It’s remarkable how quickly things can change. While the tech industry was trying to keep defense tech at arm’s length just a few years ago, that sentiment has completely reversed.
“The war in Ukraine changed everything about how young people think about the Department of Defense’s work, and really the important mission of deterrence and making sure that we invest in the next technologies,” Katherine Boyle, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said onstage at the Fortune Most Powerful Women conference on Tuesday.
Boyle, who cofounded a16z’s American Dynamism fund and has backed defense tech company Anduril and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, said onstage that she would get “laughed out of rooms” when she asked about whether companies were selling their technology to the Department of Defense. Now, Boyle said, founders she speaks with are motivated by America’s national security and deterring war and armed conflict. “We have a company that literally has said: Xi Jinping is setting our product strategy,” Boyle noted.
But there is still a wide gap between commercially available technology and what is being used in national security, according to Nini Hamrick, cofounder and president of Vannevar Labs, an a16z portfolio company that makes software and hardware for U.S. intelligence missions, who also spoke on the panel.
Hamrick, who worked in intelligence for seven years, pointed out how her intelligence team in Afghanistan had a software engineer, and had critical technology. When she came back to the U.S., and was working on a mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Syria, she noticed a “big gap” in what was available to them.
“The companies that we were procuring software from were a very small set of traditional primes—none of whom are software companies,” Hamrick said, noting how she then was motivated to cofound Vannevar Labs.
Boyle emphasized how, because warfare is so technological now, more people and companies should be working with the Department of Defense in addressing this gap in innovation.
“We are seeing Russia [and] China build up their defense industrial base—invest in manufacturing, invest in capabilities. And they have no problem, as they are authoritarian dictatorships, making the best and brightest in those countries work on those problems that will be used for war against us,” Boyle said. She later added: “If we do not get our young people, who are accelerating and building new technologies at a rate we have never seen before, to work with the Department of Defense, we are going to lose the battle of the future.”
When asked about the ethical considerations surrounding this kind of investment or product development, Boyle said that these burgeoning technologies allow the U.S. military to operate with greater precision and do less harm to civilians.
“This is so much about deterrence,” she said later. “It’s making sure that the war of the future doesn’t happen, and if it does happen, that it happens as quickly as possible or in as precise a way as possible.”
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