MUNICH — It’s the techno-military industrial complex.
Ukrainian troops are dealing with artillery shell shortages by arming themselves with off-the-shelf drones. Kyiv’s defense relies on access to SpaceX’s civilian Starlink comms system, tightly integrated with human intelligence, satellite imagery and other AI-driven tech to update the military’s understanding of the battlefield in real time.
Meanwhile, Houthi rebels are firing $2,000 drones at Western vessels in the Red Sea, which then use $2 million missiles to knock them down.
In the past, military researchers pioneered tech ranging from jet engines to duct tape and the internet that later found civilian uses. Now the process has turned full-circle: Generals are shopping for tech developed by civilian companies.
That revolution will be front and center at the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC). Over three days starting Friday, tech CEOs will schmooze with arms-makers and military brass.
The panels, dinners and glitzy evening drinks will be dominated by efforts to figure out the new dynamic.
“We’re slowly getting to a place where there’s more of a healthy realization that both [tech and defense] are needed,” said David van Weel, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for innovation, hybrid and cyber. “A complete lack of knowledge of each other’s existence was the norm. Now the big [defense] companies are understanding that they need to incorporate these innovations into their systems and that they can’t develop it all themselves.”
Governments have grown dependent on tech firms for their defenses — a reliance that goes beyond securing IT systems and extends to mastering new ways of war like winning a drone battle, developing apps to support military operations and handling the flood of data that informs everyone from commanding generals to the soldier in a trench in eastern Ukraine.
It’s a recognition that no matter how large a national defense budget, modern weapons systems can only be built in conjunction with civilian tech.
“It’s a huge accomplishment to build an aircraft … but you can’t also build the best software,” said van Weel.
The stakes for this reshaped alliance of tech and defense couldn’t be higher. This year’s MSC isn’t “a normal” security conference, said Nico Lange, a former chief of staff at Germany’s defense ministry and a senior fellow with the event organizers.
With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearing its second year, conflict exploding across the Middle East and China regularly provoking Taiwan, war is “not an abstract matter anymore,” Lange said.
Working the corridors
The conference at the glitzy Hotel Bayerischer Hof is where tech players will rub shoulders with the gunpowder CEOs and military brass.
When security officials in 2020 were grappling with countering disinformation campaigns from Russia, Iran and elsewhere, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was a top speaker addressing an audience on how Facebook policed safety and security.
In 2023 both Google and Microsoft went all-in with public affairs to display how they had supported Ukraine in its war with Russia, including by sharing cyber intelligence.
This weekend, Kent Walker, Google’s president for global affairs, will schmooze with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and arms-maker Rheinmetall’s CEO Armin Papperger. Microsoft, Meta and others are sending PR battalions to work the corridors of the hotel.
The firms have their side events and networking dinners planned at lavish locations like the hotel’s open-roof pool area called the Blue Spa. They come with pledges like the new “Tech Accord” — first reported by POLITICO — to set up systems to fend off the potential of artificial intelligence to disrupt democratic elections taking place across the world in 2024.
Militarization of tech
But even more than election integrity, this year’s conference will zero in on the implications of military innovation.
The battle along 1,000 kilometers of frontline in Ukraine melds the “kinetic blood and guts, shells and mud” with the “science fiction of drones and satellites” said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
That’s a problem for the procurement model of Western governments, which still rely on expensive and slow development projects like the Franco-German schemes to develop next-generation fighter jets and main battle tanks.
“There is a lot of movement around the militarization of cheap commercial technologies,” said Lange.
He said there was a danger that despite higher defense spending, countries could continue buying the equipment they should have been stocking up on a decade ago “without looking to the future technologies they actually need.”
That’s a mistake Russia made, relying on old fashioned sea power in using its Black Sea Fleet to choke off Ukraine’s access to the sea. But by using a mix of marine drones and missiles, Ukraine has wiped out almost a third of the fleet and reopened its ports.
The blending of old and new tech comes as money floods into defense. Global military spending rose 9 percent to an all-time record $2.2 trillion last year, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
That means it’s boom time for defense contractors — and for tech firms — on the ground in Munich.
Strings attached
While getting entwined with military projects can bring in a lot of cash, it also carries big risks for tech firms.
For many in the tech industry — defined by a corporate culture of self-confident, risk-taking “tech bros” and astute IT nerds — the shift has raised questions around accountability and purpose.
Google and Amazon both faced internal uproar in past years, with staffers openly protesting projects like Project Maven and Project Nimbus for defense services in the U.S. and Israel. Others, like ClearView AI and Palantir, have come under intense public scrutiny for their handling of personal data.
In some cases — and in cyberdefense in particular — firms like Microsoft and Google have taken on a role that resembles almost that of an intelligence agency.
Smith said some tech companies have grown “quite concerned” about what their liabilities might be in a conflict and whether employees could themselves be legitimate targets under the laws of war.
Government and military leaders, too, have had to adapt to the ways of the tech industry. To the Western alliance, relying on its largest corporations comes with risks — perhaps most visible when governments like Ukraine have had to navigate relations with Starlink and its enigmatic chief Elon Musk to launch drone attacks.
But bringing the powerful tech sector into the fold has become a necessity — and, when done well, an advantage amid rising military tensions.
“We’ve seen in Ukraine how big the role is of big tech companies. You can like it or not. But it’s a fact of life,” said NATO’s van Weel. “We should be happy that they’re based in Western democracies and not in China.”
Laurens Cerulus contributed reporting.