[Apocryphon]

The U.S. arms industry is huge, and so is defense spending. If the DoD wants better talent, then budget accordingly and pay high salaries and fix up their recruitment messages and surely some smart CS grads will go to them. Why should our military be dependent upon SV civilian companies that have workers who don’t want to work on military applications? Then just hire the ones who do, fund new military-oriented startups. This is a free market and the Pentagon needs to pay to play.

[NewsAware]

They are paying to play -that's how outsourcing works. The high salary of Google devs is priced into the contracts the pentagon pays. So it's not an issue of salary level but of their inability to build up an internal structure (to which their public image among the SV crowd contributes) which causes them problems. Can this be solved? Maybe, but not simply by raising salaries.

[drak0n1c]

True, developing sustainable institutions with vision and effective knowledge transfer/accumulation mechanisms requires more than cash. It requires cultural attraction and perhaps some measure of prestige. NASA, and the major military branches have this. Some don't. Those that don't revert to the lowest common denominator for bureaucracies - a short-sighted transactional entity that shuffles around one-off projects.

[jopsen]

IMO the big problem is that many of the big SV companies build end-user products. And to protect that they shouldn't want to get into arms contracts.

[adventured]

That's exactly the scenario we'll see over the next ~20 years, as parts of Silicon Valley refuse to go along with the Pentagon.

The military industrial complex will put tens of billions of dollars into backing new start-ups that will cooperate over that time. Those companies will receive favoritism from the state over time, to Google's detriment. That will include technology transfer and regulatory favoritism (AI will be a regulated industry 10-15 years from now, and will be regulated forever thereafter). For every worker in Silicon Valley that refuses to do military work, the Pentagon will find 100 outside of Silicon Valley that are more than happy to do so. Numerous large companies up and down the tech chain will cooperate as well, including Microsoft, Amazon, Intel, IBM, Oracle, HP, Dell, Cisco, TI, Micron, nVidia, and dozens of others. The contracts they receive over time will be a lucrative part of their business (it already is in many cases).

[tossaccount123]

You do realize Larry and Sergey's initial funding to create a search engine came from DARPA, a military program, right?