Pentagon funding was essential to the creation of the Silicon Valley tech industry. But eventually commercial business became much more lucrative than working for the Pentagon, and many firms opted out of doing military work.
That has changed in recent years as the military seeks to capture the superior software skills and computing power that Silicon Valley firms have to offer to build a new generation of military technology.
The Pentagon wants to build a new kind of war machine that can crank out large numbers of affordable, high-tech, high-speed, pilotless weapons systems in short order. Thus the need to cultivate Silicon Valley tech firms.
The biggest source of funding for the development of next-generation drones and systems controlled by artificial intelligence is coming from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz and the Founders Fund. These firms and their cohorts have thrown billions, if not tens of billions, at military tech startups in the past few years alone.
Techno-optimists such as Palmer Luckey of Anduril and Katherine Boyle of Andreessen Horowitz assert that a new age of warfare is on the horizon, and that only smaller, more nimble, software-savvy firms can meet the demands called for by this new approach.
Anduril has even gone so far as to publish a manifesto entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy.” The document suggests, among other things, that Silicon Valley tech firms will eventually replace industrial dinosaurs like Lockheed Martin atop the ranks of Pentagon contractors.
‘Miracle weapons’
There’s just one small problem with this new approach — there is no guarantee that the advanced technologies being promoted by Luckey and his cohorts will work as advertised. There are also serious questions to be asked about whether the strategy these new “miracle weapons” are supposed to enable — swarms of drones and other smaller, more accurate weapons meant to overwhelm any adversary, but especially China — actually makes sense.
The history of “miracle weapons” does not bode well for the likely outcome of the current military tech surge. From the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam to Ronald Reagan’s quest for an impenetrable Star Wars missile shield to the highly touted rise of precision munitions and networked warfare after the end of the Cold War, military history is littered with examples of new weapons concepts that were supposed to revolutionize warfare and give the United States an unbeatable edge.
When reality impinged, the technologies either failed outright, or they were of limited value in the kinds of wars they were being asked to win — as was the fate of U.S. precision bombing and drone warfare in our failed ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are already signs that the new age weapons touted by the Pentagon and the tech industry are not all they are cracked up to be. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that small drones produced by U.S. defense startups were so brittle and so costly that the Ukrainian military stopped using them and started buying cheaper, more reliable Chinese systems instead.
If the new technologies do end up working as advertised, that will pose a whole other set of problems. The whole point of these systems will be to shorten the “kill chain” — the time between when a target is identified and when it is destroyed. But the shorter the kill chain, the greater the chance of catastrophic errors, and the greater the temptation to take “inefficient” humans out of the loop and move towards robotic warfare.
Slow down
All of the above suggests that we should move deliberately in determining whether to build an AI-based military. It also means that we need a serious debate about what strategy our military technologies — and even more importantly, our military personnel — should be called upon to support. We are nowhere near the point of adequately thinking through those issues.
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If the venture capital and tech firms that stand to benefit most from this brave new world of warfare have their way, we will rush these technologies into production and deployment prematurely, at great financial and security risk.
It’s time to treat the claims of the new age militarists in Silicon Valley with extreme skepticism and to make sure that the development of our defense policy for the future is not dominated by the people and institutions that stand to profit from an overreliance on untested military technologies. The time to slow down the military tech train is now, before vested interests override the national interest.
William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and coauthor, with Michael Brenes, of “Private Finance and the Quest to Remake Modern Warfare.”
