an extent. It would be immoral not to in a lot of ways, saying you'd rather wash your hands of it and pretend it weren't happening than to try and think of what you might do about it.
There are people far braver than me, but they were indeed fired. There are probably people covertly fighting the system from within but I didn't work close enough to any of these projects to know them.
So ideally people would do what you say and/or just be very open about their objections, but it's also worth recognizing the risk of industry blacklisting and how things like employer provided health insurance raise the stakes.
The workers can't even influence things like office setup and floor plans. They certainly can't influence business decision to any meaningful degree.
Has this level of obtuseness infected the software industry because this is not the first time I've heard this; usually someone will take a job at a missile factory then later realize "Wait, we build war machines AND sell them to countries I don't like? I had no idea!"
This isn't an employee-owned grocery store where your opinions matter.
You're at the point in Goodfellas where he tells the babysitter "do you understand what we're involved in here?"
The 'will not' list in here I Just learned about today, https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies it easily maps to the employment situation question.
Sadly in my experience a lot of tech workers just don't even care about the issue, let alone have the courage to push back against it.
I certainly care about it and I have immense respect for your decision, but I've worked with numerous "typical tech/dev" types in the past who later went on to work at places like Shield AI and Anduril with seemingly no compunction about the imperialistic baby-killing aspects of working directly within the military-industrial complex as long as the pay is good.
The implication of your idea is what? The desire for a destruction of a state of 10 million people and another exhile of the Jews? That's the stance you deem moral - or am inferring unfairly (I hope I am actually)
If I am following correctly - you left Microsoft because it doesn't share this genocidal desire? I guess that's consistent and I admire that part, but the underlying perspective is horrifying when you just casually drop it in like that
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-tech-covenant-anthem...
The standout example of this from the Ukraine war is artillery shells.
We should maybe have a state owned corporation for making artillery shells in America, because there does not seem to be enough profit to incentivize private corporations.
I’m not following how that is a lesson from Ukraine. Their drones and missiles are made by private companies.
The true lesson i think is that in times of peace (or in times of wars of choice) procurement is dominated by excercises, lab tests, and design reviews. When you are doing that it is hard to tell apart the “good enough” from the “over engineered”. To every choice you can dream up a “counter”. Some real or imagined response or tactic by your enemy which would negate your system. And then your engineers have to design some counter-counter, or harden the system somehow. This leads to complexity which leads to high cost per individual weapon.
In contrast Ukraine is fighting for their existence. If they want to know if a new weapon is good enough, they send it to the front and try it. If it hurts the enemy more than it costs great. Order more. If it stops being effective, try something else. They are not picking the weapon system which will serve them for the next decade. They are picking what is available and effective today.
Different incentives, different opportunities which lead to different choices and different outcimes. But the difference is not if they are using private companies or not.
The road we've taken where we make air-defense missiles costing $5 million a piece which we'd run out of in a shooting war within two weeks is just untenable.
The military-industrial complex with its overpriced toys is a dead end. We need cheap stuff by the millions. The military-industrial complex simply isn't interested in delivering that kind of hardware. Lockeed-Martin has made a "cheaper" version of the Patriot air-to-air missile, but it still costs $2.5 million a piece. I doubt they'll go any lower than that.
Taxes are not paid voluntarily but coerced out of citizens under the threat of force. So when they hand out such large contracts, the government is taking from all taxpayers by force and giving it selectively to a few chosen people who happen to own shares of those companies.
Many of those shareholders aren't even US citizens!
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.
reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.
if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.
but that's not what's happening.
It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.
How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.
the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.
they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?
I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck
edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?
One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".
Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.
[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...
On the other hand, it looks like Silicon Valley has run out of ideas for consumer stuff and are now looking to merge with the government to extract tax dollars while building the perfect surveillance state.
The way it looks right now, we are probably more going in the direction of Silicon Valley becoming a part the military industrial complex while also providing plenty of money making opportunities for people who are connected to Washington DC.
The U.S. military spends about $800bn a year [1]. That's up about $300bn from ten years ago.
American consumers spend about $21 trillion a month [2].
If you look at VC, most of it still goes to B2C and B2B. DefenseTech is a headline because it's novel.
[1] https://www.warcosts.org/us-military-budget-2026
[2] https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/?reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&categor...
There were also established companies like Lockheed, Hughes, and Gruman and smaller start-up companies founded in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I started working for one of these, ESL, in 1978 and worked at several others, ArgoSystems and Applied Signal Technologies, up until I retired in 2023. All were mostly involved in working with the Intel community on SIGINT and ELINT systems with other work building SIGINT into aircraft for the Services. During its heyday, late 60s to the 90s, it was nothing to change to a new company every year if you liked as long as you held a golden ticket, a special access clearance. The executive staffs of these companies were closely tied into the Government up to the White House. In fact, the founder of my first company, Dr. William Perry, served as deputy directory of defense under Carter as well as secretary of defense under Clinton.
All this mostly ended when the Cold War collapsed the Soviets. Lockheed is a shell of what it once was as it moved most of its manufacturing elsewhere, keeping only its missiles in Sunnyvale. A lot of the small companies either closed or were bought by the big boys. TRW bought ESL and was, itself bought by Grumann who then partnered with Northrup, Boeing bought ArgoSystems, and Raytheon bought my last company, Applied Signal Technologies.
So, basically, SV has been deeply invested in defense for 81 years.
Wild seeing it come back completely unabated out of Luckeys mouth of all people. Missiles are kewl, bro!
It happened with Cursor, where Musk completely overpaid (what will he get in return? a new kind of circular deal?)
It happened with Anduril (topic of this submission). Kushner led a round and days after Anduril got a huge Pentagon contract:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-admin-hands-mega-d...
It's been an open secret for over a year that a cheque from Thrive buys tariff exemptions.
Now that spending is definitely x10 more than 2023, at least.
Steve Blanks' "Secret History of Silicon Valley" details the emergence of that tech hub beginning with WWII and the "radiation lab", which helped develop radar.
<https://steveblank.com/2009/03/23/if-i-told-you-i%E2%80%99d-...>
Quite a few HN submissions over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=secret%20history%20of%20silicon%20...>.
Those of us who can remember the 1980s / early 1990s, prior to the defence build-down following the end of the Cold War might recall quite a few defence-related establishments in and around Silicon Valley, in its original scope centred on Santa Clara County and the Santa Clara - Palo Alto region.
Wireless broadcast media, PSTN, air travel, international post, international financial networks, global supply chains, the internet have all contributed to this, but AI will drive it home: AI governance in particular. Once one nation adopts it, the benefits will be obvious and expand rapidly. Few yet realize how transformative the changes will be.
Secret History of Silicon Valley by Steve Blank https://youtu.be/ZTC_RxWN_xo
I for one want my country to have the best weapons that kill the most enemy combatants in the most efficient way with the fewer non combatant casualties and with the less collateral damage.
For a world without weapons, I usually go to the fantasy isle of the bookstore.
And the actual title doesn't make it a question at all; they assume it's happening and ask how:
"How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex"
I understand that HN auto-removes the leading 'How', but adding the question mark changes the meaning significantly.
> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.
> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.
> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.
https://apnews.com/article/drones-eric-donald-trump-powerus-...
this is true but it's also kind of falling into a trap.
first, the weird endless hunger that man has for any and all spotlights draws attention away from the policy issues and rampant criminality, which are a lot more important than his personality problems.
second, he was causing chaos overseas with military in his first administration too. Silicon Valley wasn't all-in on that.
third, Anduril, Palantir, et al represent a consistent philosophy of how the Valley takes over the military-industrial complex. they come from the same financial backer, Thiel, who also put a lot of money behind Trump. so we got a paper here about the real issue, and if we're shifting our attention from that to this clown who kind of just works for Thiel (among other, even more dubious possible bosses), the risk is that the conversation transitions from substance to gossip.
But yeah, the tech bro elite are now tech fascists.