OSD 295: Military industrial context
Lucas Botkin tweeted this last week:
It touches on an argument from this piece a few weeks back:
A cop’s tools don’t care whether he’s showing up to take away your attacker or take away your guns. How do you arm the police with awesome tech to do the former without making it easier for them to do the latter?
The answer is actually central to gun rights: the way to solve problems with a new technology is to make more new technology….
So a self-regulating system for modern police tech is something you’ve seen on gun forums forever: the police can have whatever they want, as long as I can have it too.
This leaves you with a simple map of the future: if government gets a monopoly on powerful technology, then over time, tech will strip people of their freedoms. But if government doesn’t have privileged access to new tech, then you don’t need to worry much about government tech since you’ll have it too.
That makes it odd to see the trend of venture capital firms getting into defense tech. There have been a lot of firms jumping into that space recently, often with PR pushes about how brave it is to fund defense tech. It’s all well and good to fund companies that build weapons for the government. Someone has to. (Probably? Maybe. Kind of.) But brave it is not. It is not a contrarian, anti-consensus play. There are actually few things more conformist than strengthening the military industrial complex.
If you really believe in freedom through technology, the most important place to invest is the civilian defense industry.
If only there were a firm that does that…
This week’s links
The Reload breaks down SCOTUS oral arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok, the 80% receiver case
Good podcast episode on it too.
Primary & Secondary podcast with Dr. Gary Roberts (DocGKR) on terminal ballistics
As one redditor put it, “Dr. Gary Roberts is a renowned expert (if not THE expert) in terminal ballistics. He’s an oral trauma surgeon at Stanford (aka a dentist that fixes people who get shot in the face).“
Thanks to Discord member @RS3 for linking this.
About Open Source Defense
OSD Capital
We invest in civilian defense and tech that promotes it. As a founder or investor, reach out by replying to this email.
Merch
Grab a t-shirt or a sticker and rep OSD.
OSD Discord server
If you like this newsletter and want to talk live with the people behind it, join the Discord server. The OSD team is there along with lots of our subscribers.