As the United States gears up for a new arms race and great power competition with Russia and China, the key to success will be be innovation.
But after decades of wars and military intervention that have yielded little progress, tech companies are reluctant to work with Washington or the Pentagon.
At Microsoft, employees are pushing for the company to pull out of a $480 million contract to provide augmented reality technology to the Pentagon over concerns of their products being used for “warfare and oppression.”
Those objections echo similar concerns raised by Google employees about working with the U.S. military. Indeed, Google decided last summer that it would not renew its contract to work with the Pentagon on artificial intelligence after employees protested the use of their technology for war.
Given the recent history of U.S. intervention, the objections are not to be lightly dismissed as unpatriotic. Indeed, there are good reasons to be wary of how the U.S. has applied new technology, including its provision of weapons for the ongoing war in Yemen and drone strikes targeting civilians.
The solution is to recognize the shortcomings of past U.S. policy and work with companies to address those concerns and do better.
In fact, the Pentagon has little choice but to embrace this policy. On military applications of new technology, such as augmented reality or artificial intelligence, the Pentagon’s own plans rely heavily on private sector partnerships — partnerships that are unlikely to work if companies fear widespread backlash from employees or customers.
More importantly, doing so is the heart of a free society. The policies and priorities that constitute the national interest should be contested — even when it comes to sharing technology with the military. That people and companies can choose to work for the government is what sets the U.S. apart from our rivals such as the People’s Republic of China, where the line between public interest and the private sector is increasingly blurry and marked by coercion. Indeed, it is those very policies that the Trump administration has repeatedly criticized in the trade war with Beijing.
The problem is not that the people, including companies, lack proper support for a government, but that the government, or at least the military, has been untrustworthy in the recent past. To fix that problem requires a different kind of innovation — a political pivot to better uphold the values the country claims to defend.
