At 11:16 a.m. local time on Sept. 28, 2008, a privately financed company launched a rocket from Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., founded by 37-year-old South African immigrant Elon Musk and based in Hawthorne, California, sent its own Falcon 1 into low Earth orbit nine and a half minutes later.
The achievement marked a major turning point in human history. As Sharon Weinberger writes in Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, Musk had demonstrated that “space technology and exploration, a feat once limited to nation-states, can be accomplished with private money.” Less than two decades later, Axios would call SpaceX “the most valuable defense contractor in the world.”
Weinberger, a veteran national-security journalist whose work has appeared in Aerospace Daily and The Wall Street Journal, has unusual access to both spheres at the center of her book: the technology industry and the defense establishment.
She was working inside the Pentagon when al Qaeda attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, and has toured the polished campuses of Silicon Valley. Her reporting draws on conversations with the central figures in both worlds, including senior officials and executives who sometimes spoke anonymously, as well as previously unpublished military and industry documents and firsthand observations of pivotal events.
Within the body of work examining the relationship between the defense establishment and private enterprise — a tradition that can be traced back to William Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp in 1965 — Valley of Death stands out as the most current and comprehensive account. Few topics carry greater urgency. With every passing moment, artificial intelligence is reshaping the conditions of human life.
Nor should we underestimate the extraordinary power generated by this partnership. It helped create two other historic dividing lines: atomic weapons, which destroyed entire cities, defeated fascism and ended World War II; and the Apollo program, which put humans on the moon and brought them safely home.
What sets the current era apart is the unprecedented extent to which the democratic arsenal is controlled by private companies.
The book’s “valley of death” describes the difficult interval between the completion of a weapons system and its deployment by troops. The gap is largely a product of the Pentagon’s notoriously slow and costly acquisition process. Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, once put the matter more bluntly, saying the valley of death “is the Pentagon.”
Into that gap stepped Musk and a new generation of technology entrepreneurs: Peter Thiel and Alex Karp at Palantir, Palmer Luckey at Anduril, and, more recently, Booz Allen’s Horacio Rozanski, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Mach Industries’ Ethan Thornton. Together, they advanced a faster and fundamentally different way of doing business.
Instead of waiting for the Pentagon to define a capability shortfall, write detailed specifications and award another contract to one of the frequently delayed and over-budget “Big Five” — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and General Dynamics — these entrepreneurs financed the development and patenting of their own technologies and weapons. They approached the government only after the products were ready to sell or lease.
Those privately funded systems now occupy numerous positions along the military “kill chain,” ranging from software capable of combining enormous data streams to missile components and complete munitions.
Defense-technology startups attracted $50 billion from investors in 2025. Weinberger notes that money continued pouring into the sector even as venture capital for most other startups — with artificial intelligence as the notable exception — “had slowed markedly.”
The newcomers also achieved market valuations that dwarfed those of long-established competitors. Weinberger points out that Tesla was valued at $1.45 trillion last year, almost six times Toyota’s market value, despite generating less than one-third of Toyota’s revenue. Palantir, meanwhile, reached a valuation of nearly $435 billion, making it the most valuable defense company even though it produced “significantly less revenue than the prime contractors.” As Weinberger observes, many of these startup valuations appeared difficult to justify.
Weinberger approaches the moral and practical consequences of this sweeping transformation in how military technology is created, financed and controlled with notable care. The questions are especially pressing as China emerges as a near-peer rival while some of the same technology billionaires rely on intricate manufacturing and supply chains connected to China. The central concern is stark: Will every defense-tech billionaire be able to set an independent foreign policy?
The conflict became visible four days after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Musk responded to requests from Kyiv by allowing access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. Working with the United States and its regional partners, Musk quietly sent the embattled government of President Volodymyr Zelensky thousands of Starlink terminals, providing a vital communications link. But what the Lord giveth: When Ukrainian officials later sought Starlink coverage for an offensive aimed at retaking Crimea, which Russia had first annexed in 2014, Musk refused. He judged the operation unlikely to succeed and believed it carried a high risk of mass casualties.
A comparable dispute emerged this year when Anthropic resisted the second Trump administration’s proposed use of its artificial-intelligence models for mass domestic surveillance or lethal operations conducted without human supervision. “The rapid progress of AI has forced the Pentagon to contend with firms that hold unprecedented leverage over technologies critical to the military,” Weinberger writes. War Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to push back against that leverage by blacklisting Anthropic and awarding a contract to OpenAI instead.
Valley of Death follows the story chronologically, beginning with the Navy’s $1 purchase in February 1931 of 1,000 acres at the center of what would become Silicon Valley. Moving through the Cold War, the Sept. 11 attacks, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza and the Iran war, Weinberger charts the evolution of technology and the deepening relationship between Big Tech and the Pentagon — a relationship that has not always strengthened US national security.
Even in an otherwise sweeping account, several episodes receive little or no attention. One is President Nixon’s 1970 creation of the White House Office of Telecommunications Policy, which brought federal policy in the emerging field under centralized executive oversight. The office’s most consequential achievement was the 1972 “Open Skies” policy. Developed by three young prodigies, including the agency’s general counsel, Antonin Scalia, it ended the government’s monopoly on launching domestic communications satellites and opened the door to private companies.
The book also largely passes over the Iraq surge. Subsequent empirical research has found that US and allied forces weakened a powerful insurgency partly through expanded use of cellphone data for intelligence collection and targeting.
Cyberwarfare, another major omission, receives only a brief mention, despite extensive treatment in earlier books such as David Sanger’s Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power (2012) and John Arquilla’s Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare (2021). Weinberger does not mention Stuxnet at all — the first digital weapon, a piece of malware deployed by the Obama administration in 2010 through compromised USB drives to disrupt the centrifuges central to Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and its broader pursuit of nuclear weapons capability.
A barrage of contracts and dollar-figures sometimes leaves “Valley of Death” a bit of a quagmire. The book is liveliest when Weinberger recounts her own interactions with the military brass and the Big Tech bros. Her account of a drone-technology exhibition in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, sponsored by Ondas Holdings last years, carries echoes of Tom Wolfe.
“Above us, on an upper deck of the winery and wearing a black mask over his face to shield his identity, was Yeti, the nom de guerre of one of the Ukrainian company’s drone pilots, who was helping run the demonstration,” she writes. “Having pilots fresh from the battlefield in Ukraine demonstrate drones over a California winery’s terraces, with the Silicon Valley landscape in the background, made for a surreal scene … The venue, which is now home to concerts and weddings, and features wide-open spaces, ended up being a good place to fly drones, particularly drones that were dropping water bottles instead of bombs.”
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent at Newsmax and the author, most recently, of “Scalia: Supreme Court Years, 1986-2001.”
