Venture capital and military startup firms in Silicon Valley have begun aggressively selling a version of automated warfare that will deeply incorporate artificial intelligence (AI). Those companies and their CEOs are now pressing full speed ahead with that emerging technology, largely dismissing the risk of malfunctions that could lead to the future slaughter of civilians, not to speak of the possibility of dangerous scenarios of escalation between major military powers. The reasons for this headlong rush include a misplaced faith in “miracle weapons,” but above all else, this surge of support for emerging military technologies is driven by the ultimate rationale of the military-industrial complex: vast sums of money to be made.
While some in the military and the Pentagon are indeed concerned about the future risk of AI weaponry, the leadership of the Defense Department is on board fully. Its energetic commitment to emerging technology was first broadcast to the world in an August 2023 speech delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to the National Defense Industrial Association, the largest arms industry trade group in the country. She used the occasion to announce what she termed “the Replicator Initiative,” an umbrella effort to help create “a new state of the art — just as America has before — leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains — which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”
Hicks was anything but shy about pointing to the primary rationale for such a rush toward robotic warfare: outpacing and intimidating China. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC [People’s Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond.”
Hick’s supreme confidence in the ability of the Pentagon and American arms makers to wage future techno-wars has been reinforced by a group of new-age militarists in Silicon Valley and beyond, spearheaded by corporate leaders like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
These corporate promoters of a new way of war also view themselves as a new breed of patriots, ready and able to successfully confront the military challenges of the future.
A case in point is “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a lengthy manifesto on Anduril’s blog. It touts the superiority of Silicon Valley startups over old-school military-industrial behemoths like Lockheed Martin in supplying the technology needed to win the wars of the future:
“The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who, nevertheless, do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need… These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of defense.”
In contrast to the industrial-age approach it critiques, Luckey and his compatriots at Anduril seek an entirely new way of developing and selling weapons:
“Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificially intelligent, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds.”
At first glance, Luckey seems a distinctly unlikely candidate to have risen so far in the ranks of arms industry executives. He made his initial fortune by creating the Oculus virtual reality device, a novelty item that users can strap to their heads to experience a variety of 3-D scenes (with the sensation that they’re embedded in them). His sartorial tastes run toward sandals and Hawaiian shirts, but he has now fully shifted into military work. In 2017, he founded Anduril, in part with support from Peter Thiel and his investment firm, Founders Fund. Anduril currently makes autonomous drones, automated command and control systems, and other devices meant to accelerate the speed at which military personnel can identify and destroy targets.
Thiel, a mentor to Palmer Luckey, offers an example of how the leaders of the new weapons startup firms differ from the titans of the Cold War era. As a start, he’s all in for Donald Trump. Once upon a time, the heads of major weapons makers like Lockheed Martin tried to keep good ties with both Democrats and Republicans, making substantial campaign contributions to both parties and their candidates and hiring lobbyists with connections on both sides of the aisle. The logic for doing so couldn’t have seemed clearer then. They wanted to cement a bipartisan consensus for spending ever more on the Pentagon, one of the few things most key members of both parties agreed upon. And they also wanted to have particularly good relations with whichever party controlled the White House and/or the Congress at any moment.
The Silicon Valley upstarts and their representatives are also much more vocal in their criticisms of China. They are the coldest (or do I mean hottest?) of the new cold warriors in Washington, employing harsher rhetoric than either the Pentagon or the big contractors. By contrast, the big contractors generally launder their critiques of China and support for wars around the world that have helped pad their bottom lines through think tanks, which they’ve funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.
Thiel’s main company, Palantir, has also been criticized for providing systems that have enabled harsh border crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as “predictive policing.” That (you won’t be surprised to learn) involves the collection of vast amounts of personal data without a warrant, relying on algorithms with built-in racial biases that lead to the systematic unfair targeting and treatment of people of color.
To fully grasp how the Silicon Valley militarists view next-generation warfare, you need to check out the work of Christian Brose, Palantir’s chief strategy officer. He was a long-time military reformer and former aide to the late Senator John McCain. His book Kill Chain serves as a bible of sorts for advocates of automated warfare. Its key observation: that the winner in combat is the side that can most effectively shorten the “kill chain” (the time between when a target is identified and destroyed). His book assumes that the most likely adversary in the next tech war will indeed be China and he proceeds to exaggerate Beijing’s military capabilities, while overstating its military ambitions and insisting that outpacing that country in developing emerging military technologies is the only path to future victory.
And mind you, Brose’s vision of shortening that kill chain poses immense risks. As the time to decide what actions to take diminishes, the temptation to take humans “out of the loop” will only grow, leaving life-and-death decisions to machines with no moral compass and vulnerable to catastrophic malfunctions of a sort inherent in any complex software system.
Much of Brose’s critique of the current military-industrial complex rings true. A few big firms are getting rich making ever more vulnerable huge weapons platforms like aircraft carriers and tanks, while the Pentagon spends billions on a vast, costly global basing network that could be replaced with a far smaller, more dispersed military footprint. Sadly, though, his alternative vision poses more problems than it solves.
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and a senior adviser to the Security Assistance Monitor and a columnist for the Americas Program.
Source: CounterPunch
