It's Just a Rumour That Was Spread Around Town

The Hipster-Military-Industrial Complex

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It's Just a Rumour That Was Spread Around Town

Something strange is afoot on American campuses: working in national security is becoming cool again. The San Francisco Standard reports that students who were until recently repelled by the idea of working in the defence industry now see it as an attractive career option.

The reporter, Jasmine Sun, spoke to students at Stanford, a pipeline of talent into Silicon Valley. A political science student called Divya Ganesan told her that in 2021, her freshman year, companies like Palantir were “super looked down upon…They were seen as the evil guys.” Ganesan agreed with them at the time. After all, apart from working on defence contracts, Palantir was co-founded by billionaire Trump backer Peter Thiel.

But after taking a popular course called “Spies, Lies and Algorithms”, she became obsessed by defence tech, completed internships for national security agencies, and started a group called Stanford Women In National Security. “My most effective and moral friends are now working for Palantir,” she told Sun.

Students who once aspired to build social media apps are now dropping out to work for defence tech companies, or to start one. One of them, Andrew Fang, tells Sun, “The U.S. has had decades of dominance and peace. We could fight any country we wanted — nobody could touch us, right? But now China is multiplying itself, and it’s pretty obvious that we could lose. This is existential.” Ganesan says that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “the 9/11 of our generation.” After the war started, her national security group for women saw a huge uptick in student interest.

This is just one report, of course, and we shouldn’t place too much weight on it. But I would not be surprised if it does reflect a real change in the cultural status of national security. Hostility to the arms industry among educated young liberals in America was a persistent feature of late twentieth century society, at least since the Vietnam War. In this century, it was reinforced by failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. But as those events recede from memory, and modern warfare merges with the tech and gaming industry, while Russia and China loom large, students at elite schools may be more willing to be seen to be interested in it.

This is a recruitment ad for Anduril, a software-focused defence firm founded by another Trump-supporting tech billionaire. Palmer Luckey (who has a cameo in it - one that suggests he doesn’t take himself quite as seriously as Thiel does).

What I find interesting about this campaign is its blending of liberal and conservative cultural codes. Its messages are conservative: we expect you to come in every day, we don’t do “life-work balance”, we love America, this is a national mission. You can imagine a rather serious, red-faced MAGA version of this. Instead, the tone is designed to appeal to liberal college students: languid, ironic, in-crowd cool.

You can see this crossing of the wires at Palantir, too. “We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself,” says Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir. Karp is an unabashed patriot who believes America is a “beacon for good”. Under him, Palantir refuses to do business with Russia or China.

But, unlike his fellow co-founder, Karp is a liberal, a Democrat who backed Kamala Harris in 2024. (Palantir has been a strongly supportive partner of Ukraine in battle; how much this is complicated by Trump’s current stance is an interesting question). Karp describes the culture of Palantir as “equal parts Larry David, a philosophy class, tech and James Bond”.

If America is undergoing a change in its relationship to warfare, Europe is about to undergo an even larger one, as it jerks itself into the post-post-war era. Keir Starmer’s increase in the defence budget, at the expense of aid, was a symbolic move as well as a financial one. It signalled the beginning of a new political narrative.

National security is where Starmer’s foreign and economic policy goals converge. Investing in Britain’s tech capabilities, building data centres, even cutting the welfare budget, will now be justified by the threat of Putin and the need to support Ukraine, as well as by the imperatives of growth. (The UK government has just signed a deal with Anduril to make attack drones for Ukraine.)

Economic reorientations tend to be accompanied by cultural shifts, and it will be fascinating to see whether working for the military-industrial complex becomes aspirational again in Britain (and across Europe, noting that the last time it was aspirational in Germany things didn’t go so well). Working for MI5 or GCHQ never entirely lost its allure but weapons manufacturing has not been a sought-after destination for smart or idealistic graduates. If that changes, and if there is more of an industry for them to work in, we might even see a return of patriotism. In fact, that might be a prerequisite of success.

I’m talking mainly about the highly educated classes here, of course, since they are generally the ones who have a problem with working in the arms industry and with patriotism. Elvis Costello’s much-praised song Shipbuilding presented the act of working on warships for use in the Falklands War as a painful moral compromise. In reality, ship-workers and their families would probably have been proud to take part in a national effort to repel a fascist aggressor from British territory.

Costello’s song is celebrated because the conventional attitude of the middle class is that any and all warfare is immoral and shameful (a sentiment expressed superbly by the final series of Blackadder). Even the British armed services seemed to half-agree. They stopped selling themselves on the basis of thrilling experiences, prestige and valour, and focused instead on the mundane stuff of skills and inclusivity. They have consistently struggled to meet their recruitment targets.

Military strength in the twenty-first century still depends on a capacity for mass mobilisation. But it also depends, more than ever, on attracting and retaining elite technical talent (both in the armed services and in the companies that supply them). Talent like this is highly mobile and much sought after. Each country’s military-industrial complex will need offer it a powerful story - a purpose - if it is to win a greater share of it.

It’s questionable that a company like Anduril could thrive anywhere but the United States, and not just for economic reasons. One of America’s advantages is that its culture is fluid and adaptable and throws up these new compounds. And despite its divisions, it’s still one of the most patriotic countries in the world. But unless European countries develop a new, pro-military ethos among their most educated young citizens they risk getting stuck in failure mode.

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Coming very soon: a new podcast, in which Nabeel Qureshi discusses some of his Principles with me (if you haven’t read them, you should).

After the jump: notes on a fascinating new study in political psychology which looks at the link between anxiety and economic views. Plus: a rattle bag of juicy links, including an interesting podcast from a Democratic presidential hopeful, a study on what parenting does to your brain, and notes on what I’ve been reading and watching. Sign up for your paid subscription today and join the Ruffian-Industrial complex.