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This month in the NYR Online, Susannah Glickman writes about the “new Silicon Valley defense-tech and finance group [that] has become central to Trump’s second term.” Executives from software companies like Palantir and Anduril, finding a friendly White House staffed in part with former executives from software companies like Palantir and Anduril, are pushing for a “software-driven reindustrialization” of the defense industry at the same time as Trump relentlessly cuts federal spending on scientific research. “We are now in a situation,” Glickman notes,

where an array of right-wing firms and think tanks perversely extol the virtues of industrial policy and American renewal even as they support politicians and financial institutions that are currently dismantling the infrastructure to actually do industrial policy.

How did we get here? The answer lies, in part, in the fact that defense-related industries like the semiconductor sector have themselves long obscured their real relationship to industrial policy.

Below, alongside Glickman’s essay, are five articles from our archives about the travails of American industrial policy.

Susannah Glickman
The War Over Defense Tech

Silicon Valley firms like Palantir and Anduril are threatening the foundations of US industrial policy even as they call for reenergizing it. What made their current bid for power possible?

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Tamsin Shaw
The New Military–Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

“In bringing together the personality research and the behavioral technologies that social psychologists had for decades been refining with the new tool of big data (via the astonishing resources provided by social media), [psychological projects cultivated under the banner of the war on terror have] created an important template for what is now the cutting-edge work of America’s intelligence community.”

—March 21, 2018

Jeff Madrick
Innovation: The Government Was Crucial After All

“For all the acclaim now given to venture capital…private firms often invest after innovations have already come a long way under government’s much more daring basic research and patient investment of capital.”

—April 24, 2014

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Robert B. Reich
Japan in the Chips

“By 1967, the US government was the largest single purchaser of semiconductors, accounting for almost one-third of the market—thereby giving new chip makers the volume they needed to bring costs down. Defense Department and NASA research programs also led to innovations, as the arms race and the moon race both demanded smaller, faster, and more reliable memory units. The US semiconductor industry rapidly gained ground.”

—November 19, 1981

James Fallows
The Great Defense Deception

“The most important theme of President Reagan’s proposals for defense has little to do with military strategies or concepts, but rather with sheer quantities: the budget stands for more. The administration’s program is the clearest possible expression of a faith that spending more money for defense, without being particular about where or how, will make the nation more secure.”

—May 28, 1981

I. F. Stone
Nixon and the Arms Race: The Bomber Boondoggle

“McNamara’s error on the TFX, which Nixon is now taking over,…demonstrates the growing extent to which procurement is determined by military-bureaucratic and industrial considerations. The prime determinants were to save the largest company in the military-industrial complex financially and to appease the bomber generals, who simply will not admit that their expensive toys have grown obsolete.”

—January 2, 1969

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