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- Hacker News
- No it isn't. What's transforming the military-industrial complex are the wars in Ukraine and Iran which have shown that cheap drones can totally defeat a much larger and more advanced military force.
The road we've taken where we make air-defense missiles costing $5 million a piece which we'd run out of in a shooting war within two weeks is just untenable.
The military-industrial complex with its overpriced toys is a dead end. We need cheap stuff by the millions. The military-industrial complex simply isn't interested in delivering that kind of hardware. Lockeed-Martin has made a "cheaper" version of the Patriot air-to-air missile, but it still costs $2.5 million a piece. I doubt they'll go any lower than that.
by hn_submit - If there's one thing that should be obvious from the war in Ukraine it is that relying on private companies is a bad idea for certain types of weapons. Specifically, for low margin weapons that you need in volume.
The standout example of this from the Ukraine war is artillery shells.
We should maybe have a state owned corporation for making artillery shells in America, because there does not seem to be enough profit to incentivize private corporations.
by pianopatrick - >Andreessen- and Thiel-backed defense startup opens U.S. missile factory as it exits stealth
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-tech-covenant-anthem...
by bookofjoe - It's up to us, as tech workers to push back against this. I quit my job at Microsoft due to their complicity with Israeli war crimes and oppression (and certainly the US government was involved too). It's tough to leave a high paying job, but I feel good about it every single day. We don't have to be cogs in the MIC machine and we don't have to build systems that terrorize people.by slowin
- some interesting tidbits from the longer report:
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
by paimapi - Transforming? You guys do know where google got it's start right? SV has been DOD funded from the start.by hkchad
- Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?by chanakya
- I do think that for those of us who got into tech in the last couple of decades, the history can be rather obscured, but from the Fairchild semiconductor days, the military was a main customer, right?
I think there's a real question: would the world be a better place had Fairchild and peers e.g. refused to build ICs for missile systems (including the minuteman), for example? Would the same tech have been developed with purely civilian funding? Would missiles built with other tech have caused some awful disaster?
To the extent that the internet descended from ARPANET, and the internet is now both how we access a range of information and also hospitals get shut down by remote attackers, would the world have been better if researchers refused to build it b/c it was from military funding and motivations?
In retrospect it does seem like in the 1950s-70s the military was willing to fund some stuff that was actually not especially close to applications of killing people. I don't know that the kinds of things listed in this research are likely to lead to broad other applications in the future like microchips and networks did. But neither do I think it's straight forward to just condemn this stuff as purely evil and say we shouldn't do it.
by abeppu