Inside Venture Capital’s New Military

I also considered the headings: Tech is Building an Autonomous Military for an Autonomous War, or, Palmer Luckey and Marc Andreeseen Go to War, Also: Palmer Dreams of Child Blood. Marc and Palmer Bathe in Blood Together, Father and Son. a16z’s Army. Marc Andreessen: Rise of a Military God. But you get what you pay for. This shit is free.  

You know about the Metaverse, you know about crypto, you know about AI… there’s another major-scale tech project in progress, and that is: to build out a whole new, and much more terrifying, military.

Anduril is the most important company so far in this military build-out, and is one of many new weapons companies funded by a16z, the most powerful venture capital firm in the Valley. A16z is calling it “American Dynamism”, because it sounds better than “drone wars” I guess.

Most famously, Anduril provides advanced surveillance for ICE at the US/Mexico border, but it develops a variety of weaponry, which we’ll discuss in this piece. I think of Anduril and its founder, as the head of tech’s army, and I think this is a useful way to look at it. Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey. A16z loves Palmer, and also funded Palmer’s previous startup, Oculus, which sold to Facebook for 2 billion dollars in 2014. Palmer got ripped off. To give a sense of scale, Anduril recently raised $1.5 billion in a single round, which is a pretty hefty amount where in the past 10 years the larger rounds tend to go 350 million tops and cluster more around 250 million. 

To commemorate the funding round, Anduril put out a manifesto!! It is called: Rebooting the Arsenal. Fascists love manifestos just as much as anyone else, no one will leave an opportunity for a manifesto on the table, especially when accompanied by a 1.5 billion dollar check, this is a manifesto-worthy event. We are obliged! The manifesto lays out tech’s vision for an entirely new age of warfare… created exclusively in a secret lab near you, by a16z and Anduril. 

Here’s the pitch: the military we have can’t move as fast as Silicon Valley, it can’t keep up, it can’t innovate. The military is falling behind state-of-the-art tech and models for weapons-building, and this means we’re not competitive, and if we end up in wars, proxy or not, with China and Russia, we are going to get our asses kicked and our precious country will fall, how humiliating and how sad. So they propose a massive re-building of the US military, by tech companies and venture capitalists, to catapult the US back to the head of military innovation. 

They spin this, of course, as “war deterrence”, the cloak under which many war crimes lie, sold off as peace. VCs, and a16z more specifically, feel that the traditional weapons companies don’t have the culture, the competency and the financial model/structure to keep up, and that these companies should be replaced by Silicon Valley companies (I.e., feeding money into venture capitalists instead of Raytheon and Lockheed’s shareholders). They say “legacy” weapons companies don’t have competency in software or in running computer engineering teams, so they are not going to be able to make the switch to the new warfare. (The warfare that venture capitalists are creating).  

Tech sees a future of autonomous war: where autonomous airplanes, autonomous drone swarms and autonomous submarines and surveillance satellites, and giant big data collection traps and clusters, are operated by artificial intelligence and computer programmers, rather than soldiers and pilots, from a great distance. No need for boots on the ground. To kill people from a standing desk in Palo Alto. (This is the world that Chelsea Manning warned us about.) The new military is a Silicon Valley-grade, tech-first army. It is “cyberweapons” and network systems and wow, lots and lots of drones. Drones and drone swarms, drone surveillance, anti-drone detection, drone-on-drone combat, drones drones drones

You know, just like every sci-fi movie SINCE WE WERE CHILDREN TRIED TO WARN US ABOUT. DID WE SEE THE SAME STAR WARS OR NO? THE EMPEROR WAS A VENTURE CAPITALIST. Fill in the rest of the metaphor.

This should be ringing some bells, because this has a great deal in common with how tech has created super-cops and super-policing by transforming them with Silicon Valley technologies. It was venture capitalists who created the vision of a tech-enabled cop. Policing does almost none of its own technical infrastructure and never did; it could not come up with this vision, and it could not develop and implement it. Cops barely even had websites, you think they are suddenly going to be designing giant data architectures crunching huge amounts of data and processing them with fucking Hadoop in the cloud and shit? Absolutely not. Nope, this all came right from tech, from beginning to end. 

Cops simply didn’t have the insight into these developments, they didn’t have the staffing for these developments, they didn’t have the expertise managing technical programs for this; it was tech transforming the cops, tech coming to the cops and saying: look, we have this new surveillance system we think you can use to arrest domestic violence victims and put Black people in jail and deport Latinx people. Check out this app where we have people reporting homeless people in their neighborhoods. Tech has been conceptualizing and innovating and installing entire new surveillance apparatus like the Domain Awareness Center in Oakland and the Domain Awareness System in New York, in addition to providing police agencies with huge amounts of intelligence from consumer apps, with facial recognition technology and license plate recognition technology, with machine learning and AI tools to “predict crimes”; even Axon (formerly Taser), is a tech company. 

The modern cop as we know it, was created by the tech industry. 

Access to consumer data about people that the cops would never be able to have, setting up cloud-based data collection and analysis that cops would never be able to do in house. Cops used data from tech companies to smash political movements, and consumer companies turned over data to police units continuously. The body cams are from tech companies; as are marijuana blow tests and home surveillance systems that funnel streams of data back into the policing system. Tech outfits police vehicles with so much technology each squad car is a “mobile command” center. This people have drones, they have weaponized jet skis (donated by tech elite), and tech-enabled police cars built just for cops by … Microsoft. 

This was all tech: creating a new picture of what policing is, building it, and forcing policing agencies to adopt them if they wanted to stay “competitive” with crime… and the people they were hunting. 

I think a lot of us made the assessment that police departments and agencies like ICE, were the driver of technology adoption, were leading the projects and the concepts and the strategies; when a far better description is that the tech industry stepped in and personally oversaw the super-charging of American cops; just as cops became militarized, they also became more and more tech-enabled. It was technology companies that architected a dizzying array of new surveillance systems, new data and analytics systems, new weapons systems and even new drone systems, that completely changed how policing is done; it was a tech-powered police for an era of… tech-resistance. 

Because what was the thing that required the leveling up of cops? A lot of it was the social unrest that had been going on since Occupy; that is the context where a lot of this initial tech-backed policing began, and later, Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement, etc. Tech had a great enemy in these social movements — it was in the process of taking over San Francisco and was right next to a historic site of resistance and the home of the Black Panthers. SFPD and OPD were among the first tech implementations in this new age and policing. WEIRD. Social movements were also accelerants, big time, of police department “upgrade” by technology; and, in social movements, police and tech had a common enemy.   

It shows how much we misunderstood the relationship between tech, intelligence agencies and policing in the early days. Many of our efforts tried to get tech companies to change and reform; we did it in the DEI movement, when we tried to get them to hire us, and we did it in the anti-police tech movements, where we were trying to get tech companies to cancel contracts, signing petitions to show our outrage. Why would they cancel contracts for things they personally envisioned and designed and then pushed into the policing apparatus? Why would they undermine the cops and projects they were creating to serve as their personal security and take over cities and smash social movements and protect their industry from social unrest and keep its low-paid workers living in fear? This was never about a few problematic contracts, it was the fact that tech was taking over the police force, itself creating and architecting a new kind of cop and policing system, not being merely “contracted” to problematic projects, but was generating those projects in the first place. It seems like a subtle distinction, but it isn’t… its a fundamental question of directionality, and materially, how this was going down and thus, how to stop it.

And now tech is going to do what they did with cops, a complete re-imagining of warfare, and boy, are they full of plans. What they describe is a fundamentally different kind of “army” — these are huge departures from a strategic perspective, a technical perspective and an economic perspective. 

“Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificial intelligece, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds. The bipartisan congressional Future of Defense Task Force, drawing upon DARPA’s “Mosaic Warfare” concept, describe a future “where ubiquitous and affordable unmanned air and ground platforms find targets on a contested battlefield and pass the information to a decision maker who can instantly task another part of the same system to strike the enemy from safety.” The traditional division between land, air, sea, and space domains will become increasingly anachronistic, as nation states compete for total, all-domain superiority.” 

— From the Rebooting the Arsenal manifesto

What is proposed is a new age of warfare and one that is being innovated… in absence of the United States either being in a war state or one being imminent, so far as the citizenry is aware. As many analysts and investigators have discussed, the existance and build out of a military creates the need for conflict in order to get returns on investment and justify not only its existence but its never-ending revolution overall, and in order to supply the cash needed to continue this forevermore. To this point, the Anduril Manifesto discusses wartime periods that produced radical innovations, such as the Manhattan Project, which killed over 200,000 people. 

Great! 

Butttt guess what also produces tech innovation: cold wars. During the cold war we landed on the moon! That and other military projects for someone else to elucidate, are responsible for many of the innovations that we now “enjoy” each day. (In quotes because, scientifically and medically, all this shit is making us want to kill ourselves). And the language used in the Manifesto is very cold-war thinking, repeating it over and over: the legacy weapons companies are falling behind, the military has become slow and lost any agility and energy, we wouldn’t be able to win a war, we need a build up as a deterrent…. against China and Russia!! Who are innovating much faster then us!! A tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme!! 

The manifesto states that America’s “lead in military technology has been the pivotal factor in preventing World War III,” and calls for a “new breed of defense technology” to maintain that edge. China and Russia are growing too big and too powerful. This is not even warmongering, no, never, even though this shit is custom-built for killing, this is… the peaceful and humanitarian route to take — huge military escalation is actually the necessary cost of peace, which you can step over here to purchase. 

Let me disaburse you of the notion that this is in the early days of this build-out. Nope, as it did with the cops, tech has been merrily whittling away. Anduril itself has been in production in multiple conflict zones for years now, including the US/Mexico border and in Ukraine (it doesn’t matter what you think of the conflict, you just need to understand that they are in production in war zones.) Anduril products include: 

Lattice, an “operating system” for war: “Lattice uses technologies like sensor fusion, computer vision, edge computing, and machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect, track, and classify every object of interest in an operator's vicinity…” , it is an “open operating system for defense that is simple, scalable, extensible, and ultimately leverages machine intelligence to accelerate the closing of complex kill chains.”

Complex…. kill chains? Wow.

“Force Protection”, specifically for use at borders, as well as military bases and oil fields, “provides integrated, accurate, persistent awareness and security across every domain, protecting personnel and infrastructure from a rapidly evolving set of threats.” Perfect for anti-immigration extremist governments!!!

Ghost, a “near silent” drone for “multi-mission reconnaissance”. It is 37 pounds and can be put in the air in under 3 minutes. Palmer is always careful to emphasize the ease of use here, just like using an iPhone!! Speaking to the future of computer work, Anduril helpfully notes that “One operator can easily control teams of collaborating autonomous Ghosts for complex mission profiles.”

They also have a new autonomous submarine!! This one upsets me a lot because I really don’t like the idea of venture capitalists fucking around in the ocean. Use cases? “Undersea battlespace intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, mine counter-warfare, anti-submarine warfare, seafloor mapping and more.”

Anti-submarine warfare! In 2022!!! Delightful. 

That is just what is being done at Anduril, *one* company under a16z’s “American Dynamism” portfolio.

Other companies are doing digital forensics for the CIA (Toka), weapons-grade drone defense (SkyShield), AI pilots to create drone swarms (ShieldAI), a surveillance company with more than 1,200 law enforcement agencies in use (Flock), training programs for military “personnel” read: war criminals, probably to create killer hybrid war machine computer programmers (Shift). There are others, and there are yet more in the portfolio of Peter Thiel’s VC firm, Founders Fund. Both firms are members of a conspiracy on this and other technology schemes, including cryptocurrency. So, this is actually ALREADY HAPPENING and is WELL underway, many of these companies have been running since the last bubble and already have significant production deployments in high-risk and “mission critical scenarios”.

But the vision of the autonomous war future, is not the only thing distinguishing tech’s model; there are others that appeal right to the heart of the military budget structure, to which the startup model provides an alternative economic strategy for weapons development, one that makes it easier for the military to acquire tech weaponry and one that removes serious up-front costs of weapons development.  

In the current process, *the military* funds R&D (research and development) costs for the new shit, both internally and in contract with legacy weapons companies that it collaborates with. This is the riskiest money in the entire lifecycle; the person who is funding R&D is taking on all the early costs and all of the risks. Inevitability, R&D results in many failures, which the military is then left eating the cost and having to explain what went wrong not only to the taxpayers but to various other government entities and processes and reviews and so on. So this is not only expensive and disappointing but is one of the hardest parts of the lifecycle to get budget for, period, much easier to spend money on things that are further down the road, especially when it comes to vendor relationships, and this is reflected in the way military budgets are structured. 

So now you finally have an alternative to that! The VC model which means that *VCs are funding all the up front costs* for R&D. Venture capitalists and the tech companies provides the R&D!!! You can see how this would be incredibly appealing to the military; and the reason why VCs will get the returns they seek, is because they took those risks.  

But there’s something else that goes hand in hand with this. When it’s the military doing R&D, it’s the military driving the specifications and the requirements and the vision and the use cases and so on. When it’s the venture capitalists and startups doing the R&D… they are the one driving the vision. They are the ones doing the testing and the innovating and the strategy. The company doesn’t consult the military any more than it wants to as it builds out products. Like with what we see in policing, this puts tech in as the decision-maker in what gets built. And weapons solutions can be purchased by cops and the military “off the shelf”, which it is easier to get budget for — these are grab-and-go weapons, ready to go right from a VC lab into a war zone. 

The new vision of weapons and war development, positions Silicon Valley as the master of war and not only the supplier of, but the architect of, modern warfare. Tech is the battlefield strategist, weapons dealer, data dealer, military-grade autonomous transport; for hire by not only the military but certainly police departments, but wars in other countries and other conflicts, “military deterrents” for other forces, etc. 

Not only that, tech lives under such precious little regulation and has proved itself ready to fight itself into the dust over and over and over again to keep regulations from descending on it. The entire tech sector will fight, as a unified body, any incursion of regulation. This is a huge competitive edge over internal development as well as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and other top weapons companies that tech is now trying to supplant. Legacy weapons companies are cocooned in a thick blanket of regulations and over-sight processes and audits and government calendars and cycles in addition to its own internal bureaucracy … which has built up over decades and decades. The young, sprightly tech industry is relatively, almost unencumbered. 

As Anduril’s manifesto discusses, this is a transition to more of a consumer model for traditional weapons development. Concerning! Anduril proposes such a disruption to the financial model itself, suggesting that the military can move towards more flexible funding/buying models… such as, oh, the way you pay for Netflix! “…governments should experiment with industry-standard payment structures like subscriptions and “as-a-service” models, which minimize switching and sunk costs, encourage competition, and demand that technology is constantly updated.”

The Manifesto’s talk of the consumer model for weapons development, is the CIA’s efforts in the industry coming full circle and yet another example of the simpatico between them. 

In-Q-Tel is the CIA’s venture capital arm, and since it opened in 1999, it has been — mainly quietly, and in undisclosed amounts — relentless funding a variety of startups related or, unrelated (seemingly) to war. For example, one of the biggest areas they were investing in in the last bubble, was in big data management, and in building out the CIA’s data infrastructure; much of which is housed with Amazon; in fact, the CIA was one of the FIRST major intelligence customers of AWS — for Amazon and the tech industry more generally, this proved that the “cloud” — switching from in-house computer systems to managed ones — was ready for use by “the enterprise”, aka large companies or systems who had extremely serious requirements around security, regulations, the classified nature of data, uptime, etc. 

(Here I will pause and make the point that in order to HAVE data, you have to be able to harvest it, and that is a role that tech has played as well, directly funneling huge amounts of data into the CIA itself, similarly how it gave police data COLLECTION services such as body cams, consumer housing cams, new software for officers and fleets, and so on. Tech is a data supplier, and it is that data that powers up these entities as well.) 

Anyways, the entire theory of the CIA having a venture capital arm is that the consumer market is the best way to incubate and develop new technologies; then, the CIA benefits from that rapid innovation, which it can capture and put to its own uses; important, the CIA via early investments, gets a stake in all the “data nets” that tech is creating. In this way, the CIA actually operates very much like a tech company, in that is uses data FROM people to CRUSH people, and that one of its primary purposes is collection of data and tech is the straw that lets them suck it up. 

I saw that CTO of the CIA speak at a big data conference in 2013, and he openly stated that the CHARTER of his office was to collect and store all the data in the world, forever. Unspoken, was that no one else would have access, as that would be its competitive advantage. This is, of course, the same advantage and power at the core of the tech industry. They keep the data all to themselves as much as possible, even from the people it harvests from. The never-ending requirement for data as the innovation engine speaks to my recent piece discussing the imperialist need for never ending growth, and here, we see it in never-ending data collection and incursion into the human body and being. 

My point is that the CIA is souped-up by tech, the police have been souped up by tech, and now tech is set to take on the military. In all cases, it is the data of the People that makes all of this possible, that was the accelerant; just as our tax dollars have been used in forever-war, so has our data been drafted to its pursuit. Tech has given yet another pipeline from the citizenry into the superstructure of police and military that oppress us. We are the petri ditch, the incubator of their war toys, as unwitting and unwilling citizens of their new surveillance state. 

Critically, in a software-defined battlefield, you don’t have soldiers and pilots as the staff; you have artificial intelligence and software programmers. 

Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist that funds Anduril, has a famous saying: “software is eating the world”; I think it should be obvious at this point that this loathsome, greedy appetite for takeover, is what landed us in exactly this position, not to extinguish war, but to turn it into yet another arm of the tech empire. And in this manifesto, Anduril proposes one elegant extension to Marc’s platform: “software is finally eating the battlefield”, it says. 

And, by the way, the *American* government is not the only government or the only customer that the tech industry is eyeing. Tech leaders were asked DIRECTLY by the president of Ukraine, to intercede in this situation directly; answering the call, Anduril showed up, INCLUDING Palmer Luckey (he loves blood and this is one of his first - I hope(?) - deploys into an active war zone), it is my belief that he personally piloted drone aircraft that killed people there. 

No one has asked how many people Anduril killed or helped kill in the conflict. 

Guess who exports weapons all over the world as well? The CIA of the United States of America!!! Again, I cannot emphasize enough how when you look at the structures, goals and collaboration between tech and the CIA, they are on the same page in many regards, in elemental and structural ways; they have a long history of collaboration, and multiple high-level people at the height of the tech industry are from the CIA; and vice versa. The revolving door between the CIA, very specifically, and the tech industry, is one that doesn’t receive quite as much of the attention as it should. For example, Marc Andreessen served on a direct, exclusive, secret advisory board to the DIRECTOR of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, and is thus, definitionally, a high-level CIA asset in addition to going in on countless rounds of funding with the CIA. 

Here is my best theory of what is going on in the highest possible terms: United States is weak, not only the military but much of the infrastructure — the public transportation system, the health care system, the supply chain and manufacturing…  this is a falling state. America is not thriving. (Of course, a lot of that is because tech has grown up this massively exploitative and wealth-consolidation engine, that has had a hugely negative impact on the economy as well as labor, that has crushed many of the progressive social movements of the past 10 years, that its consumer products literally sow mass misery, loneliness, suicidality, eating disorders and mental conditions; that tech has literally destroyed cities like Oakland and San Francisco and is working hard on more.) And of course this is further because tech has established new definitions of “innovation” and “growth”, and is the one creating the gap that other industries must cross (for a cost), while having a monopoly on all of the major resources needed to do so; quite literally, tech is holding hostage through monopolies what is needed for the rest of America to compete and is starving them out. The reason other sectors have not “kept up with” tech is because tech doesn’t want them to.

As I was saying, the VCs have one thing right, which is that the country remains in a weakened position, and I think that is granting tech and perhaps certain intelligence agencies, the opening for a.. Transfer of power… predation on the cities and the country and tax payers. The national infrastructure is so weak that tech can easily “plug into” infrastructure and verticals that are falling apart, and take them over. A longer conversation, but overall, it’s just a very precarious moment between a failing national infrastructure, and a self-admitted devouring black hole of an industry.  

Hmm…. The CIA joining with a military force, such as VCs are becoming… conspiring to take over the governance of a country… the CIA supplanting and establishing new regimes… coups…. remember when Elon said “we will coup whoever we want”? LOL WAKE UP

I don’t know, that’s just where my thoughts go as well as the course of military history, and we’ll have to see what happens as more time passes. What is obvious is that we’re headed down a very dark road here, and while every single individual tweet that Elon writes is getting desiccated by the media, the new king of the locust swarm, picked over within an inch of its life for all but the obvious conclusion, THIS is happening — THIS which is tech launching its army. 

The manifesto concludes with a call to technology workers: “There is no secret government silo of advanced technology that will save us if war breaks out — you must build it.” Throughout the manifesto are these macho calls to action ripped directly (literally, in this case) from “Uncle Sam wants YOU” and other wartime propaganda posters. This campaign is not only aimed in the direction of military and intelligence agency decision makers, but at workers within the technology industry itself. 

In order for tech to succeed industry-wide with what is essentially a military takeover or at the very least a takeover attempt of the top 5 weapons contractors, it needs big buy-in from its workforce, because this is going to take a lot of labor; as I’ve discussed in other articles, tech is in a slightly delicate place where its illusion of liberal values are no longer productive; employees who have moral or ethical leanings are an actual threat to the relationship between tech and military and intelligence dealings; look no further than the Project Maven protests, as well as sort of an ongoing low level drumbeat of anti-war and anti-ICE activity emitting from colleges, and local protests to things like the Domain Awareness Systems… and of course, the mother of them all, PRISM. 

To conclude, since we know that weapons development and the space race are accelerants of technology, we have to worry about the possibility of tech producing some kind of totally discontinuous technology out of either of these programs, whether that is a new kind of bomb (like in Project Manhattan) or deadly artificial intelligence. Palmer is quite obsessed with the idea of creating an Oculus that can kill the wearer if they die; perhaps he sees a future where, if the pilots of autonomous warcraft, like drone operators, go down, the “soldier” does too. 

 Anduril openly says that wars are the petri dish of innovation, a truth that should well stop and make us consider literally any alternative, I propose luddism. This is a great example of tech’s relationship to imperialism and to fascism - the problem of the never-ending need for expansion and never-ending appetite, the never-ending requirement of capitalist revolution and imperial empire. The end game of war is always death. And this whole American Dynamism new-military program, has mass death written all over it. We need a movement against tech’s new war games, as soon as possible.  

I want to end on the note, that these nightmares presented and funded by Andreessen Horowitz, are not the only possible technology futures for war. We could use tech to end war. That is the true innovation, and we are speeding away from it, and straight into the depths of hell. Where a16z and Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey will be burning and burning and burning in hell forever. 

Will you be going with them because you are a computer programmer who didn’t do something?