The Venture Capital Military Strategy
In this blog we’ve been talking a lot about the massive build-out of weapons startups by venture capital, in particular a16z and Founder’s Fund. We’ve looked at some of the startups and talked about how this space is developing. In this, very long, post, we are going to look at what the VC military strategy actually IS. And the worldview, context and goals that are being expressed through this development process.
We are aided by the recent publication of the Anduril manifesto, which we covered here; and particularly for this post, we will use “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High Tech Warfare” by Christian Brose. Welcome to the chat Christian.
Our boy Christian is a government good ol boy. Done a bunch of bullshit in the Senate, lots of working with McCain as a top advisor, his main work has focused on defense and military strategy. He got his start writing speeches for Colin Powell. Memorably, the man who led us right into the human rights crimes and war crimes catastrophes that mark the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and have defined this entire age of military disaster. So, who better to strategize the next one.
Either way, our boy Christian here is a bureaucrat type, hasn’t been in the military, was not fighting in wars, he was pushing paper and chilling at the Aspen Strategy Group summits. Christian is important to us because he left his position architecting war in the public sector to come right into Silicon Valley, where he is now Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril. A Chief Strategy Officer in the Valley is either a lobbyist or a marketing guy who is too macho to be called a marketing guy, for added context.
Anduril of course on our radar because they are THE head of the new startup military being built out by VC. Anduril is a “platform” weapons company started by Founder’s Fund, a16z and the CIA’s venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel. Anduril is the largest of a series of weapons companies that have been funded by these three parties, many in the later days of Web 2.0. Anduril is designed to compete directly with Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, and actually to replace/displace all of the existing major defense companies in a massive, rapid paradigm change. This of course, is the move that Silicon Valley is famous for. And it’s trying to do one on the military.
The paradigm shift is the rise of commodity autonomous hardware like lethal drones, a new era of battlefield surveillance capabilities, AI systems integrated at every step of the military apparatus, and even “enhancements” to soldiers through biohacking of various forms. This war model is designed to replace a “legacy” system of expensive, massive platforms like manned, massive ships, aircraft, bases, etc. The new model is about being quick to adapt, deploy and iterate, moving away from monolithic military platforms, and importantly, getting far away from the existing regulation and budgetary pathways that have supposedly cobbled our military development.
The *underlying* paradigm shift, though, is that development for the military will move from the military + legacy defense contractors, and *TO* VC-funded startups and tech companies. That makes this a multi-trillion dollar play over time for venture capital. The movement of weapons building capacity from established weapons contractors and internal development practices, to weapons building being done by venture capitalists, startups and Silicon Valley, is a monumental shift.
What is proposed is a total changing of the guard; the best people to fight a technology war in the technology age is the technology industry.
What VCs are calling for is a massive INCREASE and RE-ALLOCATION of defense funds to be going straight into venture capital, which can produce these weapons startups using its own development patterns and processes. The model changes to the venture capital business model, of fronting R&D costs and then selling completed products, as opposed to going through a taxing and long, military-internal R&D process or working with legacy providers who won’t front the costs and get tangled up in elaborate budget and requirements processes. This is a move to a far more agile, on multiple dimensions, weapons development process that will be faster, continuously updated, highly dynamic, while relieving budgetary process on militaries, etc. Etc.
And objectively, this will be more “effective” and faster. But in this case what is being accelerated is a recipe for mass death. So, there’s that.
What comes with this massive shift is… a fuck ton of money. What Anduril and the entire portfolio of “American Dynamism” companies out of a16z + PayPal Mafia, propose, is a massive increase in military expenditure, and a massive works project that would be coming out of the technology sector. They are turning the ship around so to speak; that is a massive maneuvering above and beyond the cost of the existing ship. Which is to say, this does require reallocating government expenditure, but it is also going to require a much bigger military budget in general.
One way to look at this, is that the US is actually funding the venture capitalist’s military.
This strategic direction is unfolding within a story they are telling about what is happening in the world and its implications for military competitiveness. This is the major focus of the book, The Kill Chain. All strategy is a story. Their story revolves around China and the idea is that China will gain the military edge over us. This is presented as basically an inevitability and that we need to figure out how to adapt to China as a peer and stop it as a superior force. This is the underlying dynamic that pushes us towards the need for a new military strategy.
They suggest that China will go to war with us and actually come onto American soil; our play thus becomes making sure we can defend the homeland by making it prohibitively expensive for China to penetrate our defenses. Instead of having a reasonable conversation about actual deterrence that might be indicated in this situation, the venture capital military strategy spins out into the construction of a never-ending, Cold War-style warp speed build out, racing to the development of “edge warfare” as this innovation pathway/escalation pushes the technology further and further. So the PLAN here is to live in an at-scale rapid, extreme and discontinuous weapons development face-off with China perpetually, which is itself pouring fuck tons of money and people into this.
Seems healthy.
As the book cops, a major acceleration in US weapons development and in particular a new KIND of weapons development and a new strategy of weapons development, will kick into a massive acceleration on their side and have cascading effects around the world.
One of the first frameworks to shift here is that, even though the premise given here is MILITARY competitiveness with China, that China is actually the venture capitalist’s #1 competitor. In 2021, the US technology industry was worth 1.6 trillion dollars, the largest such industry in the world. Second of course was China, coming in at around 770 billion. That’s a significant gap; the US tech’s industry is more than double the size of China’s. However, that gap is closing and is very much in sight, considering the massive growth of the global technology market and considering China’s obvious competitiveness in AI, social media and crypto.
Thus, tech’s involvement in re-doing the military and the rules and form factors of military engagement, is in a broad context of itself having a major competitor in China. This is NOT mentioned as a motive for the switch up at any point.
Indeed, this is happening within a state of play where not just the US and China are in the picture, but venture capital is as a nation-state level force that is seeking to establish broad global sovereignty. In this view, venture capitalists and the Pentagon are perhaps more saliently understood as allies of sorts. Even in cases like this where you see the venture capitalist body conform to an existing container like the US defense strategy, they are playing as their own entity with a consistent propulsive force even where they are wearing other masks.
This piece is not going to be an anti-war manifesto, that’s for another post, but it would be irresponsible not to mention here, that war is a terrible thing, that building weapons does not stop wars, that entering into a race like this produces the fucking Atomic bomb, that inflaming tensions with other nation-states is a horrible idea, and that the US has caused absolute horrors of horrors through a military strategy that has been consistently unjust and totally in violation of all natural law. Our pal here Christian himself came up in the 9/11 days, where his boss Colin Powell literally lied to get us wrapped up in a fake ass war that has resulted in 4.6 million deaths. Precious few of our side, weird!!! This is in fact that context that this generation of TECHNOLOGY comes out of — the disastrous war on terror and now we are seeing its architects step up to the plate as senior war-fare experts.
The fact that Silicon Valley can outpace the government in developing technology, could theoretically be fine, unless that level of innovation and that level of data and execution and early-stage funding and existing technical infrastructure, is being brought to bear on accelerating the killing of innocent women and children all over the world. And like, stuff that we know that the US military does. It’s not a mystery what is going to happen with weapons manufactured and used by the American government/military.
Of course, there is no compromise between these positions. Trying to “convince” venture capitalists not to unleash web 4.0 warfare will never work and we cannot argue with them out of this. Such is the reality of military power. As we know from history, the creation of weapons creates the need for war; under capitalism, those weapons need a return on investment. With venture capitalists that is doubly and it is triply true. They will be wanting massive returns on this and it’s important to keep in mind that the actual motivation of all of this is actually money and sovereignty.
Even though Anduril gets realllyyyy into the patriotism thing, the whole “Go Go Rah Rah USA”, that is only one part of a broader picture of the weapons selling market. In addition to being able to restrain China from fighting on American soil, another prong of the new military strategy is to actually start to build out and up the armaments of ally countries once more; this fits in neatly with the overriding design of nodes and distributed systems and networks.
The Kill Chain identifies re-armament of allies as a top priority; and remember, this is coming from the very top of venture capital military strategy:
“The United States has had good reasons for limiting the military power of our allies, not least a concern that more capable allies might be tempted to start or escalate fights that could implicate us in misguided conflicts. This is a legitimate risk. But the greater risk now is not that America’s frontline allies are too militarily capable; it is that they are not capable enough and integrated sufficiently into meaningful roles in the US military’s operational planning. Washington leaders pay lip service to the importance of alliances. What we often convey through our actions, however, is that allies are nice to have, but if push really comes to shove, we prefer to do the hard things on our own. This must change for America to deny China military dominance… America needs our allies to be capable of immediately defending themselves and us from any acts of aggression. We also need our allies to be willing to host significantly larger amounts of US military power than they do now, because America no longer has the luxury of commuting to future conflicts from stateside bases on multi month deployment schedules. These expectations of our allies entail much larger political and diplomatic orders, and our allies would bear these burdens not only for themselves but also for us — because the US military might not be able to defend effectively without their support and access to their territory.”
So when we are talking about the market for this strategy, we are talking about one much larger than just the US. Provoking this type of bullshit, for the venture capitalist, not only opens up the American defense market, but the defense markets of all its allies. This is a big swing at a big playing field.
There are many countries that the tech industry could sell into. Some of them will be US allies; some of them likely will not be. They do what they want. We saw the nearest example of that in the Ukraine war, where Anduril and sister company Palantir AND SpaceX (all backed by the same money) transacted directly with Ukraine, and even beyond that, were openly requested to come in by Ukraine’s leader in a time of active warfare. Regardless of how you feel about the war, this is an example of the type of direct liaison we can expect to see as far as venture capital’s entry into the global weapons biz. This of course has a precedent in Palantir’s engagement with various other nation-states for surveillance apparatuses. Venture capitalists have been selling “non-traditional” weapons like these systems for a long time; this will be another product that they can bring into those existing channels with foreign governments and militaries.
Everyone will have to arm up.
Another thing arming allies means is, of course, conflict with communists in a number of proxy battles or wars. This is extremely interesting when you consider a political context in which venture capitalists have come out hard in the past few years with anti-communist rhetoric. Marc Andreessen of a16z has been beating this drum especially hard and talking about how disastrous communism is and no matter what we do we cannot allow communism to happen. In another a16z book, The Network State, communists are also pictured as an enemy and one which requires constant fighting. There has been some muddling of the waters where VCs are using the conversation on the “woke mind virus” (that they also started) to segue into anti-communist rhetoric.
Again, we see here that there is a viewpoint of the US military, and another viewpoint of the self-serving venture capital mechanism. VC is in the middle of its own massive escalation and change in strategy, one that very much resembles the proposed military build out. Specifically, that is their ongoing efforts to establish sovereign zones outside of the US and to use those “outposts”, where they are already planning large-scale construction projects, to bootstrap a sovereign nation where they won’t have to pay taxes or follow the regulations or be constrained in any way by another sovereign entity. And what they most need to escape is America.
This should be viewed much more as two sovereign nation-state level forces negotiating for weapons contracting, and in no way a sign that venture capitalists have any actual patriotism to other than to their own.
The idea that this is about a vendor (VC) and a customer (in defense), reflects a deep untruth about these entities and their positionalities . As we’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog, venture capital and those behind Anduril specifically, views itself as its own sovereign nation-state, and is aggressively accelerating a plan to set up sovereign zones in the global south to form a distributed nation-state. Under this model, the venture capitalists have the ability to sell and provide weapons to host nation-states taking them in. Weapons is yet another thing that VCs have on offer as they enter into negotiations with cities and countries in the global south, many of which are impoverished and facing civil conflict, and have a long history of communism movement. VCs have surveillance systems, drone armies, body cams, towers, even fucking military submarines to arm right-wing, authoritarian and fascist regimes they might want to set up house in. See: regimes like that of El Salvador’s current military dictatorship, which is all-hands-on-board to build a venture capital city, “Bitcoin City”. As the country is cited for human rights abuses by Amnesty International, American venture capitalists have taken top political appointments as they prop up the regime and prepare to start eating the country.
There is no viable communist party in the US, so when VCs rail on about communism and Marc Andreessen spent half of last year reading up on communist ideology so he can lamely refute it in a16z podcasts, they are not talking about communists here in the US — they are talking about the communists and leftists in the global south, many who have a strong ally in China. Venture capitalists have an enemy in these communist parties because they are the ones who will pose the challenge to the venture capital state as it invades countries promising economic packages and business development, which communists will and have recognize immediately the colonial and imperial and capitalist threat embodied. We have already seen protests against Bitcoin colonization in El Salvador and there have been outcries around other attempted settlements in Puerto Rico and Honduras. So venture capital is ALREADY in conflict with these parties that it is now building a military to fight against, with the specific goal of imperialism and colonialism. Indeed, top a16z brass has been heavily praising the genocidal state of Israel and Christopher Columbus himself as the models for the new venture capital state.
So this is not just the strategy for the US military. It is the strategy of the venture capital state -as an ally- to the US in the military arena but as a nation-state level entity with its own identities, goals and trajectories. Sovereign ones. Sovereign ones that will require it to personally fight communists.
To pivot for a minute…
I think one important point to make is that outside of the core strategy and hardware and execution skills of Silicon Valley — and in this case, of Palmer Luckey specifically as the head of a16z military — there are other major benefits to the Pentagon of these relationships and a renewed relationship with Silicon Valley. The re-location of the power center of weapons development to Silicon Valley, means that the DoD will have much more access to the technology in startup portfolios, it will have much more access to the massive data hoards of the venture capital body, and things like AI technology; in fact, as the Pentagon supports and buys weapons across an entire new fleet of weapons companies, VCs like a16z have increasing incentive to open up the whole cabinet of technologies to them.
To this point, one of the major platforms discussed in the new military strategy is that of the large networks of low-cost satellites that have been launched most forwardly by Space X’s Star link. In this version of warfare, this massive network of cheap satellites and other cheap hardware/sensors which can provide absolutely incredible resolution, live surveillance of everywhere, and beyond visual line of sight, is able to be easily, cheaply, and at mass, deployed for use in combat. This is part of what is called the “Military Internet of Things”.
I think this is important because people are looking at SpaceX as some kind of amazing hunt for the stars and the satellite network as being about freedom and access to internet all over the world, including as a censorship-resistant mechanism from “authoritarian regimes”, aka, literally any entity with which the US would like to crush and dominate using military as the coercive factor if not the deadly and decisive one.
Space X is not thought of by the average person as a military operation. The space program is providing essentially a consumer spectacle while in the backdrop you have this massive, much more frightening and in many ways more material, Cold War playing out, whereas the space project is so exciting and interesting and “patriotic”, and itself hides military technology development. We have the space function of a war exercise and the military function of that same exercise, where the “ohhhhh space”, the lights and action and fun and excitement of it all, is burying the fact that a major application and reason for this company existing, is for the military; and that is totally upheld by the profound entanglement of Space X with the Pentagon, DoD, NASA, CIA and etc.
“As sensors are proliferating on Earth, they are also blanketing it in outer space. From hundreds of miles away, commercial satellites can see objects on Earth in minute detail, and they may soon be able to identify individual faces. The number of these satellites grows by the hundreds every year. Silicon Valley is largely responsible for soon-to-be thousands of small satellites that will create an unblinking eye over the entire Earth, resulting in more real-time surveillance of the planet than ever before… put simply Silicon Valley is turning the entire world into a sensor…”
Elsewhere: “Satellites will aways be there, everywhere, providing constant surveillance of the entire world.”
Wheeee!
This is a particularly illuminating passage because it shows that what actually outstripped the military’s capabilities… was Silicon Valley. And that Silicon Valley is the fulcrum for this new kind of warfare; NOT the Pentagon or any other official American entity. But that it is within Silicon Valley that the war emerges.
This includes new capabilities for creating Super Soldiers, it turns out. Citing computer processing and machine learning advancements, one use case that VCs are very interested in:
“Low-cost genetic engineering technologies which make it possible to create new genetic engineering technologies, which make it possible to create new genetic material and even new forms of life from scratch. An immediate application that will be of enormous interest to militaries has to do with expanding the frontiers of human performance enhancement — assessing more precisely which people are best at what kinds of cognitive and physical tasks, and then enhancing those natural abilities through individually customized medications or biotechnologies.”
And don’t worry, they already have full-speed-ahead plans for computer-brain interfacing too. Again, we are dealing with some extremely sick people who want to do some extremely sick shit. Don’t worry, AI isn’t left behind. “It’s not hard to imagine that militaries will train artificial intelligence programs using hundreds of years’ worth of simulated experience… every possible event that could occur during an actual war would be an event the machine has confronted many times over in simulations.”
Great.
Information , though, is the true battlefield. “What will matter far more than the things themselves is the connections between them — the ability of every sensor to share information with every shooter, every shooter to receive information from every sensor, and every machine to transmit information in real-time and at all times to every other machine. The things themselves are just nodes in the network — things that sense, shoot and share information.”
How did we get here, to this level of engagement between VC and military where entire paradigm shifts are being called into being and the relationship is changing at warp speed to become much closer? This is a huge sea change from the relationship between parties in the years since the dot com bubble and well into web 2.0. In fact, the militarization of venture capital with the founding of Anduril in 2017 marks the transition out of the web 2.0 era, which was mainly defined by big consumer plays backed by giant data storage tech and the rise of the iPhone/iPad and AWS ages.
The Kill Chain book talks about the history here. Obviously the origination of the modern technology industry finds its roots in the deepest and darkest part of the government. But, or so this narrative goes, something changed. Christian chronicles how the split between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon / Defense was wedged in particular by the development of political consciousness in the computing industry and a lack of willingness or commitment to work on defense projects out of humanitarian and ethical concerns. In turn, this had a very serious negative impact on the competitiveness and development of military technology, to the point that oftentimes the military was forced to cobble together consumer technology in order to function. A popular talking point with Anduril is that your average person holds more technology in their pocket than a solider does on the battlefield.
From my perspective, the topic of industry sentiment to defense is of great interest. Our biggest relevant disruptions within the industry were in relationship to PRISM (via Palantir), Project Maven — a Pentagon contract cancelled after Google employee walk-outs — and in 2019, No Tech for ICE, which protested primarily Palantir as well. Unfortunately, Palantir, which is a relatively small part of this picture, has absorbed huge amounts of anti-war energy from the industry, and predictably left us with zero momentum from a systems perspective.. I.e., Anduril was a major player in the ICE conflict, putting up major surveillance towers around the US/Mexico border; this was an opportunity where we really started to see the VC military formation emerge across multiple startups and specifically right out of a16z, but the tendency to focus on singular companies and not VC portfolios won out. We remain in this position. And from my view, this has been the fatal mistake we made in trying to hold the VC-defense industrial complex at Bay; it is what has opened up the field to this blissful reconciliation. This was a mistake made over and over and over again, but in this application, it is the mistake that will cost the most lives.
Despite what I personally would consider a pretty lukewarm anti-war attitude and far too sporadic movements within the industry, it is obvious that the social movement in the industry and social consciousness in the industry DID have an effect. If only in that companies were less likely to pursue these contracts because they didn’t want to face-off with a possible backlash from their employees and the resulting PR nightmare. As money was ample elsewhere, this was far less of a loss to Silicon Valley than to the military.
From the perspective of our social movements, you see very clearly how those efforts HAVE moderated and effected the military apparatus, showing once again that we have underestimated the value of social movements and most saliently, have abandoned them WAY too pre-maturely. It is as if all energy was exhausted on these past efforts and there is none left this most critical moment of escalation. The other side was always ready to go given the opening; they now have carte-blanche. There is no political dissent in the industry whatsoever as the last of it was swept away in the hundreds of thousands of layoffs done across the sector to lower salary and stock comp, massively increase dependence on global contracted workforces, and slash the capital footprint of VC-backed startups.
This also suggests, of course, that people inside the military and Pentagon and intelligence agencies were actively knowledgable about the political environment within the tech industry and themselves were extremely invested in this issue and how to break it. This put them in the same boat with venture capitalists like a16z and PayPal Mafia / Founder’s Fund, who wanted into this market and this arena overall, were extremely close collaborators with the CIA’s VC arm, InQTel, and so forth. So you see again more affinity there where there are shared political enemies and shared problems in pursuing larger colonial and imperial aims. One has to wonder if any collaboration emerged in that area, particularly seeing as the CIA is at the very core of all of this as well and actually was the most effective government agency as far as working with venture capital even during this break or interruption of the relationship between tech and military/defense/intelligence.
The author of The Kill Chain says in one particularly illuminating passage:
“A friend of mine who recently did targeting in the US military told me that the best his unit could get on one page in identifying a target was with Google Maps. They had to gather up all of their different streams of information about the target from their assorted sensor platforms, come to a time-consuming decision on where the target actually was located, and literally drop a pin in Google Maps to direct their shooters where on earth to fire their weapons. The was around the time that the Google employees wrote their open letter to their leadership demanding that the company cut ties with the Department of Defense lest their technology contribute to lethal military operations. ‘If those folks only knew how many bombs the US military has dropped using Google Maps,’ my friend told me, ‘their heads would explode’. “
Even when the industry stood against these technologies, these sick fucks were still taking a lot of pleasure in using the technology to kill people anyway. Sadism.
On the note of social movements, I think it’s important to look at how a new age of autonomous war-fare — I.e. not involving human soldiers— could affect anti-war activity and our ability to mobilize against this new type of threat. When you move into an automated warfare model you cut out… human soldiers. In fact, The Kill Chain suggests that this transition will also mean huge job losses in the existing military base. No longer needed; replaced by machines.
Per the Kill Chain:
“The next battle network, built around intelligent machines, will invert the ratio of humans to machines for the first time ever. Instead of needing large numbers of people to operate one machine, one person will be able to command large groups of machines single-handedly…. This form of command and control could look less like what the US military practices today and more like the instantaneous operations of ride-sharing services such as Uber of Lyft”.
Uhmmmmmm…. ???
Human soldiers, draftees, veterans have often been on the front-lines of resistance to the military industrial apparatus. I recently watched a documentary about the resistance from soldiers to the war in Vietnam called Sir No Sir. Turns out one of the big reasons that the war did ultimately end was because the soldiers in Vietnam started refusing to fight and actually started to kill their commanding officers among other acts of sabotage, resistance and desertion, massive AWOL in addition to the huge numbers of “draft dodgers” and conscientious objectors, soldiers who became activists when discharged, often due to serious injury and having seen some true horror of horrors (and committed them). Even in more recent times, it was dissenting soldiers like Chelsea Manning who have played critical roles in raising awareness and dissent to the war crimes that America commits as a matter of course.
This is something we should be worried about across the board as PEOPLE are taken out of core functions of society and replaced by machines; the machine will not organize a union, go to a protest, leak information to the media, or refuse to fight, or sabotage infrastructure, or put a hole in the head of the commanding officer.
Which is another reason these ghouls love this shit.
Veterans of war still form the enduring anti-war pillar, and in fact seem to be the most constant, steadfast and active dissenters in the entire anti-war movement, one which most of the left has forgotten. Particularly in the wake of an immensely popular war in Ukraine. Again, it simply doesn’t matter how you feel about the war in Ukraine; the fact of the matter is that it has been hugely advantageous to a hawk agenda simply because it is in fact, a POPULAR war and in that political environment, people’s supposedly anti-war philosophies disappear not just for the immediate conflict but in the larger attitude. It significantly decreases people’s moral sensibilities about war and significantly expands the scope of what they see as reasonable militarily.
And it’s bad news bears for us, since that popular war is playing out during a time of rapid military expansion by venture capitalists and their startups and providing a great cover for it. And particularly when those startups specifically — Anduril, Space X and Palantir — were directly negotiating with Ukraine and viewed as heroes in this situation. All of those companies funded by the same venture capitalists, by the way. Ukraine was in many ways a coming-out party for the startup military, but again within this context of popular war, the actual material significance of that, was totally swept away. Instead, Ukraine has become one of their favorite talking points; a Trojan Horse of sorts that also positions them as heroes; as opposed to the fact that their engagements at the US/Mexico border via these same parties make them war criminals.
There is absolutely a level of depersonalization that happens here and you have your most likely anti-war forces out of the picture when you don’t have human soldiers. A popular image these new weapons startups like to use is that of one operator manning an entire autonomous weapons operating system of drone swarms, sensors and live surveillance and AI, theoretically doing the work of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people under the old paradigm.
Indeed, it is inside of this record-low level of dissent to military activity not only in the industry itself, in the broader left which is essentially non-functional at this time, and in the veteran community following the wind-down of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, that this threat is emergent. That most salient memory of hot war has shifted to the war in Ukraine, which everyone seems to be celebrating as a moral victory to fight in.
To close us out here…
One of the biggest things that bothers me about all of this, is that you basically have this whole entire ass strategy that is advocating the absolute necessity of this major acceleration and build-out, because we need to beat or stay ahead of China or whatever.
Yet several passages of the Kill Chain come within a hair of admitting the absolute inevitable fact, that China has 4x more people than us, its economy is within a hair of eclipsing ours, and that they are in fact already ahead of us in some key military areas. Considering America, because of the system of capitalism, has been facing endless economic catastrophe, and most lately has allowed 1 million people to die in a pandemic, while China, despite being 4x larger, experienced far, far less, its looking like there are some pretty clear divergences in the futures of these countries. AKA, we are going the fuck down. Our financial system is a fucking disaster, the entire infrastructure of the country is falling apart, the health system is a disaster, and most Americans don’t have enough money to survive even a minor emergency. There is absolutely nothing on the horizon to suggest that the decline of America is going to stop, or that the ascendence of China is going to end.
Considering the reality that competing with China on pretty much any level, including and even especially militarily, is going to be basically impossible, it very much brings the entire motive of this level of warfare into pretty serious question. The amount of money involved in this is absolutely astronomical, and people like the author of the Kill Chain, who are sitting right in the center of the Silicon Valley military build-out, are positioned to make an absolute fuck ton of money literally regardless of the validity of this build-out, its effectiveness, or its use or no use at any point. In fact, the author of this book will likely be worth billions someday as a direct result of gaining the contracts he so shamelessly begs for.
This is the necrotic emergence of the venture capital state, thriving in downfall and economic collapse. VC as the dealer of war coming out of the falling state.
The idea that Silicon Valley possesses some secret and un-replicable sauce for making startups that will keep us ahead of China is totally delusional. Other countries like China can absolutely start and grow startups and giant technical and military apparatus and do and have. That much is simply not in question.
It seems that instead of using this moment to double and triple down on a never-ending war — a thing that is, above all else, an economic instrument — we could instead be putting our “best and brightest” minds to work on WORKING with other countries to find a way to end war and end aggression and de-militarize and avoid war. This is money and infrastructure that will not be going into making core indicators for global health of PEOPLE better. And it will absolutely lead to mass death. Mass death is the province of this entire operation.
This is a metaphor to me of how the entirety of the technology mindset is, which is that speed is the holy value, and where we end up in is this endless race where the only values are the one of being faster and better than anyone else, of pushing the technology as far as possible (according to VC dreams), and no other metric exists except the one that puts you ahead technologically. War is the inevitable outcome of this. Death is the inevitable outcome of this. This is not just the US military; this is the result of who Silicon Valley is, how it operates, who VCs are, how all of this is organized and funded, and the values expressed financially in these categories. It is Silicon Valley that has produced this method and strategy and execution path of warfare. This developed out of venture capital.
Even the vision for space warfare comes from us. “As military movement on Earth becomes harder, there will be a shift to the ultimate high ground off of Earth. Moving to and from space will become cheaper, easier, and more common, which means that militaries could eventually come to view space travel as little different flying or sailing around the planet. Every phase of the kill chain will depend on military space systems”.
This was where we were always going to end up with them. This is the inevitable result of the venture capital machine.
And a lot of people are going to die for it.
A final quote from The Kill Chain:
“Whether the weapons in question are digital, hypersonic, or directed energy, they will be arms — means of military action — and the United States and China will compete to amass these weapons in many of the same ways that great powers once competed over battleships and ballistic missiles. That competition could also encompass nuclear arms, especially considering how much China has been emphasizing nuclear forces in its military modernization.”
Boom bitch, get out the way.