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How the Pentagon built Silicon Valley
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Quincy Center for Responsible Statecraft
Posted: May 23rd, 2025
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/
Department of Defense spending is increasingly going to large tech companies including Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Oracle, and IBM. Open AI recently brought on former U.S. Army general and National Security Agency Director Paul M. Nakasone to its Board of Directors. The U.S. military discreetly, yet frequently, collaborated with prominent tech companies through thousands of subcontractors through much of the 2010s, obfuscating the extent of the two sectors’ partnership from tech employees and the public alike. The long-term, deep-rooted relationship between the institutions, spurred by massive Cold War defense and research spending and bound ever tighter by the sectors’ revolving door, ensures that advances in the commercial tech sector benefit the defense industry’s bottom line. Military, tech spending has manifested myriad landmark inventions. The internet, for example, began as an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now known as Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA) research project called ARPANET, the first network of computers. Decades later, graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and U.S. intelligence community-launched development program Massive Digital Data Systems to create what would become Google. Other prominent DARPA-funded inventions include transit satellites, a precursor to GPS, and the iPhone Siri app, which, instead of being picked up by the military, was ultimately adapted to consumer ends by Apple.
Note: Watch our latest video on the militarization of Big Tech. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI, warfare technology, and Big Tech.
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