Although the United States can best any other country in the traditional physical domains, it faces a much more level playing field in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been slower to adopt national-security technologies like artificial intelligence than certain other countries, including China. One major reason is that the leading developers of these new digital tools are not members of the traditional military-industrial complex—companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman. Instead, they are in the technology industry.

This is a significant difference. Traditional military contractors have worked for decades in lockstep with the Pentagon. The connection was not just financial; it was political and cultural. Many executives and board members of companies within the traditional military-industrial complex had previous jobs in the military or CIA. “The mission continues” is a typical sign-off in emails between contractors from .com email addresses to their counterparts with .mil and .gov email addresses. But the leaders in the tech industry were people like Chris Lynch, skeptical of government bloat and bureaucracy, whose hackles were raised by the ways that the same technology they were making could be turned toward destructive ends.

In 2015, Lynch became the director of the Defense Digital Service, and in 2019, he left to found his own company, Rebellion Defense. His company is one of several to emerge in recent years to provide countries with the technologies needed to protect national security in the 21st century. This industry includes a handful of big-name players such as Microsoft and Palantir, as well as countless smaller companies that few people outside the national-security world would know, like Rebellion Defense. This new breed of government contractor is changing the way the U.S. and its allies conduct foreign policy around the globe, and they are upending the traditional relationship between sovereign nations and their defense businesses.