The Holiday from History

In 1993, the Pentagon invited the leaders of the American defense industry to dinner.

They called it the Last Supper.¹

The message was simple: the Cold War is over, the money is gone, consolidate. Within a decade, fifty-one major prime contractors had become five. The five wrapped themselves in regulations thick enough that no newcomer could follow them in, and settled down to enjoy the peace.

That dinner opened what I call the holiday from history: thirty years in which the West's most talented people built software, apps, and ad networks — while quietly assuming that serious war belonged to the past.

Five years ago, Google refused to work with the Department of Defense at all. Too dirty.²

The holiday is over. Global military spending has set a record for eleven straight years. NATO has pledged five percent of GDP by 2035. A generation of new defense companies is being funded, built, and celebrated.³

And almost none of them have been tested by the one judge that matters.

Wars are won by economies

Before the Second World War, American factories produced over a million cars a year. When the war came, car production essentially stopped — every line in Detroit turned to tanks, trucks, and bombers. That is what "arsenal of democracy" actually meant, and it is how the war was won: not by braver soldiers, but by the largest, fastest industrial machine on earth.⁴

Now consider the other side of that ledger.

In 1933, Germany spent one percent of GDP on its military. By 1939, ten percent. A state that converts its economy to war has to use it — the investment demands a return.⁵

Russia today spends roughly ten percent of GDP on defense. Forty percent of its national budget. Its civilian industry is gone. It is a war economy, at 1939 levels, run by a man watching to see whether anyone will stop him.

Is he going to stop?

And decided by humans

Here is the part the technologists get wrong.

On the most drone-saturated battlefield in history, resupply has gone back to soldiers walking seven to ten kilometers to the front — because the unmanned vehicles keep getting hit, and humans are still the most stealthy, most reliable system on the field.

When Ukrainian operators can choose between AI terminal guidance and their own hands, they choose their hands. They don't yet trust the machine to be as good.

I learned this lesson before I could name it. One January morning in Iraq, I watched my soldiers stack against a wall outside a house that held the enemy, and go through the door — not because a machine told them to, but because they would rather die than let each other down. With all the best technology in the world, war remains a contest of human will, human courage, and human love.⁶

The same scene plays out hundreds of times a day, right now, along a front line a two-hour flight from your office.

Further viewing: a Hero of Ukraine on why history wins wars — Episode 3 of the Ukraine Military History Podcast, with Lt. Gen. Mykhailo Zabrodskyi.

The bill arrives

Hold those two truths together — wars are won by economies, decided by humans — and look at the world as it actually is.

Empires do not die of old age; every handoff between world orders in modern history has been settled by war or the credible threat of it. The American-led order that made war feel obsolete is being renegotiated right now — by debt, by internal division, and by a rising axis that is already fighting, already building, already learning.

The holiday from history is over, and the bill has arrived.

The only open question is who pays it: the societies that remembered how to master war — or the ones that hoped mastery was no longer required.

And that question will not be answered by the five companies from the dinner in 1993. It lands on someone else entirely.

It lands on you. That's Part II.

Continue to Part II: The Call » · or watch the talk free