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.”
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