On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered perhaps the most prescient farewell address in American history.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Eisenhower was a five-star general. Supreme Allied Commander.
The man who led the liberation of Europe.
He understood military power better than anyone alive.
His concern was not with the military.
Nor with industry.
His concern was what happens when government, industry, and the military, become so intertwined that they begin reinforcing one another beyond meaningful public oversight.
Sixty-five years later, his warning deserves an update.
The military-industrial complex hasn’t disappeared.
It has evolved.
Today it includes something Eisenhower could never have imagined:
Artificial intelligence. Space technology. Cloud computing. Autonomous weapons. Data analytics. Venture capital.
Call it… The Technology-National Security Complex.
This may be the defining power shift of the twenty-first century.
If you want to understand Washington today, don’t begin on Capitol Hill.
Begin in Silicon Valley.
The federal government no longer builds many of its most important technologies.
It buys them.
Increasingly, it depends upon them.
A relatively small group of companies now sit at the intersection of government, intelligence, defense and artificial intelligence.
The names are becoming familiar.
Palantir. Anduril. SpaceX. Scale AI. OpenAI.
None of these companies existed when the Berlin Wall fell.
Today, all of them influence how governments gather information, analyze threats, conduct military operations or develop artificial intelligence.
Some have become critical infrastructure.
The most interesting story is not any single company. It is the network.
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