U.S. Tech-Defense Leaders Want to Upend the Establishment

The Pentagon might announce a slowdown and early end to F-35 procurement and a greater emphasis on CCA, while requiring bidders to invest in development—as General Atomics did in the first decade of the century—in return for higher margins. In that case, venture-capital-backed firms will be well positioned to dislodge the major primes.

The Tech Bros will not be dictators. Republican states dependent on Defense don’t want to lose those well-paid jobs, or trade them for automated gigafactories. Most of DOGE’s targeted ‘government bureaucrats’ work for contractors or as civilians on military bases and pay taxes all over the country.

The military itself has been successful at negating or outlasting civilian revolutionaries. (‘Musk is Robert McNamara 2.0.’ Discuss.) Whatever one’s view of the F-35, it can’t be replaced by a quadcopter. The Western Pacific is emphatically not Ukraine and the need for reach—range and speed—sets a limit to small and cheap.

Above all, the armed services need a continuing supply of hardware and can argue against disruption in the face of an imminent threat. They can make a case that civilians have been proclaiming the death of the manned aircraft, the tank and the aircraft carrier for 70 years.

But what if the military sees the White House as a temporary ally, to make politically unpalatable changes? On 5 December, Air Force Global Strike Command chief General Thomas Bussiere was asked about the future of the over-cost and behind-schedule Sentinel: ‘If the nation directs us to do something different … some kind of mobile system,’ Bussiere said, ‘we will develop such concepts.’ But he was far more positive about the need for more B-21s to meet ‘an unprecedented demand signal’ for the bomber force.

The Sentinel program is pouring air force money into holes in the ground (the missile is fine, and the overruns are in silos and bunkers) and stands apart from other missions. The F-35 continues to incur heavy research and development bills. Redirecting resources from money pits into force redesign centred on bombers and bomber-launched weapons—the air force’s first love—while blaming Musk might not be without its appeal.

We are in a moment in US politics like none other since Reconstruction. There is much left to be settled between now and 20 January, Inauguration day, but there are all kinds of revolutionary ambitions in the mix—and the history of revolutions is that the outcome isn’t usually what the instigators planned.

Bill Sweetman is a veteran, award-winning journalist and aerospace industry executive. He is the author of Trillion Dollar Trainwreck: How the F-35 hollowed out the US Air Force. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).