I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC as they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries, specifically by analyzing the impact of mobile penetration in the poorer regions of Mexico.
González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world.
I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).
There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it.
>I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC
...
> they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries
So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations?
is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.
Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.
While there are quantitative Cultural Anthropologists (UChicago, UC Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have good researchers working on this), Roberto González is not one of those.
Furthermore, the truly interesting things to dig into w/ regards to the MIC are more Economics, Finance, or Commercial Law driven - namely digging into how fair or unfair RFCs are, analyzing changes in procurement regulations, actually testing whether anti-competitive measures in the Defense industry have a positive or negative impact on efficacy, differentiating between different types of budget spend (Cloud/Infra Security research vs foundational ML research vs simulations reasearch), etc.
These are questions that need a quantitative background in Business, Law, Politics, and Technology.
Also, not naming Nvidia is a MASSIVE red flag, as they are balls deep in the Defense R&D space (that was the only reason they were able to survive the dot com bust).
Finally, how STEM Innovation works in the Military/Defense space is entirely different from how it works in much less regulated spaces, due to the limited set of buyers and the massive impact that asymmetry can potentially have.
> you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone
I agree! There are a lot things to disagree about w/ regards to the MIC, but the questions and problems González surfaces aren't new nor unique to the Tech industry. This feels less like a research paper and more like a surface level op-ed.
He brings up very good points about the impact CNAS (and more specifically Eric Schmidt) and other peer think tanks (imo CSIS is not that hawkish) is having on the vision of innovation R&D on the Hill, but that is an entirely separate investigation (and something that absolutely needs to be done), and the larger paper seems to ignore that.
González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world.
I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).
There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it.
[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...