The defense revolving-door, Silicon Valley edition

he Trump administration has installed a revolving door between defense-tech companies and the Pentagon.

An eye-opening glimpse at the links between two congressional committees and more than 100 defense contractors, consultants, and lobbyists.

By John Mecklin, August 17, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/the-defense-revolving-door-silicon-valley-edition/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20defense%20revolving-door%2C%20Silicon%20Valley%20edition&utm_campaign=20260817%20Monday%20Newsletter%20%28Copy%29

ince President Eisenhower more-or-less invented the term military-industrial complex, US defense spending has grown, dramatically in some eras, leveling off a bit in others, but overall heading ever-upward. Annual US defense expenditures now approach $1 trillion—and, if the Trump administration gets its way, will head toward $1.5 trillion in the coming fiscal year. A variety of factors has driven this rise in defense outlays, but one has become persistent: the revolving door that some national service officials walk through to take well-compensated positions at private-sector military contractors and the firms that lobby the government on their behalf.

The phenomenon and its corruptive possibilities have been much-studied and widely criticized. US Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the noted progressive, commissioned a report on the issue in 2023 with the withering title “Pentagon Alchemy: How Defense Officials Pass rough the Revolving Door and Peddle Brass for Gold.” The libertarian-to-conservative Cato Institute writes less compelling headlines (“Dealing with the Defense Industry’s Revolving Door in the 2027 NDAA”) but doesn’t like the revolving door, either. And in its 2023 report, “March of the Four–Stars: The Role of Retired Generals and Admirals in the Arms Industry,” the heterodox Quincy Institute basically supports Warren’s attempt to at least slow the revolving door via the “Department of Defense Ethics and Anti-Corruption Act.” Warren initially introduced the bill in 2019 and reintroduced it in 2021 and 2023, to no avail.

The interactive display below [on original] illustrates one piece of the defense revolving door as it has evolved over the last decade. During that time, former congressional officials have strolled through the door and wound up working not just at the largest defense contractors (often called “primes”) but also for a new class of high-technology firms—often involved in artificial intelligence and headquartered in Silicon Valley—that has aggressively expanded its Pentagon contracting efforts. And to be clear, the door leads in both directions; private sector bigwigs sometimes move into influential government positions that could affect the fortunes of their companies.

As UC Berkeley investigative reporter Bernice Yeung recently wrote for the Bulletin:

[T]he Trump administration has installed a revolving door between defense-tech companies and the Pentagon. The deputy secretary of defense, Steve Feinberg, is the cofounder and former CEO of a private equity firm that invests heavily in companies with Pentagon contracts. The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology co-chair David Sacks is a venture capitalist who invests in defense tech. The country’s science and technology advisor, Michael Kratsios, was previously an executive at top AI defense firm, Scale AI. The armed services are also stacked with senior leaders with ties to the tech industry, such as Under Secretary of the Army Michael Obadal, an Anduril alum.

The interactive is anything but comprehensive. It looks only at members of Congress who served and top staffers who worked on the House and Senate armed services committees during the 2015-2025 decade. The graphic does not deal with defense-related political contributions, or with the many employees of the Pentagon, military services, State Department, and Energy Department who also rode the revolving door connecting government service to high-paying positions with defense contractors and the K Street firms that lobby for them. The interactive simply shows some of the ways in which the two congressional committees that deal with the country’s armed services are connected with private-sector defense contractors, consultants, and lobbyists. Even within this limited scope, the connections are eye-opening.

August 24, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Is Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Defense System a Pipe Dream?

Hannah Bowlus,  August 13, 2026, https://inkstickmedia.com/is-trumps-golden-dome-missile-defense-system-a-pipe-dream/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

US President Donald Trump’s highly touted ‘Golden Dome’ will cost taxpayers untold sums of money. Will it even work?

The Golden Dome for America is US President Donald Trump’s vision of an impenetrable shield protecting the entire United States from land, sea, air, and space against short- and long-range weapons armed with nuclear warheads or conventional munitions. It may not survive the Iran war. Regional missile defenses deployed by the US and Israel have failed at times. The Golden Dome relies on their success. 

A year and a half and $25 billion since the president announced the Golden Dome, plans still remain classified, and the White House has backed off of the claim it will be virtually impenetrable. 

Experts and congress members eyeing the $1.5 trillion defense budget — an additional $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome in a separate reconciliation bill, and an estimated $100 billion for the war on Iran — are now rethinking missile defense.

In March, the Cato Institute warned that the Golden Dome, “modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome and air and missile defense (AMD), rests on a system now showing clear vulnerabilities.” The think tank cited several instances of Iranian attacks breaking through Israeli defense systems. “If Israel’s shield can be tested this way, the lesson for the United States is clear: a similar effort risks wasting vast time, money, and resources on a promise that may not hold.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates it could cost $1.2 trillion to build missile defenses that still couldn’t fully defeat a smaller salvo of missiles. A more robust (though still penetrable) dome might cost $3.6 trillion. The US Space Force says it will cost only $185 billion.

The best the Golden Dome could perform, even at the $3.6 trillion price tag, is an 80% interception rate, one report concludes, though it notes that is an unrealistically optimistic scenario. If Russia launched its nuclear arsenal with this Golden Dome in place, and 20% of their missiles evaded thousands of space-based interceptors, at least 75 million Americans could perish immediately. Some 1.4 billion would likely die globally in the ensuing famine and climate disaster within two years.

In May, US Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told a press conference on Capitol Hill that the Golden Dome was a “vanity project” for Trump that would cost Americans at a time when economic insecurity is rife. “We’ve got 48 million people in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world, who are food insecure or hungry,” McGovern said. “When you start going down this road of a new arms race, where there’s no end in sight … we’ll have nothing for anything else.” 

Laura Grego, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, suspects the Golden Dome is doomed like its progenitors. “I think we’ll spend a lot of money before we get there,” Grego told Inkstick. 

Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics were among the 12 companies selected to develop space-based missile interceptors, the costliest and most technically daunting piece of the Golden Dome. Each manufacturer has current missile defense systems operating on US bases and in Israel. These extraordinarily expensive systems of sensors and interceptors have repeatedly failed while the US and Israel waged war on Iran, and throughout Israel’s war in Lebanon.

Inkstick asked each company how they could guarantee a workable missile defense system in space when their weapons in conventional war failed. None responded.

Elsewhere, Lockheed Martin’s CEO has predicted the next few years will be a feast for contractors. Anduril’s CEO said the defense industry is more energized than ever. 

Money is one motivation for pursuing the Golden Dome, Grego says, but there are also true believers in missile defense who take its enormous financial cost as proof of its legitimacy. It should and will work because the US has spent $500 billion on it. 

Since the US first left the anti-ballistic missile treaty, government officials have claimed to currently own working defenses to “fix the problem of nuclear war.”

“My worry is that the people who should know better believe it,” Grego said. 

Just this year, the Missile Defense Agency’s Lieutenant General Heath Collins testified to Congress that the ground-based midcourse defense system had “made the impossible possible, hitting a bullet with a bullet.” By its own evaluation, the program has a 55% intercept rate in highly scripted and uncomplicated tests. 

n this and past wars, the Pentagon has exhibited a tendency to mislead the public on the efficacy and maturity of its weapons. Golden Dome details have been concealed, even to Congress, despite its members approving $25 billion toward it last year. 

In May, General Michael Guetlein, the manager of the Golden Dome, claimed he had spoken to 400 potential defense contractors about the project. He said he expected the Golden Dome to be completed on time.

Elsewhere, concerns are mounting. Speaking in Congress in June, US Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, argued that the Golden Dome should be investigated for large-scale fraud. “The people getting federal taxpayer money for this have been caught repeatedly lying to Congress and to the public about what the technical status of those [weapons] are,” he said. 

The backbone of the Golden Dome, a tranche of data relay and early warning satellites, has already been launched into low Earth orbit. It’s over-budget and behind schedule. The Government Accountability Office has urged the Space Development Agency to be more transparent about its progress.

Companies awarded contracts for the tranches of satellites were allowed to self-report on the technical readiness of their own products. They gave themselves high scores, inaccurately, GAO wrote in one assessment, potentially derailing the entire program in the process. 

The bulk of the Pentagon’s request for an additional $17 billion in Golden Dome funding relies on another reconciliation bill that might never materialize. House Republicans recently drafted a supplemental bill with $60 billion earmarked to offset the cost of the war and cover immediate defense priorities. 

US Representative Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas, blasted Democrats in July over reconciliation. He insisted that Democrats should support the bill in order to “support our troops in time of conflict.” He claimed it was about providing the armed forces with “baseline readiness — not Star Wars and Golden Dome and transformative modernizing of the military — just the bombs, bullets, and battlefield readiness for our men and women in uniform to finish the fight successfully and return home safely.” 

In a recent hearing on missile defense, US Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, questioned the logic of the Golden Dome when regional systems were falling apart. “What I don’t want to be doing is getting bogged down in a war in the Middle East that we’re losing while also spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars here at home” on the Golden Dome, he said.

Congressional appetite for the Golden Dome is flagging in the face of a more than $100 billion war. Iranian missiles have resulted in costly damage to American bases and military equipment across the Middle East, and recent reports have revealed that the US stockpile is dwindling fast. “There are lots of relatively cheap ways to circumvent a system or make it obsolete right away,” Grego explained.

A country could increase the number of its salvo, make its missiles faster, shoot decoys, attack sensors and interceptors. These are basic measures that would drive up requirements and costs of the Golden Dome.

In April and October of 2024, Israel claimed it intercepted 99% of projectiles fired by Iran. Trump subsequently praised Israel’s missile defense capabilities and, while announcing the Golden Dome, insisted that the US “is entitled” to the same kind of protection. Independent analysis, though, estimated that Israel’s interception rate was closer to 80 or 85%. Israel was able to destroy so many targets before impact because Iran’s missiles were relatively unsophisticated, armed without countermeasures, and aimed at less populated areas in a country 470 times smaller than the United States. 

August 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

$1 Trillion And This Is All We Get?

Spending does not equal value when it comes to Pentagon contracting

Lisa Savage,Aug 16, 2026, https://went2thebridge.substack.com/p/1-trillion-and-this-is-all-we-get

More bad news for the Pentagon as another highly expensive warship goes dark.

“On July 24, 2026, while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power,” reads the statement. “There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response.”

The loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning. Potable water was also affected, Comer said. He did not respond to a question about how sailors handled waste.

I’ve already written about the woes of the USS Abraham Lincoln which is reportedly about to be replaced the the USS George Washington (without the USS Benfold in its entourage), leaving zero aircraft carriers in the waters around China for the first time in many years.

Military types have been less than impressed with the disrespect, gaslighting, and minimizing of the Commander in Chief and his minister of war about the Lincoln’s woes, a 5,000 person ship that must now be supplied from Diego Garcia 3,000 miles from Bahrain where Iran destroyed a crucial U.S. naval base.

Typical of a draft dodger’: Rep. Seth Moulton blasts Trump’s response to USS Lincoln crisis

“The U.S. had no plan going into this war”

Retired Maj. General Randy Manner on Friday accused President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of “spewing lies” about the reportedly deplorable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and its extended deployment in the Middle East

A professional military that sees national defense as a sacred calling and that embraces martyrdom if necessary it is up against a whiny Gen Z force that mostly thinks of the U.S. military as a job. My husband: “Probably the only job they could get.” He’s right if we’re talking jobs with benefits like health care and college tuition for high school graduates.

The leadership of this crack military force? They are focused on spending big, bigger, and biggest bucks on elaborate systems like Golden Dome that are highly unlikely to produce interception of hypersonic missiles as promised.

But military-industrial promises are made to be broken.

In the excitement over finally pulling Russia into war, General Dynamics promised to build artillery shells that U.S. proxy Ukraine was running through rapidly. GD took $533 million from taxpayers to equip a factory with state of the art robots purchased from Turkiye.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Descriptions of the malfunctioning robots reads like bad sci-fi and suggests, at least to my mind, sabotage.

The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week..

according to interviews with 12 former factory workers.. the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie..

Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer [emphasis mine] to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.”

If someone comes up with a better metaphor for the U.S. approach to maintaining its imperial ascendency, please let me know.

Who will be held accountable for the artillery shell boondoggle? Not GD executives.

Wages of Failure: Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.

Maybe Turkish robotics firm Repkom will take the blame?

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

If this is starting to sound like a bad movie plot with espionage and sabotage threads, keep in mind that you paid way more than $17 to see this film. But not to worry! Private-public partnerships with contractors all over the globe are racing ahead to produce fast, powerful military hardware that will attempt to compete with Iran, China, and Russia. All three of which are currently demonstrating the decisive power of a loyal, patriotic work force called upon to step up production in the face of existential threats.

General Dynamics workers in my state go out on strike regularly for better pay and working conditions, while their CEO slurps up another bonus.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

I’ll let Xi Jinping have the last word here. From his 2015 plans for The Governance of China:

There cannot be sustainable development in the world when some countries are getting richer and richer while others languish in prolonged poverty and backwardness.. Such practices as beggar-my-neighbor, shifting crises onto others and feathering one’s nest at the expense of others are both immoral and unsustainable.

Confronted with complex threats to international security, fighting alone or fighting with a blind faith in the use of force [emphasis mine] will not get one anywhere.

August 19, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment