There is a long history of cooperation between the US government and American defence contractors. Yet the increasingly intimate relationships between elites in Washington and Silicon Valley, and dense financial links between public and private entities in the tech sector, represent a qualitative shift in the way that nominally civilian firms are integrated into security procurement. The US government not only offers financial resources, but it has also expanded control over tech firms – and platform firms in particular – through state capitalist regulatory instruments that are justified by the threat posed by China (Gertz and Evers, 2020). For instance, the Trump administration’s national cyber strategy published in 2018 labelled China a ‘strategic competitor’, concluding that the ‘vitality of the American marketplace and American innovation’ in the tech sector is a matter of national security (The White House, 2018, 14). The strategy envisions a symbiotic relationship between the state – namely its defence-related organizations – and American tech firms. This was echoed by the DoD’s (U.S. Department of Defense, 2018, 9) Cyber Strategy, which, in short, is designed to:
defend forward, shape the day-to-day competition, and prepare for war by building a more lethal force, expanding alliances and partnerships, reforming the Department, and cultivating talent, while actively competing against and deterring our competitors. Taken together, these mutually reinforcing activities will enable the Department to compete, deter, and win in the cyberspace domain.
Platform firms have become an important pillar of national security strategy because they provide vital infrastructural and technological services which state agencies do not possess, while their R&D budgets dwarf available public resources and incumbent defence contractors. The Defense Innovation Unit reported that US platform giants outspend its top defence contractors (e.g., Lockheed Martin and Raytheon) on R&D by 11-to-1 (Brown, 2021, 13). Google’s 2024 R&D spending amounted to \$45 bn, around five times the budget of the National Science Foundation. Collaboration offers state agencies the opportunity to influence platforms’ R&D strategies, as in the National Cyber Strategy that will ‘use its purchasing power’ to shape innovation and influence firm behaviour in support of defence goals (The White House, 2018, 8). The ‘third offset’ – a military strategy aiming to leverage private sector innovations for defence purposes – became embedded in the 2018 National Defense Strategy (Gentile et al., 2021). Ultimately the military-industrial-security complex is in the process of reworking state-business relations in the platform sector, with the objective of aligning the business strategies of the world’s largest platform firms with Washington’s geostrategic imperatives.
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Reinventing Capitalism