Power’s primary battlefield has always been public perception. The definition of reality is a competitive market, and the winners are those who can make their version of reality feel like common sense.
Zuckerberg’s social media apps entered 2026 with a how-were-you-ten-years-ago nostalgia vibe. Going past the personal, 2016 was the first time Trump was elected President, and the first time Havana syndrome, a disputed medical condition, was reported. It began with American and Canadian diplomatic personnel in Cuba experiencing health problems—hearing loss, memory loss, nausea—that were, as the State Department concluded, either the result of an attack or due to exposure to an unknown device, possibly a sonic weapon or infrasound. Later, suspected attacks against US intelligence personnel were reported in China, Austria, Germany, Russia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Poland, Colombia, Taiwan, Vietnam, India. And yet, under Trump and then Biden, multiple US intelligence agencies claimed that it was unlikely a foreign power was responsible, and that those experiencing health problems were possibly collectively going mad.
Swipe forward to January 2026. According to a witness’s account of the US raid to capture Maduro, reposted by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the US used a powerful mystery weapon that brought Venezuelan soldiers to their knees, “bleeding through the nose” and vomiting blood: “We were on guard, but suddenly all our radar systems shut down without any explanation,” the guard said. “At one point, they launched something; I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a very intense sound wave. Suddenly I felt like my head was exploding from the inside.”
The same phenomenological category—mysterious weapons causing neurological devastation—gets managed as mass delusion when it happens to American personnel and circulated as triumphant capability when wielded by American forces. That’s the logic of dreams: the meaning of an event is anchored in utility managed by the state and social media.
On X, some MAGA techies were fast to thank Epirus, a startup that creates defense systems built for warfare “that converges a saturation of asymmetric, robotic & growingly autonomous electronic threats across all domains.” Thanking a startup for a mythical weapon is a kind of religious behavior: the worship of empire.
And yet, the fact that Epirus delivered its high-power microwave capability systems (which may or may not have been used in Venezuela) to the US Army, on time and without “drama” is practically and symbolically significant for US national security. Take the “Arsenal of Freedom” tour of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: visits to Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey’s autonomous systems company; Divergent Technologies, which uses 3D-printing for weapons components; Castelion, a hypersonic missiles startup; Rocket Lab, which builds satellites and launch services; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. On this tour, Hegseth consistently urged the defense industry to adopt AI and announced that the Department of War is reopening to the “disruptive energy” of tech startups, challenging the long-standing dominance of legacy “prime” contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, whom he blamed for soaring costs and stagnant innovation.
“Freedom.” “Innovation.” “Disruptive energy.” It’s true that the re-enchantment of the war machine requires language; equally true that all free nations, including empires, need to possess war machines. The question is what kind of machines, built by whom, with what underlying appetite and corporate consciousness driving development and deployment, and with what narrative spellwork that turns force into virtue and procurement into destiny.
If consciousness is not just computation but desire and attention and valuation, then corporate consciousness is revealed in what a company cannot stop chasing. Across decades, Microsoft remains a company you might expect profits from but not the desire to change humanity’s destiny. Zuckerberg is more than ever obsessed with power and wreaking it over others. Whereas Google may not entirely remain the “do no evil” startup, but it doesn’t feel surprising that its founders, Brin and Page, and DeepMind CEO Hassabis, primarily care about winning the superintelligence race to cure cancer and make math and science magic.
Apply this to defense. The old primes (like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin) needed contracts, which meant they needed procurement cycles, which meant they needed justification for procurement, which meant they needed a certain kind of foreign policy. Their business model was entangled with endless low-intensity war in ways that weren’t incidental but constitutive. Le Carré’s novels bear fictionalized testimony to the damage this entanglement wrought across the world: the corruption and extortion that precedes and follows involvement with behemoths whose corporate consciousness is oriented toward persistence rather than transformation. They didn’t want to win; they wanted to continue.
The new ecosystem wants something different. If Anduril’s obsession is autonomous systems, if Epirus’s obsession is directed energy, if these companies want to win the innovation race rather than maintain their position as prime contractors, then their relationship to deployment might be structurally different. They want transformation, not stability. They want to build things that actually work, that change the strategic landscape, that produce deterrence or decisive capability rather than the profitable grinding of forever-wars. Different obsessions, different structural incentives, different weapons—and therefore different strategic possibilities.
This is the argument for potential liberation: that disrupting the manufacturing side of the military-industrial complex might change the policy side, because the old primes had captured foreign policy through lobbying, revolving doors, and their structural need for conflict. Break that stranglehold, and maybe the pressure releases. Maybe foreign policy becomes more responsive to actual strategic need rather than contractor need.
But weapons get built by companies with one consciousness and deployed by a state with another. The ecosystem creates option space; it doesn’t determine what gets chosen within that space. The new defense-tech ecosystem and the MAGA tech-right may have a natural affinity: they both want decisive action, quick wins, overwhelming capability deployed sparingly, deterrence through demonstrated lethality rather than through presence and entanglement.
This affinity, though, can’t predict the future. The next generation of defense-tech leadership could have different obsessions. And Palmer Luckey’s corporate consciousness may not be Raytheon’s, but it’s not neutral, either. Every David can turn into a Goliath.
Yet, if the victory of AI-powered national security startups over the traditional military-industrial complex can for now help end pathologies that for decades have tormented or ended the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world, that will be one of the vital transformative effects AI can have. This possibility remains contingent, managed by who holds power and what they do not want to stop wanting.
