Hacking for Defense in Silicon Valley

I'm about 3/4 through the biography of Boyd (referenced in the article) and he's truly an amazing fellow. I wonder how many other geniuses are in our armed forces but their abilities are suppressed because of the huge bureaucracy they have to work within.

Pete Newell is simply phenomenal. He's the absolute right guy to start healing the rift between DoD and the Valley.

I've worked off and on on those types of projects over my years as a developer - defense dept, military intelligence, NSA - and every time at the end of the project I tell myself that I'll never work with them again.

But I get sucked in because the projects are incredibly challenging and interesting.

But what makes me in the end swear off each time is a few things. One is how the projects are organized - they try t split the work up in a way where each team doesn't know what the other teams are working on. But of course everyone knows what's going on, yet you still have to deal with multi-week feedback loops where you submit your work, begin working in the next step, then find out 4 weeks later that the cognitive psychologist rejected your u.i....

(This style of working arose because the French used their u.s. Grad students in the 70s to assess all u.s. Military comps I projects)

The second reason I stop working with them each time is the general creepiness of the people involved. Some of them are geniuses that speak a 1/2 dozen languages or more but are not part of normal society. I don't want to fall into that world any longer. (But the stories are good... Parties with Saudi princes and Cuban cigars they fly to the u.s. On their private jets, partying all night with Persian beauties, lots of drinking with mil Intel guys).

And my final reason is the constant pressure to work on offensive projects. I've only worked on defensive projects (reducing friendly fire, intelligence, etc) and won't work on weapon systems.

I know I rambled here. But if you're thinking about going into this type of work try to understand the long term consequences. You'll hate it eventually. You should put as much thought into it as if someone asked you to work in the porn tech industry.