Midjourney prompt: "the shire and a fighter jet, watercolor"

Defense Tech Shouldn’t Be Sexy

Weapons are a necessary evil, not a hype-y consumer product

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Ian Watts almost 2 years ago

Definitely guilty of this myself, looking at now and the past. Military engineering can be so fascinating and excellent (existential threats will do that) that it's hard not to get excited and damn near giddy when I look at a beautiful weapon. Probably a deflection mechanism in part too, like comedy; don't know how to deal with the true nature of the stakes (and so far removed) that I default to some mix of "OMG beautiful engineering" analytical and "big explosion boom fast jet zoom" caveman mind that really tickles my fancy. I have decent appreciation and respect for war (obviously nowhere near somebody who's directly or closely felt the impact), yet I have trouble squaring my excitement for weapons with hatred of destruction.

One aspect left out from the article which I believe to be especially true now (though has also been thought and proved wrong countless times in the past) is that this new breed of technologically advanced weapons remove people and increase accuracy, and therefore may be saving lives relatively (though yes, they thought dynamite, machine guns, and bombers would save lives too). Alas maybe drones would just mean we can create more weapons than ever before and destruction will only increase, but whereas those previous examples only increased scale with little change to decision-making, accuracy, or human risk, these increase scale while improving all of those significantly. The dream of the Bomber Mafia may finally be coming to fruition. Further, companies like Anduril are challenging the entire military-industrial complex system, which costs hundreds of billions a year in inefficiencies.

I think most people even drawn to these companies don't have it lost on them what their work truly means. I imagine they've thought about it extensively and had existential crises on the matter. Through the lens of "transforming war from a battle of humans to robots and disrupting one of the most corrupt, damaging institutions in America" I believe excitement and damn near glee is warranted.