How Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon

Angry Planet

Matthew Gault

War, Politics, Conflict, Government, History, News

4.3 • 882 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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Facing a friendly audience at an AI expo earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp let loose on a list of controversial topics. He talked about Israel, Gaza, and campus protests. “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp said. “We are the peace activists.”

Palantir, Karp’s company, is promising a bold new way to wage war using AI, one it’s testing out in Ukraine. Karp’s comments hit on an old promise. For generations, salesmen have tried to convince everyone they have a new way to conduct war that’s cleaner and better for everyone. That pitch is at the hard of dozens of new defense tech startups.

On today’s show we get into the weeds of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley obsession with Michael Brenes. Brenes is a Yale historian who recently published a Quincy Institute brief about the rise of private finance and disruptors in the DoD contracting space. To hear Brenes tell it, companies have been trying to sell a peaceful way to make war for a hundred years.

It never quite turns out how they planned.

Private Finance and the Quest to Remake Modern Warfare

A.I. Won’t Transform War. It’ll Only Make Venture Capitalists Richer.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature
0:05.1	It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hello and welcome back to another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.
0:21.0	Jason, how are you doing today? I am great I am happy to be here.
0:28.0	Really great at 10 a.m. already I have coffee I have
0:33.7	everything I could possibly want including one of my closest friends and an intimate conversation about conflict
0:41.6	about technology and conflict and salesman.
0:46.0	We've been, this one has been long in the making and I'm very excited to do it.
0:51.0	Mike, can you introduce yourself? Sure I'm Mike Brennis I'm the
0:56.6	co-director of the Brady Johnson program in Grand Strategy at Yale University I also
1:02.1	teach in this in the history department as a lecturer and I write broadly
1:07.7	on 20th century U.S. foreign policy and its relationship to domestic politics and look forward to the conversation.
1:15.0	So I wanted to have you on, is there something that's been on my mind quite a bit in the last couple of years,
1:22.0	which is this new wave of startup defense stuff.
1:30.0	And it's kind of been pinned to the high-flying promises of artificial intelligence.
1:37.6	So Silicon Valley's relationship to the Department of Defense is changing.
1:42.3	Things have gotten pretty interesting. And then
1:44.4	lo and behold, in June, the Quincy Institute publishes this thing that you co-authored,
1:50.2	private finance and the quest to remake Modern Warfare.
1:54.0	And I was quite hardened to read it and see that it was kind of a,
1:58.0	I wouldn't call it quite a takedown, but a reasoned explanation of kind of what's going on and kind of the
2:05.1	historical precedence and just like a lot of context a lot of good meaty stuff.
2:11.2	And so I'm very happy to have you on.
	...

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