[Global Times Comprehensive Report] The illegal act of the NSA's Office of Tailored Access Operation cyber attack on Northwestern Polytechnical University was exposed this month, giving people more knowledge about the technical organization abbreviated as TAO.

Category：hotcomm

2025-04-26

[ Global Times Comprehensive Report] The illegal act of the National Security Agency's Office of Tailored Access Operation cyber attack on Northwestern Polytechnical University was exposed this month, giving people more knowledge about this technical organization abbreviated TAO. And in Silicon Valley , DIU — the US Department of Defense Defence Innovation Unit — has "reignited the partnership between Pentagon and Silicon Valley in seven years." Although Silicon Valley companies have historically had a tradition of anti-war and have refused to cooperate with the government in the past few years to avoid suspected violations of other people's privacy, the reality is that more and more technology companies, large and small, have been increasingly connected and interacting with the Pentagon under the guidance of policies and the temptation of huge interests, have become politicized while opening the "mutual shaping model".

The Pentagon took the lead in throwing out an "olive branch"

Why did American technology companies begin to actively cooperate with the government and the military? First, the Ministry of National Defense has put forward an "olive branch". In December 2014, a team of senior defense officials visited Silicon Valley to ask emerging technology companies for ideas about national security. During the term of Obama's , the Pentagon also released a new strategy, mentioning for the first time "using cyber weapons to stop destructive attacks launched by the enemy." In 2015, then-Defense Secretary Ashton Carter also visited Silicon Valley specifically to seek closer ties with top technology innovation companies. In the same year, the Ministry of Defense's National Defense Innovation Department (DIU) was established, with its headquarters in Silicon Valley.

On the homepage of DIU's website, the following sentence is written: "Accelerate commercial technology for national security. We are the only organization dedicated to accelerating the adoption of commercial and dual-use technologies to solve combat challenges quickly and at scale." The US SCMedia website reads: "DARPA, founded in 1958, is an administrative agency in the Pentagon that is responsible for the development of high-tech for military purposes, but now people are more concerned about new institutions like DIU because it is specially set up to leverage the tech startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley." The article also said that DIU's affiliates have their own technical priorities and investment strategies, with dazzling abbreviations, or with words like Lab (lab) to indicate innovation types.

In 2016, Mike Brown, who has been a technology executive in Silicon Valley for a long time, joined the Ministry of Defense and became the director of DIU in 2018. The British Economist reported that in the face of pressure from China, how to strengthen the US military advantage, especially the technological advantage, is the Pentagon's top priority, and Brown believes that it would be easier to complete this task if world-class American software developers work more closely with equally powerful American weapons manufacturers. He also said that China's technological and economic ambitions are driving this competition and inspiring more U.S. tech companies and personnel to work with the Pentagon.

It is understood that from the outset, DIU's procurement process is different from standard government or military procurement agreements. It usually allows interested companies to submit proposals of "no more than 5 pages or 20 slides", which can facilitate small businesses or non-traditional companies that are not familiar with federal contract requirements and are worried about the complicated process. This strategy has indeed attracted a lot of new companies to bid. The agency provides figures: From June 2016 to September 2021, DIU awarded 33% of contracts to suppliers who provided services to the Department of Defense for the first time; of all companies that received the contract, 86% were non-traditional businesses and 73% were small businesses.

"Can Silicon Valley technology companies reshape the Pentagon?" The Economist recently published an article with this title, saying, "In California, , where Silicon Valley is located, anti-war sentiment once permeated in the lecture halls and faculty lounges at Stanford University, and in the garages of entrepreneurs at that time." But now the atmosphere has changed. Currently, large technology companies have equipped the U.S. military and law enforcement with cloud storage, databases, application support, management tools and logistics equipment.The alphabet ( Google parent company), Amazon , Microsoft and Oracle are expected to win huge contracts of $9 billion to operate the Pentagon's Joint Battle Cloud Capacity (JWCC). Last year, Microsoft won a $22 billion Army contract to supply its HoloLens mixed reality headset for simulated training combat. The software giant also helped develop the Air Force combat management system. In June, Alphabet Company set up a new division, "Google Utilities Division," to compete for the U.S. Department of Defense's combat network contract.

Even the American academic community also recognizes and supports cooperation between Silicon Valley and the military. Steve Blank, an American scholar who founded the National Security Innovation Center at Stanford University, is telling a new lesson—technology, innovation and competition from big powers. He recently published an article on a technology website saying that "the Pentagon's partnership with Silicon Valley has been reignited." Russia launched the anti-satellite missile in November last year, and in order to cope with the threat posed by the increasingly severe "asymmetric competition", the Pentagon, which can no longer maintain its identity as a technological pioneer and a major investor, needs to change its 60-year-old procurement system, strengthen its ties with academia, industry and Silicon Valley, and become a "fast chaser." Russian Businessman once quoted Margaret Omara, a professor of history at the University of Washington and author of the book "Silicon Valley Code: How Technological Innovation Reshapes the United States", saying, "Today all the technology giants in the United States have the DNA of the military industry."

"Silicon Valley hopes to power the war machine"

Review why American technology companies began to be keen on serving the military, " New York Times " tells the story of "Silicon Valley visits the Pentagon": In July 2016, Raymond Thomas, commander of the Special Operations Command during the Obama administration, hosted a guest: Google's then chairman Eric Schmidt . The four-star American general spent almost a day visiting the headquarters of the headquarters with Schmidt and talked about the topic of artificial intelligence . When Schmidt said, "You guys are doing a bad job in this, I can help you solve the problem in one day", Thomas was angry, but he still held back.

4 years later, Schmidt's outspoken assessment of the technical flaws of the US military turned into personal actions: transforming the US military with more engineers, more software and more artificial intelligence. The American media described it as follows: "In this process, this technology billionaire who finally left Google has reshaped himself as the main liaison between Google and the national security community."

In the autumn of 2020, the new think tank "China Strategy Group" led by Schmidt wrote a report titled "Asymmetric Competition: Strategy for Coping with China's Science and Technology", suggesting "asymmetric Competition" with China in the field of science and technology. In addition, Schmidt, chairman of the Defense Innovation Advisory Committee, has invested millions of dollars in several defense startups through his own venture capital firm and $13 billion in wealth.

According to the US magazine Wired, the Defense Innovation Advisory Committee was also founded in 2016. Silicon Valley celebrities such as Schmidt and Amazon founder Bezos were invited to join. With this committee, even though later President Trump's relationship with these tech companies was once tense, Silicon Valley's relationship with the Pentagon was not greatly affected.

During the 2016 election, Silicon Valley giants were even more on the side of the Democratic Party. They believed that the Democratic government’s support for emerging industries would also benefit Silicon Valley more, and Trump’s “America First” policy and anti-globalization practices will restrict the development of Silicon Valley. After Trump was elected, he held discussions with about 20 Silicon Valley giants, and his subsequent tax cuts also allowed these technology companies to taste the sweetness.

According to the Russian rambler website in May 2019, during the Trump administration, the Ministry of Defense budget and CIA venture capital focused on technology giants, and the government also signed contracts with these companies, which not only facilitated military and intelligence operations, but also made these high-tech companies stronger.

With Biden in power, Silicon Valley and the government are closer.Executives of companies such as Facebook , Twitter held positions in Biden's transition team in 2020. Some Western experts believe that the real winner of the 2020 presidential election is not Biden at all, but the leadership of the tech giants.

"Silicon Valley hopes to provide power for the American war machines." The American magazine " Fast Company " published an article in November last year saying that just as relations between the United States and China are becoming increasingly tense, U.S. Department of Defense officials and technology companies hope to reshape the Pentagon. The article said: "In the Reagan era, the military tailored defense equipment around large platforms such as aircraft carrier , and these platforms can only be built by large defense contractors such as Thor. But now, the technology that may determine the war in the 21st century will be based on artificial intelligence, digital technology , and quantity Subcomputing, space, cybersecurity and biotechnology, in other words, are industries in which Silicon Valley has invested heavily in serving enterprises and consumers. "

A recent article in Russia's Opinion newspaper titled "Silicon Valley is close to Washington" said that due to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the US Internet giant Meta cooperated with the US government's actions to allow Facebook to publish information confrontation against the Russian military. "Of course, the US IT giant will not make such a decision alone. This is an agreement with the US government." "Silicon Valley is so compliant because the US government has a strong influence on enterprises." Russia was also extremely angry about the news about the "Starlink" satellite communication service provided by the US private aerospace company Space Exploration Technology Corporation (SpaceX company ) in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and mentioned that the company received funding from the US Air Force and received a huge contract from the US Department of Defense Space Development Agency.

"Many projects will start to hide"

Seth Robinson, an analyst at Palantire Technology in the United States, believes that modern warfare is "software first". "Software First" is good news for small American software developers and brings "Silicon Valley one step closer to the battlefield." In January, Anduril won a contract to build a $1 billion anti-drone defense system over a decade. According to the US Fast Company magazine, Andurill is a startup that has been established for only four years and focuses on national defense. It has raised $700 million in financing and is valued at a valuation of $4.6 billion. It is a star enterprise generated by the US Department of Defense Innovation Department (DIU) in the process of bringing Silicon Valley speed and engineering talents into the Pentagon. The company's CEO Simpf said their anti-drone system changed from prototypes to products that meet defense requirements in 18 months, and in the traditional Department of Defense process, "it took two or three years to identify threats alone."

Chinese military expert Zhang Xuefeng told the Global Times reporter that in early September, The Center for Research on Strategic and International Issues (CSIS) released the title "Software Defined War: The Ministry of Defense builds an architecture for transformation to the digital age." The statement of "software-defined war" may not be accurate enough, but it does illustrate the important position of software - including technologies such as algorithms and artificial intelligence in the future. In particular, artificial intelligence can play a role in all levels of the military field, from image recognition in the intelligence field to air combat, to assisted decision-making, etc. In 2016, Psibernetix's Alpha AI pilot defeated human pilots in combat air combat, reflecting the huge potential of artificial intelligence technology in combat.

Zhang Xuefeng gave an example, saying that in 2017, the US Department of Defense proposed the Maven plan in the field of artificial intelligence to build a "cross-functional team of algorithm warfare", with the purpose of accelerating the Ministry of Defense's integration of big data and machine learning technology and cooperate with an AI cooperative organization jointly established by Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. The project has used machine learning to identify vehicles and other targets in drone video images, and this technology is behind the accumulation of Google .

In the view of scholars studying American issues, the US military and intelligence community has actually been in contact with the technology industry and has maintained close contact with some early technology giants in Silicon Valley. Many people remember that HP co-founder David Packard once served as deputy secretary of the defense department of the Nixon administration.This connection in the past was not as close as the military and traditional arms dealers, especially after the Snowden incident, American technology companies at least had concerns about public cooperation with the US intelligence community and the military, because public opinion and the public were worried that this would lead to more personal privacy leaks. However, with the changes in the internal and external policies of the US government, in the eyes of American technology giants, the Ministry of Defense's annual project procurement funds and R&D funds are undoubtedly an attractive huge market, and it also makes the original "moral constraints" of some technology companies no longer work.

Zhang Xuefeng told the Global Times reporter: "In the future, the cooperation between the US high-tech companies and the military will definitely be more, and the relationship between the two sides will be closer. This is a process of mutual shaping. At the same time, traditional defense giants will also participate, just like Psibernetix, a subsidiary of the University of Cincinnati, which develops artificial intelligence, was acquired by the defense contractor Thales Group in 2019." In his opinion, whether the cooperation will be more public still depends on the sensitivity of the related projects. Zhang Xuefeng believes that the United States is no longer as confident as before, and many projects have begun to "hide". In addition, many American technology companies and innovation companies actually provide technical support for the US military and intelligence agencies to conduct cybersecretaries. For such technical services and projects to be carried out secretly within the "black budget", they are definitely unwilling to admit or dare to make public.