A Violent Convergence: How Silicon Valley and Private Finance Are Reshaping War
Shana Marshall, Security in Context, April 16, 2026
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Most academic research into war and its causes focuses on geostrategy, ethnic cleavages, climate-driven resource disputes, or game theoretic models of elite decision-making. Despite significant work done by journalists and advocacy organizations around the political economic foundations of war, relatively few scholars adopt this approach. Yet many of those same scholars would agree that much of US foreign policy – including military invasions and bombing campaigns – is guided by the output of think tanks, research centers and the substantial number of lobbying, consulting, and issue advocacy organizations that draw their funding from the military industrial complex. If this is true, then the microfoundations of war are very much rooted in issues of the US political economy.
The issues of US political economy most relevant to US ‘forever wars’ are: 1) the military industrial complex, notably the ‘legacy’ or ‘prime’ contractors like Lockheed Martin, etc. that form a substantial share of high-value US manufacturing; 2) Silicon Valley and the tech industry more broadly; and 3) private capital, specifically the vast reserves that have accumulated in the venture capital and private equity portfolios of the transnational capitalist class. These three forces converge and overlap in new ways to produce forms of violence that are novel in both their breadth and intensity. It is no surprise that Iran has identified Gulf outposts of US tech firms and major banks as legitimate military targets in the current war; they provide the computing power and private finance that expand the US war machine.