Here’s an item from Business Insider of the sort you see just about every day in that publication, at least if you read it every day, as I do. It’s so common that its implications seem to go in one ear and out the other. “More big tech execs are joining the Army Reserve as senior officers,” we’re told.

• The Army has added three more tech executives to its special Detachment 201 reserve unit.
• Det 201 members join as lieutenant colonels, advising the service on AI, cyber, and modernization.
• The new troops come from places like Cloudflare, a major private equity firm, and Facebook AI Research.
• A second crop of tech executives entered the Army Reserve last week, expanding the service’s ties with Big Tech as it continues a dramatic effort to modernize its equipment and systems and better prepare for modern warfare.

Those who recently joined include Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Cloudflare; Sam Pullara, managing director and CTO of Sutter Hill Ventures, a Palo Alto investment firm; and Serkan Piantino, a former Reddit executive and co-founder of Facebook AI Research.

The executives have joined a unit known as Detachment 201, a special unit “designed to bridge the gap between private-sector innovation and military modernization,” the Army said in a press release, reflecting the Pentagon’s push to leverage private-sector technical expertise to address complex national security and defense challenges.

Members are reservists, can work remotely, and must complete a minimum of 112 hours of service annually.

“Their primary role is to serve as senior advisors to help drive the Army Transformation Initiative, concentrated on high-level technological strategies in areas such as cyber, AI and machine learning applications, and other data-driven capabilities,” Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Orlando Howard said in an email to Business Insider.

They join four other tech leaders who entered the Army Reserve one year ago: Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, former chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer at OpenAI.

All entered the Army as lieutenant colonels, a rank that takes most officers over a decade to reach. The senior entry, known as a “direct commission,” is not unheard of, though. Most military medical providers, chaplains, and veterinarians join at slightly more senior ranks, though they undergo their own version of boot camp, while Det 201 does not.

“The program selects applicants who are highly skilled civilian technology professionals at the executive or C-suite level to serve as part-time strategic advisers,” Howard said. “These officers use their advanced expertise in commercial tech and private industry to offer a different perspective and advise senior Army leaders on solving military problems.”

The implications here are obvious. Unlike, say, Gaza, the United States is not a cramped urban enclave the size of Philadelphia. It has not been under blockade since 2006, has not weathered a series of full-scale assaults since then, and has not recently been the scene of de-development, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. So it can’t use those excuses for embedding its civilian population in close, inextricable proximity to its military population. Nor can it use those excuses for blurring the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, or using the latter as shields for the former. But that’s what it regularly does–while pointing the finger of moral recrimination against the victims of its own frequent aggressions.

What’s being normalized here is the idea that Big Tech is as much a part of the United States military as any branch of the armed forces. Yes, it’s a civilian organization. But it’s also a military organization. It’s one, it’s the other, it’s both, and it’s neither–all at once. Ultimately, there’s no way to make a sharp differentiation between the civilian and military dimensions of Big Tech. There’s no need to. Big Tech is a military-civilian partnership. If the powers-that-be want to stress its military dimensions, they do so. If they prefer to stress its status as a civilian entity with non-combatant status, immune from military assault, they do that. There’s no need for a principled distinction because there’s no pretense at upholding any actual principle. There’s just a new principle for every situation. This is what people like to call “nuance.”

To the extent that any “principle” is involved, it’s that in bello rules–the rules of engagement in warfare, e.g., proportionality and discrimination–apply to our enemies but not to us, because our wars ipso facto satisfy ad bellum conditions  (the rules justifying resort to force), and when you do that, other rules cease to apply. How? Not because they facts warrant the claim, but because the West is ipso facto more civilized than its adversaries.

Since the West is liberal and the Rest are not, and the West is civilized and the Rest are not–since the West is heir to Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome and the Rest are not–nothing we do ever counts as aggression, and everything they do or omit does, even if it’s a response to what we do to them. This is why people believe that the Iranians are the aggressors in the recent war and the United States and Israel are in a posture of self-defense against them, even though the U.S. and Israel repeatedly attacked Iran, not the other way around. This of course isn’t a principle, but delusional special pleading. But it’s the dogma by which the West lives, produces, trades, and then annihilates the barbarian hordes around it.

The totally innocent building where I work, home to a nice, respectable German tech company with zero skeletons in its closet

It should be obvious but probably isn’t that recruiting Big Tech into the military makes the entire supply chain involving Cloudfare (San Francisco), Sutter Hill (Palo Alto), Facebook AI Research (New York), Palantir (Denver), Meta (Menlo Park, Calif.), Open AI (San Francisco), and Thinking Machines Lab (San Francisco) a set of military targets.

To the best of my (limited) knowledge, and setting aside cyberwarfare (a big thing to set aside), none of the United States’s direct adversaries–e.g., Iran–has the capacity to target this supply chain. No existing Iranian missile system could, for instance, hit Palo Alto or Denver. But if the Iranians developed that capacity, it’s hard to see what would be wrong with their targeting it in just the way and on just the rationale used by the Americans, the Israelis, and the Emiratis in their bombing campaigns in Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran (along with the Pakistanis in Afghanistan). Or rather, it’s hard to see what would be wrong with their doing it to us as long as you accept the legitimacy of our doing it to them in a war that we started. Maybe it’s all wrong, but quixotic peaceniks aside, non-bombing isn’t widely regarded as a feasible option. You might as well try to roll back AI.

Imagine that you’re an Iranian targeter targeting Palantir. If it’s now uncontroversial to accept a 1:100 target-to-collateral damage ratio (give or take) then if you target Palantir’s headquarters in Denver, and everyone in the supply chain is a target–because everyone makes a causal contribution to Palantir’s targeting you–then if Palantir’s Denver office has 500 employees, you could comfortably kill 50,000 Denver residents and not feel too bad about it. You’d just have to do your best to aim at the 500. And suppose you miss? Well, who’s counting, exactly? The UN?

It would, of course, be a silly strategy just to target Palantir and leave it at that. What about Meta and Cloudfare and all the rest? The United States is a target-rich environment. There’s a lot to hit, which means there’s a lot more than 50,000 people to kill. Try five million. Or fifty million. The more productive Americans are, and the more belligerent, the more of a target they become. The sky is the limit. So is a big hole in the ground.

Don’t worry! It’s just a thought-experiment. I’m not actually advocating that anyone bomb the shit out of us. I’m just saying: if we apply our own logic to ourselves, we’re led to annihilation at the hands of our enemies. All that saves us is their incapacity. 

That said, there are other things those adversaries can do short of bombing Palantir or Meta or whatever. But since this is a gruesome topic, and I don’t feel like getting in trouble for enumerating the tactical options involved, I won’t. I’ll leave it to your imagination. But I feel confident in saying that if you use your imagination, it’ll do wonders in this domain.

It’s tempting to hide things like this in euphemisms like “bridging the gap between private sector innovation and military modernization,” or achieving “transformation.” But what’s meant is that we’re putting our civilian capacities to military ends, and since the people who set those ends are imperialists bent on global hegemony, even at the price of genocide, torture, and mass displacement, what we’re doing is transforming our society into a gigantic hi-tech murder machine the likes of which the world has never seen. There’s nothing like the first time.

To justify it, we’ll have to keep inventing threats to chase and villains to kill–Iran today, China tomorrow, maybe North Korea the day after that. But if it’s all to be normalized, it has to be done with a minimum of hysteria. A little hysteria is fine, but no one can be hysterical all the time. Best to paint the critics of war as hysterics, and treat involvement in war as a boring, respectable Business Insidery affair. So it is here. So it is everywhere–everywhere except the battlefield, the trauma center, the refugee camp, and the grave.