Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-woos-silicon-valley-to-join-ranks-of-arms-makers-38b1d4c0

by jimmy2020 • 3 years ago

50 55 3 years ago

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.

thebooktocome• 3 years ago

Yeah, I don’t get it. In the process of becoming a substitute for one of the big primes, any given Silicon Valley corp is going to become just like a Raytheon or NGC. The process of govt contracting at scale breeds inefficiency and rent-seeking.

AlbertCory• 3 years ago

.. and indeed, that's the real reason I never went to a defense company: it's the stifling culture inside it.

est31• 3 years ago

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.

There has been such a healthy ecosystem of smaller companies in the defense industry, but the pentagon has forced the companies to consolidate. See: "last supper" of 1993 for example, but even before that there have been decades of mergers.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/merger-mania-should-the-p...

This report has also some nice graphs showing that this has been a very long trend, see Table 1 and figures 2 and 3:

https://media.defense.gov/2022/Feb/15/2002939087/-1/-1/1/STA...

tobylane2• 3 years ago

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

kevin_thibedeau2• 3 years ago

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

mbrudd• 3 years ago

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...).

dredmorbius2• 3 years ago

Steve Blank's "Secret History of Silicon Valley" (2008/9) is an HN perennial:

<https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>

Algolia search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>

lobstrosity420• 3 years ago

Is it crazy to imagine this is the “tit” for the “tat” of bailing out SVB?

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

crazy to imagine this is the “tit” for the “tat” of bailing out SVB

Yes. The Pentagon didn’t bail out depositors. And they aren’t looking for incompetent bankers. If anything, letting SVB collapse and opening e.g. USAA business accounts for contractors would have been the moustache-twirling move.

Reimersholme• 3 years ago

Microsoft having a lot of partnerships with the military industry, and now also getting their hands on all of OpenAIs technology. In parallel, OpenAI stops sharing information about their models, making it harder for other countries to copy. Add to that the chip ban. Hm...?

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.md/UBSG1

mwattsun• 3 years ago

The Navy is looking for "builders" for it's next generation of submarines

U.S. NAVY | UNITED STATES MARINES | COMMERCIAL | BUILDSUBMARINES.COM | NAVY'S 'NEXT-GEN' SUBMARINES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RVDcwOYKi4

abudabi123• 3 years ago

The big picture will be at work in the U.S. Space Force.

closeparen2• 3 years ago

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?

kube-system• 3 years ago

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

philwelch2• 3 years ago

To the types of people who use terms like “lily white” in a derogatory sense, the non-white US citizens who work in the defense sector don’t really count as non-white. I think the term is “multiracial whiteness”.

iancmceachern• 3 years ago

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.

Mizoguchi• 3 years ago

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.

differingopinio2• 3 years ago

Why would you say this in time when people are getting laid off left and right? We need to provide jobs for everyone who is already here. The F visa is a non-immigration visa to begin with.

Additionally, we need to deal with people who come to our country and then only exclusively hire people from their country of origin. I can point to the page of multiple Chinese professors in the US who were trained by Americans in American universities, then start their own labs in American universities and only hire Chinese graduate students (and I’m not talking about labs of 2 students, I’m talking about massive labs of 15 - 20 students). Our country is getting taken advantage of and the last thing we need to do is give away more visas.

stametseater3• 3 years ago

This is a problem in US tech companies too. I've seen many instances of teams being run as ethnic enclaves. In a company that is 50% American nationals, what are the chances that a set of three or four teams under one man would have a total of 30 out of 30 Chinese nationals by pure happenstance?

If the other half of the company were Chinese nationals (which certainly isn't the case) a team of 30 by pure happenstance would be 0.5^30 = 9.3 * 10^-10. Real fucking unlikely, yet I've seen that scenario happen more than once. Nobody says anything about it of course, everybody knows how HR would respond.

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

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.

option• 3 years ago

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

We should definitely do so with AI now.

killjoywashere• 3 years ago

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.

throwaway6734• 3 years ago

China seems to be equalling if not outpacing the United States on speed of technological innovation as well as on international trade arrangements.

What is this based on?

imwithstoopid5• 3 years ago

they already have a larger Navy and will soon pass us in aircraft

while we were blowing up the Middle East, they were building shipyards

ekam• 3 years ago

China pays personnel way less and a huge chunk of that budget is personnel costs

stametseater3• 3 years ago

In addition to lower personnel costs, their manufacturing industry is generally more efficient. The result is they get a lot more "bang for their buck" and you can't compare military spending just by looking at capital expenditure and currency conversion rates.

They also have different goals. America spends to maintain global hegemony, which means a huge fleet of aircraft carriers meant to operate around the world. China isn't (yet) spending in that way, they're a lot more focused on regional objectives.

kilroy1233• 3 years ago

It's far more complicated than that.

https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/how-does-chinas-defense-spendin...

imwithstoopid5• 3 years ago

The gaps in US/China arms will never be closed by startups...no startup is going to start churning out Columbia-class subs or F35s.

We screwed up and lost decades on crap like the Zumwalt class, the LCS and numerous other boondoggles that easily cost us a decade and $100 bln++. The LCS really deserves special mention for a unique level of stupidity - we are scrapping them pretty much as they come off the line. Its crazy - we don't want these ships, have committed to scrapping them...and we're still ordering them! Only in America.

Let's not forget how much we built and burned in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many subs and carriers could have been built with the resources squandered? We sure did buy a lot of Humvees that never came back.

Even without those epic failures, it isn't clear we could beat the Chinese in manufacturing. Throwing bodies at a problem is definitely in their wheelhouse.

While we were bombing, they were building. Now we get to deal with it.

philwelch2• 3 years ago

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.

Historically, there has been no shortage of entrepreneurs chasing defense dollars. Lots of iconic weapons, from the Thompson submachine gun to the Spitfire to the Colt revolver, were developed speculatively and later sold to militaries that hadn’t initially requested them.

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.

Lots of military procurement expenditures have resulted in products with immediate civilian applications: rockets, radios, first aid equipment, antibiotics, encryption, highways, helicopters, jet engines, radar, sonar, Kevlar, canned food, computers.

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

The U.S. DoD needs to have more in-house capacity to produce weapons, equipment, and ammunition - as it did, very successfully, from ~1780 to ~1980. Outsourcing to a few far-too-consolidated and far-too-greedy defense contractors (and their well-paid-off friends in Congress) is just plain idiotic.

kilroy1233• 3 years ago

I just watched this the other day, and it was very eye-opening. They came to the same conclusion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEe_dJZtF1E

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

Wow - that's WSJ-branded content. Not the crowd that you'd expect to speak ill of corporate mergers and pricing power.

imwithstoopid5• 3 years ago

US DoD already makes its own ammo

lnsru• 3 years ago

I am really interested in smart munitions be it drone shaped or rather classical rounds for howitzers. Super cool topic combining miniaturized electronics, optics and control systems. But at the end… limited buyers, crazy difficult testing and super low success chance. Not really good starting conditions for startup for average engineer.

b_mc22• 3 years ago

There's a few resources out there for smaller companies to try to get into defense, mainly networks and incubators. [1]

But you'll also see SBIR/STTR funding topics (program run by the Small Business Administration) [2]

You can also try checking out some of the bigger Defense contractors, some have incubator programs and are looking to expand their small business ecosystem for subcontracts, part of that includes funding. (Disclaimer, I work here) [3]

[1] https://defensewerx.org/

[2] https://www.sbir.gov/node/2214225

[3] https://www.boozallen.com/expertise/innovation/ventures.html

imwithstoopid5• 3 years ago

So far, the "defense 2.0" companies seem to be following the path of Anduril - very high grade drones and cams. I'm not trashing them - there is a huge market for military grade observation tech.

I'm just wondering when one of these startups commits to making things that kill people.

Even then, a company isn't just limited to selling to the military...way waaaay more Sig P320s have been sold to civilians than will ever be sold to the army, and I expect the Spear to likewise be much larger for civilian sales than government sales (yes, a civilian Spear is coming).

dredmorbius2• 3 years ago

I thought I saw a very similar headline within the past month or so, also from WSJ if memory serves, though it could have been another publication, perhaps WaPo.

HN archive search-fu fails me.

Closest I'm finding is 5 months old, "State Department Urges Silicon Valley to Aid National Security Effort": <https://archive.vn/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fst...>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33215418>

vegetablepotpie• 3 years ago

Acquisition Talk blog spends a lot of attention towards fixing the Planning, Programming, Budgeting, Execution process in defense. There are many barriers for startups, the big one is getting the right amount of funding at the right time. It looks like creating the office of strategic capital is an attempt to solve this problem. Expect the defense majors, Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon to lobby against this hard.

https://acquisitiontalk.com/2022/08/does-dod-not-actually-wa...

_huayra_• 3 years ago

Does anyone work (or worked in the past) for a defense contracting company? I'm curious what the environment is like (e.g. is it a pressure cooker using ancient coding standards where everything requires a bunch of people with shiny metal on their work uniform to approve?).

I worked for a startup where DARPA had given a fairly generous grant when I started my career (they made a medical training device that the military was interested in). I was jr, so I wasn't privy to the financial details of things, but overall it was very "waterfall-y" and a lot of form filling and box checking. WLB was overall pretty fair, but the key thing is that processes really hamstrung everyone (think MISRA style of coding standards) and morale was rather low. Pay wasn't great either so I left.

I just wonder now that I am more senior and have more financial responsibilities, is defense a financially safe space in case more tech keeps RIFing, even if overall comp levels are low.

b_mc22• 3 years ago

I work as a data engineer for a Defense company. It's not always stable but depends on the contract you can get on, some have a pretty broad scope and arent going anywhere, others are small projects with less stable funding.

Most of what I work with is Databricks, Python, Pyspark, etc. So most coding is done in notebooks. I haven't felt that there was a lot of restrictions coding wise, but getting access to different databases, clusters, and especially on boarding can be a pain.

Environment wise its been pretty good, you find even the clients are often contractors themselves, but if you dislike them you can always roll off and onto another project, it seems everyone needs more devs

blindriver• 3 years ago

Now would be the best time to push it, when Silicon Valley employers have a significant advantage over workers, and the amount of people willing to work on anything is the highest its been since the dot-com crash.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

None of the currently existing big defense contractors have offices in silicon valley. I don't know what the reason is, but it can't be simple happenstance.

zlatinb• 3 years ago

As a self-styled ultra-libertarian, I felt a sudden visceral disgust when I saw the title of this article. After all, SV is supposed to be all about peace, love, woke-ism and "making the world a better place".

Also, since I am always right and anybody who disagrees with me is wrong, I didn't want to bother reading the text. Luckily, there was an audio version by a not-so-hostile narrator.

TL;DR: China has already wooed their equivalent of SV.

Pentagon woos Silicon Valley to join ranks of arms makers

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