This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, the Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., was promptly fired as, on the very first day of the second age of Trump, was the first woman to lead the Coast Guard Admiral Linda Fagan, as only days later was Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to head the Navy. So, give Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth full credit. They swore they would cut back on government and they've begun doing so remarkably quickly. They've clearly decided to run a pared-down military focused on versity, quity, and exclusion, or VQE. But count on one thing: despite all President Trump's and RME (Richest Man on Earth) Musk's talk about cutting back everywhere, including the Pentagon, in a world where, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung suggests today, Musk's psychic doubles running Silicon Valley military tech firms are preparing for a new (and wildly expensive, as well as wildly dangerous) world of artificial intelligence weaponry, cutbacks there will be anything but the name of the game.
It's already clear enough that, while Musk has been eager to cut the U.S. Agency for International Development and so strip funding meant to deal with Polio, H.I.V., Malaria, and nutrition globally, weaponry -- especially high-tech weaponry -- is another matter entirely. In fact, amid all the cuts now underway, Republicans in Congress seem eager to add at least another $100 billion to the Pentagon budget in the years to come, bringing it close to the trillion-dollar mark. I mean, why in the world would you ever want to cut the biggest source of contract spending in the federal budget when you can easily begin slashing the government agencies that already spend the least?
So, peace? Cut it dead! Diversity? Clip it off! Help for veterans? How about getting rid of 80,000 or more employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs? Medical research? Who needs it? Education? Shut it down! But I don't really have to go on, do I? You get the point and so, with all of this (and so much more) in mind, let Hartung take you into a world in which the funding for what could prove to be the most dangerous weapons on Earth is essentially guaranteed to, all too literally, head for the heavens. My suggestion is: Duck (and don't quack or they might notice you)! Tom
The New Age Militarists
And Their Threat to Our Common Future
Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.
As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley's focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping, and social media platforms, which he dismisses as "the narrow and the trivial." His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence. He argues, in fact, that Americans face "a moment of reckoning" in which we must decide "what is this country, and for what do we stand?" And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands -- in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry, and designed to preserve America's "fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries."
Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is not just a but the genuine path to national salvation, and he advocates a revival of the concept of "the West" as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn't due to "the superiority of its ideas or values or religion" but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence."
Count on one thing: Karp's approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America's current great power rival.
Militarism as a Unifying Force
Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.
Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II's Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:
"The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield -- the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century."
And here's a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies "retain exclusive control" of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop? After all, his call for an American AI buildup echoes the views expressed by opponents of the international control of nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II -- the futile belief that the United States could maintain a permanent advantage that would cement its role as the world's dominant military power. Nearly 80 years later, we continue to live with an enormously costly nuclear arms race -- nine countries now possess such weaponry -- in which a devastating war has been avoided as much thanks to luck as design. Meanwhile, past predictions of permanent American nuclear superiority have proven to be wishful thinking. Similarly, there's no reason to assume that predictions of permanent superiority in AI-driven weaponry will prove any more accurate or that our world will be any safer.
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