American Prestige and Trump’s National Security Strategy
Big Tech is enshittifying the military. Our judgment is getting poorer. What the contractors deliver for the price is getting worse. The price is going up. The quality of the product, which is “lethality,” is actually going down relative to costs…
But a different form of enshittification was already happening…creating a high-tech military that we couldn’t actually use lest we lose it. But the response to that has been a mass-produced, high-failure system that’s costing us an arm and a leg…
Why is this a trillion dollars? Because we have the old prime contractors still getting paid as ever, but we also have these new entrants (Anduril, Palantir) and they gotta get paid too.
Those were some of my final thoughts at the end of an episode I just did on the American Prestige podcast alongside Julia Gledhill, one of my Un-Diplomatic Podcast co-hosts.
We dished about Trump’s national security strategy. Yes, I’ve spoken and written about that damned document many times at this point, but this conversation unearthed some unique insights, in part because Julia was in the mix, and in part because one of the show’s hosts, Danny Bessner, likes to argue!
It was a great conversation. So great, in fact, that we’re releasing the episode as a crossover on The Un-Diplomatic Podcast as well.
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