Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Private Tech, and the Future of Modern Warfare Steve Feldstein Monoray (2026)

Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War Sharon Weinberger Little, Brown and Company (2026)

States have been competing to gain a technological advantage over others for millennia. More than 3,500 years ago, ancient Egyptians’ success in the race to mastering horse-drawn chariots helped them to dominate their region militarily. Today, a similar contest is under way as global powers vie for supremacy in artificial intelligence and technologies such as drones, space-based weapon systems and advanced semiconductors.

Two books examine this latest arms race and ask who might prevail. In Bytes and Bullets, former US state department official Steve Feldstein discusses how technological innovations are becoming “crucial pieces in a geopolitical chess match”. He examines cases including Israel’s early leadership in drone technology and the various innovative prototypes being tested on battlefields in Ukraine.

How AI is shaping the war in Iran — and what’s next for future conflicts

In Valley of Death, security-focused journalist Sharon Weinberger shares how technologies have been adopted by the US defence establishment. Rich in detail, her book takes readers inside the meetings, negotiations and contracting battles that have helped to make Silicon Valley an integral part of the US national-security apparatus.

Weinberger challenges the idea that Silicon Valley is inherently libertarian and instinctively hostile to government power. She shows instead how the Pentagon helped to nurture the early growth of many technology firms, how these companies amassed enough wealth and influence to operate independently of the state and how the defence establishment is now seeking to reforge ties with tech founders and investors who have greater autonomy than conventional military contractors ever did. She calls this evolving relationship the Pentagon–Silicon Complex.

For Weinberger, the nexus between government and tech industry is best illustrated by the story of NeXT, the computer company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple. She recounts how Pentagon funding helped to transform northern California into a hub for electronics and computing at the beginning of the cold war, and how that had started to change by the 1980s. Intelligence agencies increasingly looked to the private sector for technology that outperformed their own. The CIA, for example, turned to NeXT because its powerful and user-friendly computers were better suited to analysing and sharing satellite imagery than were the government systems. It wanted as many as 20,000 workstations, modified with faster processors and specialist graphics hardware.

Of spies and space

Those secretive government purchases provided a crucial lifeline for NeXT during its struggling early years, because the firm discovered that the university market it initially hoped to reach wouldn’t fund it. The government investments helped the company to survive long enough for Apple to acquire it for US$400 million in December 1996 and rehire Jobs. As Weinberger puts it, “The spies had saved Jobs.” Without the CIA’s support, she argues, the NeXT–Apple merger might never have happened. NeXT’s software became the foundation for the Mac operating system and, by extension, that of the iPhone, which is now used by hundreds of millions of people.

Weinberger then traces the shifts in the relationship between Silicon Valley and the US national-security establishment in subsequent decades. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and his Stanford Law School contemporary Alex Karp, for instance, adapted techniques they had developed at PayPal for detecting fraud to build the software firm Palantir, which they and others co-founded in 2003. Palantir’s platform could sift through vast quantities of intelligence data.

Former PayPal chief executive Elon Musk develops rockets commercially at SpaceX, the space-technology firm he founded and sells launch services to the US government and military. This way, Musk retains ownership of the technology, unlike conventional defence contractors.

Palmer Luckey — who founded virtual-reality company Oculus VR before selling it to Facebook (now Meta) — subsequently co-founded Anduril, a military-technology firm that further pushed the trend of using Silicon Valley start-up techniques in national security. From the start, Anduril set out to not only supply the US military with drones, surveillance systems and counter-drone technologies, but also compete directly for huge contracts with established defence giants such as Lockheed Martin.

But the partnership between technology firms and the US military has not always been smooth. Google employees protested in 2018 against Project Maven, a Pentagon programme that used commercial AI systems to analyse unclassified drone footage to glean intelligence. However, other firms were more than willing to do defence work, including Palantir, which ultimately took over from Google.