By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2026-09-20 14:19:57 | Updated at 2026-09-20 15:44:30
1 hour ago
At 11:16 a.m. local time on Sept. 28, 2008, operating from the Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean, the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — a privately-funded company, founded by a 37-year-old South African emigree named Elon Musk and headquartered in Hawthorne, Calif. — launched a rocket of its own design, Falcon 1, that reached low orbit nine-and-a-half minutes later.
This marked one of the great dividing lines in human history. As Sharon Weinberger writes in Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War, Musk had “proved that space technology and exploration, a feat once limited to nation-states, can be accomplished with private money.” Within two decades, Axios was describing SpaceX as “the most valuable defense contractor in the world.”
A veteran national-security reporter for outlets such as Aerospace Daily and The Wall Street Journal, Weinberger, has enjoyed privileged access to both worlds whose convergence she chronicles in “Valley of Death”: tech and defense.
She was inside the Pentagon when al Qaeda struck on Sept. 11, 2001, and has visited all the gleaming tech campuses. The reporting in this book benefits from access to all the major players, sometimes top officials or executives speaking anonymously; previously unpublished documents from military and Silicon Valley sources; and firsthand accounts from important scenes and events.
In the modern literature devoted to the nexus between the defense establishment and private industry, a genre that might be traced to William Manchester’s “The Arms of Krupp” (1965), “Valley of Death” is the most up-to-date entry, a landmark of research and synthesis. Few other subjects are of greater moment: With each passing second, artificial intelligence refashions human existence.
Nor can we forget the awesome power of this nexus, which helped produce two other of human history’s great dividing lines: the destruction of whole cities by atomic weapons, which defeated fascism and brought an end to World War II, and the placement of men on the moon and their safe return to Earth.
What differentiates today’s nexus from past iterations is that never before has the arsenal of democracy been so extensively controlled by private entities.
The “valley of death” in the book’s title references the gap between completion of a weapon system’s development and its active use by warfighters. This lag is produced chiefly by the Pentagon’s historically cumbersome acquisition practices, which can prove slow and astronomically expensive. Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, went so far as to claim the valley of death “is the Pentagon.”
Then along came Musk and other swashbuckling tech bros — Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and more recent additions such as Horacio Rozanski of Booz Allen, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Ethan Thornton of Mach Industries. These new players offered a different, more efficient business model.
Rather than waiting for the Pentagon to identify a gap in capabilities, draw up system requirements, and contract yet again with one of the ever-delayed and over-budget Big Five firms — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics — the tech bros decided to develop and patent technology and weapons on their own dime. Only then did they sell or lease their innovations to Uncle Sam.
These self-financed inventions now serve at numerous points along the “kill chain,” from software that can integrate vast data sets to component parts and missiles.
Investors threw $50 billion at defense-tech startups in 2025. As Weinberger writes, investment in these companies flowed freely at a time when “the venture capital flowing into other types of startups, other than AI, had slowed markedly.”
The new tech firms quickly acquired market capitalization far in excess of those of their established rivals. “The valuations for many of the startups didn’t make sense,” Weinberger reports, detailing how the valuation of Tesla last year, $1.45 trillion, was nearly six times larger than that of Toyota, despite posting revenues less than a third of Toyota’s. Likewise, Palantir’s valuation last year, nearly $435 billion, was the largest of any defense firm, despite generating “significantly less revenue than the prime contractors.”
With admirable sensitivity and balance, Weinberger explores the moral and practical implications inherent in such a seismic shift in the creation, monetization, and management of war technology. Such considerations take on added urgency in an age when China is a near-peer adversary and some of these same tech titans depend upon elaborate production networks there. Will every defense-tech billionaire be able to press his own foreign policy?
This tension has already burst into open view. Four days after Russia invaded Ukraine, in February 2022, Musk granted requests from the government in Kyiv for access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Coordinating with the US and its regional allies, Musk covertly shipped the embattled Zelensky government thousands of Starlink terminals: a lifeline. But what the Lord giveth: When Kyiv later pleaded for Starlink coverage in a planned offensive to retake Crimea, first annexed by Russia in 2014, Musk deemed the operation unlikely to succeed, attended by a high probability of mass casualties, and accordingly said no.
A similar tension surfaced this year when Anthropic objected to its AI models being used by the second Trump administration in mass domestic surveillance or lethal strikes conducted without human oversight. As Weinberger reports: “The rapid progress of AI has forced the Pentagon to contend with firms that hold unprecedented leverage over technologies critical to the military.” War Secretary Pete Hegseth, perhaps aiming to restore the balance of power with Big Tech, responded with the hardball move of blacklisting Anthropic and contracting with OpenAI instead.
“Valley of Death” proceeds chronologically, starting with the Navy’s acquisition, for $1 in February 1931, of 1,000 acres in the heart of what became Silicon Valley. At each flashpoint — the Cold War, Sept. 11, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, the Iran war — Weinberger shows how technology evolved and the ties between Big Tech and the Pentagon deepened, though not always to the advancement of US national security.
A few subjects are notable for their absence from Weinberger’s otherwise comprehensive survey. One was President Nixon’s creation, in 1970, of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy. This consolidated federal policy in the burgeoning field under unified executive control. OTP’s signal achievement, the “Open Skies” policy of 1972 — developed by a young trio of young geniuses that included general counsel Antonin Scalia — ended government monopoly over the launch of domestic space satellites and opened the process to private firms.
Likewise missing is the surge in Iraq, in which, empirical studies have since shown, US and aligned forces tamed a formidable insurgency in part through the expanded use of cellphone data for intelligence and targeting.
Lastly, mentioned only in passing here is cyberwarfare, a subject treated at length in previous works such as “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power” (2012) by David Sanger and John Arquilla’s “Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare” (2021). Unmentioned entirely by Weinberger is Stuxnet, the world’s first digital weapon: a malware the Obama administration introduced in 2010, through corrupted USB drives, to sabotage centrifuge operations critical to Iran’s enrichment of uranium and broader pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability.
A barrage of contracts and dollar-figures sometimes leaves “Valley of Death” a bit of a quagmire. The book is liveliest when Weinberger recounts her own interactions with the military brass and the Big Tech bros. Her account of a drone-technology exhibition in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, sponsored by Ondas Holdings last years, carries echoes of Tom Wolfe.
“Above us, on an upper deck of the winery and wearing a black mask over his face to shield his identity, was Yeti, the nom de guerre of one of the Ukrainian company’s drone pilots, who was helping run the demonstration,” she writes. “Having pilots fresh from the battlefield in Ukraine demonstrate drones over a California winery’s terraces, with the Silicon Valley landscape in the background, made for a surreal scene … The venue, which is now home to concerts and weddings, and features wide-open spaces, ended up being a good place to fly drones, particularly drones that were dropping water bottles instead of bombs.”
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of “Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.”
