Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#11

Post by tobylane »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #2

Weird title. Silicon Valley was literally founded by military spending and as far as I know it never really stopped. Apparently the crux of the article is that the military wants more private capital to flow in the defense industry and an healthier ecosystems because the few large companies which have become keys to the military complex have become really inefficient. It’s interesting but a different point entirely.

Does the amount of foreign founders and funders make a difference here? I imagine it’s grown.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#12

Post by closeparen »

Silicon Valley tends to have degrees of employee autonomy, encouragement to be curious and ask questions / make suggestions outside your "lane," flexible and high quality workstations and tools, most code and documentation open to most employees, tons of foreigners. From what I understand, defense is lily white, extremely locked down and compartmentalized, you spend months wrestling with a bureaucracy to for access to basic tools and libraries, and not only do you not get to question the big picture, you might not even be read in on what it is. Given these differences, could anyone (other than maybe Apple) actually shift into defense contracting without utterly remaking their employee pool, tooling, and culture? In what sense is it even "Silicon Valley" anymore if you throw away those things?

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#13

Post by kube-system »

closeparen wrote: post #12

Silicon Valley tends to have degrees of employee autonomy, encouragement to be curious and ask questions / make suggestions outside your "lane," flexible and high quality workstations and tools, most code and documentation open to most employees, tons of foreigners. From what I understand, defense is lily white, extremely locked down and compartmentalized, you spend months wrestling with a bureaucracy to for access t…

There are a ton of nonwhite people in the defense sector. Just as there are a ton of non-white US citizens.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#14

Post by Mizoguchi »

First they need to fix the visa lottery bs. Many of the brightest engineers educated at our top schools need to leave the US because they can't get a status that allows them to work, stay, reunite with their families and eventually become legal residents and citizens.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#15

Post by photochemsyn »

The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements.

Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third World petrodollar recycling options, who knows) - seems to avoid discussing how the current gigantic military government budget is being spent.

Fundamentally, military expenditures don't have much in the way of additional positive economic effects. Say you're producing construction cranes, for example - each crane facilitates further economic activity, in building projects. If you're producing tanks - well, unless your economic model is to raid other countries for raw resources, it's not going to have that same effect. There's also little likelihood for a large consumer market for your product.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#16

Post by iancmceachern »

closeparen wrote: post #12

Silicon Valley tends to have degrees of employee autonomy, encouragement to be curious and ask questions / make suggestions outside your "lane," flexible and high quality workstations and tools, most code and documentation open to most employees, tons of foreigners. From what I understand, defense is lily white, extremely locked down and compartmentalized, you spend months wrestling with a bureaucracy to for access t…

I know tons of people who do this regularly. Anyone who designs complex electromechanical stuff does. Robotics, etc. The wall between medical, semiconductor/automation and aerospace hardware design is non-existant, people can walk back and forth.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#17

Post by option »

photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…

Military spending on chip tech is a large part of how SV started.

We should definitely do so with AI now.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#18

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

tobylane wrote: post #11
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #2

Weird title. Silicon Valley was literally founded by military spending and as far as I know it never really stopped. Apparently the crux of the article is that the military wants more private capital to flow in the defense industry and an healthier ecosystems because the few large companies which have become keys to the military complex have become really inefficient. It’s interesting but a different point entirely.

Does the amount of foreign founders and funders make a difference here? I imagine it’s grown.

They let a South African keep his security clearance after breaking federal law so no big deal if there isn't Chinese entanglement.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#19

Post by killjoywashere »

photochemsyn wrote: post #15

The latest estimates of the military budgets of the USA and China are 768 billion and 270 billion, respectively - yet China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements. Calling on private capital to make risky investments in new technologies that only have one likely customer - the US government (well, maybe some Third Wo…

This is very short-sighted. Gemini astronauts rode Titan 2 rockets to orbit (just an ICBM with a different payload). The space shuttle was designed mainly to insert Keyhole satellites. The internet was developed in pursuit of developing a robust means to route message traffic in the event of nuclear attack. DARPA's IPTO influenced the development of time-sharing. JPEO CBRND is catching a bunch of vaccine developers who are about to fail, sorting the wheat from chaff, and having them develop vaccines for orphan diseases and use cases that US pharma doesn't see as useful. JPEO CBRND funded the development of the Biofire PCR arrays that were widely deployed early in the pandemic as a load-and-go testing solution for minimally equiped labs.

The flush-head rivets were developed by Howard Hughes, ostensibly for his racing H-1, but his aircraft company was keen to sell to the military (air war was highly anticipated during the interwar years, so speed and endurance were first order motivators).

I mean, the list goes on and on. It's true, we invest in war machines, but as a percent of GDP, it's been going down for quite a while and now rivals the EU at something in the vicinity of 2% (we're over, they're under): https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Photos/igphoto/2002099941...

Turns out out, not dying is a hell of a necessity that mother'd a lot of invention. And at a national scale, sovereignty is the equivalent. And the enemy gets a vote. See Putin.

Working in this space on projects ranging from cancer to comms, I'm hear to tell you, biologists have a much harder job than weaponeers, but it's human nature, not US defense policy that's an issue.

Re: Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

#20

Post by mbrudd »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #2

Weird title. Silicon Valley was literally founded by military spending and as far as I know it never really stopped. Apparently the crux of the article is that the military wants more private capital to flow in the defense industry and an healthier ecosystems because the few large companies which have become keys to the military complex have become really inefficient. It’s interesting but a different point entirely.

> Weird title. Silicon Valley was literally founded by military spending and as far as I know it never really stopped.

Came here to say this! Malcolm Harris wrote a book about this history (https://bookshop.org/p/books/palo-alto-a-history-of-californ...), recently discussed on an interesting episode of Tech Won't Save Us (https://techwontsave.us/episode/155_the_untold_history_of_si...).

Post reply on HN