Inverting the triangle of power: The military–industrial complex after Silicon Valley

The American military–industrial complex is currently undergoing a profound transformation, recasting the triangle of political, military and corporate power anatomised by C. Wright Mills. Anchored in federally directed scientific research and a shared elite commitment to the geopolitical primacy of the militarised national state, the Cold War historical formation of the military–industrial complex was bound by a ‘military metaphysics’ that posited war as the era's defining necessity. This order has progressively unravelled with the shifting locus of technological development to the commercial sector. Pivoting away from the procurement process dominated by the defence primes during the War on Terror, the Pentagon has for the last decade courted Silicon Valley's tech giants and venture-backed start-ups in the pursuit of decisive military advantage amidst intensifying geopolitical competition. While the triangle's institutional orders persist, their hierarchy is now being inverted. Through its growing infrastructural power, ideological assertiveness and colonisation of political and military elites, a tech-capital pole is increasingly setting the terms for the whole. A new technological metaphysics is ascendant, affirming technological supremacy as the fundamental horizon and refiguring the state as only one, possibly dispensable, vehicle for its realisation.