{"id":57990,"date":"2026-03-09T06:31:02","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=57990"},"modified":"2026-03-09T06:31:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T14:31:02","slug":"the-brave-new-war-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/09\/the-brave-new-war-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Brave New War Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Yes, he used the American war machine to seize Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, with a naval armada off that country\u2019s coast and special operations forces flown into its capital to capture its leader.\u00a0 And once Maduro was in a prison in Brooklyn, New York, he turned his attention passingly to Greenland<\/a> and then began placing American forces, including not one but two aircraft carrier task forces (one of which<\/a>, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford<\/em>, had played a key role in the Venezuelan operation), in position around Iran, along with all sorts of other<\/a> ships and planes.\u00a0 And the next thing the world knew \u2014 hard to believe as it might have been \u2014 with only a single ally, Israel, he was at war with Iran<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What fun! Right? Donald Trump gets to make war or threaten war or fake war on anyone he pleases on this planet of ours. I mean, why else would you want to be president of the United States? Oh, except that it gives you the right to carry on for nearly two hours on national television with half your audience rising to \u201cclap like seals<\/a>\u201d after more or less every sentence.<\/p>\n

Two aircraft carrier task forces going anywhere in the world that you want, endless applause, being capable of launching wars wherever you please, and being able to speak deep into the night on just about any major channel around, while saying more or less anything that crosses your mind \u2014 what more could you ask for?\u00a0 What a wonderful world, don\u2019t you think (even if foreign leaders, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently<\/a>, \u201chave completely lost faith in America\u201d)? Hey, maybe the president could decide to send those aircraft carriers to the waters off Vietnam next, just for an old-times-sake (and bone-spur<\/a>) encore to his life.<\/p>\n

And Donald Trump is lucky indeed, because he has at his command what TomDispatch<\/em> regular<\/a> William Hartung and new TomDispatch<\/em> writer Janet Abou-Elias term a \u201cbrave new war machine\u201d that is indeed something of a techno-wonder. Or at least given all the techno-figures now increasingly involved in American war production and war-making, a techno-profiteer that may leave Americans and the rest of the world in a truly dangerous situation. ~\u00a0Tom\u00a0Engelhardt<\/em><\/p>\n

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How a Clique of Unhinged Techno-Optimists Is Putting Humanity at Risk<\/strong><\/h2>\n

By Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,\u201d said<\/a> Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley\u2019s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.<\/p>\n

Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase <\/a>the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped ICE accelerate<\/a> deportations, while also helping locate and identify<\/a> demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company\u2019s products, he openly revels in it.<\/p>\n

This February, he told <\/a>a CNBC interviewer that, \u201cif you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.\u201d (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from \u201cunreasonable searches and seizures.\u201d) Yet Karp\u2019s speculation hasn\u2019t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion<\/a> contract with ICE\u2019s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).<\/p>\n

In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held<\/a> a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that \u201cour work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview<\/a> with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times<\/em>, he summed up his philosophy this way: \u201cI actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers \u2014 I\u2019m trying to be nice here \u2014 out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don\u2019t wake up scared, they don\u2019t go to bed scared, they don\u2019t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir\u2019s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren\u2019t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.<\/p>\n

There should be no question that Hamas\u2019s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than<\/a> 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges<\/a>, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.<\/p>\n

So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is not your father\u2019s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC \u2014 executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman \u2014 are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement <\/a>about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among U.S. allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.<\/p>\n

Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but \u2014 as Karp suggests \u2014 a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a \u201crules-based international order.\u201d Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes\u2019s \u201cwar of all against all<\/a>.\u201d And those running it want us to believe that the only way to \u201cwin\u201d a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.<\/p>\n

Alex Karp has co-authored a book<\/a>, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, <\/em>in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world\u2019s unrivaled political and military power.<\/p>\n

Karp\u2019s answer to what\u2019s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don\u2019t remember, produced<\/a> the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It\u2019s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America\u2019s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.<\/p>\n

Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it\u2019s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering <\/a>trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century \u2014 wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place \u2014 they still mouth platitudes about pursuing \u201cpeace through strength\u201d and using U.S. military power to undergird a \u201crules-based international order.\u201d Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.<\/p>\n

Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war-making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril \u2014 a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Palantir founder Peter Thiel \u2014 made headlines recently when he told<\/a> an interviewer from CNBC that the U.S. could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the \u201cwrong things.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey\u2019s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled \u201cRebooting the Arsenal of Democracy<\/a>,\u201d a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.<\/p>\n

Luckey\u2019s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates \u2014 led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) \u2014 that now receive one out of every three contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests<\/a>, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. \u201cWhy can\u2019t the existing defense companies simply do better?\u201d it asks. \u201c\u2026These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed\u2026These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.\u201d<\/p>\n

The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.<\/p>\n

But spending less on weapons \u2014 as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities \u2014 can\u2019t be the only goal of defense policy.\u00a0 The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.<\/p>\n

Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the U.S. arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector\u2019s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging \u2013 safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?<\/p>\n

When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was \u201ctrust but verify<\/a>.\u201d In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be \u201cmistrust and verify.\u201d We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.<\/p>\n

The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn\u2019t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption \u2014 from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed<\/a> by \u2014 yes! \u2014 Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump\u2019s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money<\/a> came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance\u2019s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.<\/p>\n

Then came Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools<\/a> like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded<\/a> essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn\u2019t at that agency. Instead, Musk\u2019s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.<\/p>\n

There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others<\/a> in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.<\/p>\n

Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what\u2019s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.<\/p>\n

Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem with the new techno-militarists isn\u2019t that they\u2019re mistaken about technology\u2019s power, but that they\u2019re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It isrecklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.<\/p>\n

What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we\u2019ve heard this story before \u2014 from Cold War nuclear strategists<\/a>, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts<\/a>, and the architects of the \u201cshock and awe<\/a>\u201d doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this<\/em> technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.<\/p>\n

What makes today\u2019s moment especially dangerous<\/a> is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with \u2014 and die from \u2014 the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.<\/p>\n

The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It\u2019s produced by diplomacy, restraint, adhering to international law and economic justice, and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.<\/p>\n

Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don\u2019t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are<\/em> almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine\u2019s version of Aldous Huxley\u2019s Brave New World<\/em><\/a> should frighten us all.<\/p>\n

If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can\u2019t afford to take.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2025 William D. Hartung and Janet Abou-Elias<\/p>\n

Janet Abou-Elias is a researcher at the Democratizing Foreign Policy Project at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a founder of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency<\/a>. Her writing has appeared in The Hill<\/em>, In These Times<\/em>, Responsible Statecraft<\/em>, The National Interest<\/em>, Fair Observer<\/em>, and other outlets.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n