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One of the most significant challenges America faces is turning the US Department of Defense from an institution designed to fight and win kinetic wars to an organization that can design, build, acquire, and deploy AI weaponry — the unmanned drone swarms and robots that will dominate the coming battlefield.

The generation best positioned to develop such weaponry, however, is also the most hesitant, the most skeptical of dedicating its considerable talents to military purposes. Many of these engineers have never encountered someone who has served in the military. They exist in a cultural space that enjoys the protection of the American security umbrella but are responsible for none of its costs.

The most talented minds in the country and the world have for the most part retreated from the often messy and controversial work that is most vital and significant to our collective welfare and defense. These engineers decline to work for the US military but do not hesitate to dedicate their lives to raising capital to build the next app or social media platform of the moment.

Percy Williams Bridgman, a physicist who taught Robert Oppenheimer as an undergraduate at Harvard, articulated the view of many of his peers when he wrote: “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. It’s their job to find the facts. There’s no sin connected with it —­ no morals.” The scientist, in this frame, exists outside the point of moral inquiry.

It is a view still held by many young engineers across Silicon Valley today. A generation of programmers remains ready to dedicate their working lives to sating the needs of capitalist culture, and to enrich itself, but declines to ask more fundamental questions about what ought to be built and for what purpose.

We have now, nearly 80 years after the invention of the atomic bomb, arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, connecting engineering and ethics. The leading nations of the world are engaged in a new kind of arms race. Our hesitation to move forward with military applications of artificial intelligence will be punished. Our cultural hesitation to openly pursue technical superiority may be owed to a collective sense that we have already won. But the certainty with which many believed that history had come to an end, and that Western liberal democracy had emerged in permanent victory after the struggles of the 20th century, is as dangerous as it is pervasive.

“Our cultural hesitation to openly pursue technical superiority may owe to a collective sense that we have already won.”

We must not grow complacent. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Thomas Schelling, who taught economics at Yale and later Harvard, understood the relationship between technical advances in the development of weaponry and the ability of such weaponry to shape political outcomes. “The power to hurt is bargaining power,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “To exploit it is diplomacy —­ vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear: “War is always a bargaining process.”

Yet the contemporary approach to international affairs too often assumes that the correctness of one’s views from a moral or ethical perspective precludes the need to engage with the more distasteful and fundamental question of relative power. For some young Silicon Valley engineers, the order of society and the relative safety and comfort in which they live are the inevitable consequence of the justice of the American project, not the result of a concerted and intricate effort to defend a nation and its interests. For many, the security that we enjoy is a background fact that merits no explanation.

This is not to advocate for a thin and shallow patriotism, but for a genuine reflection about the merits of our national project as well as its flaws. The US is far from perfect. It is true that we should hold ourselves and our experiment to a higher standard than that of other nations, but it is also worth remembering how high a standard this country has already set. A more intimate collaboration between the state and the technology sector will be required if the US and its allies are to maintain an advantage that will constrain our adversaries over the long term. The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

Adapted from The Technological Republic
©2025 by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska with permission from Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group.