The Pentagon’s IPO for War: Now With 100% More Cowbell

The Pentagon’s acquisition system is being overhauled into a “Warfighting Acquisition System,” turbocharging weapons production, slashing bureaucracy, and empowering officials to deliver arms at “wartime speed.” Portfolio Acquisition Executives now wield sweeping authority, startups are courted like prom queens, and the defense industrial base is being rebranded as Silicon Valley with missiles.

So much for the “peace president”—Trump’s arsenal of freedom looks more like an IPO for war, where venture capital meets missile launchers and bureaucrats cosplay as battlefield commanders.

Forging the Arsenal of Freedom

Related:

FoRGED Act Documentation

Abundance or scarcity?

Abundance is a new book that has been attracting attention and debate among mainstream economists and politicians.  It aims to explain to Democrat members in the US why their party lost the election to Trump (narrow as that result was).  The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, writers at very liberal mainstream The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively, argue that it was because the Democrats and supporters of ‘liberal democracy’ have lost their ability in government to carry out great projects that could deliver the things and services that working people (called the ‘middle class’ in America) need.

Abundance or scarcity?

AI going DeepSeek

Most readers will know the news by now. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, released an AI model called R1 that is comparable in ability to the best models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, but was trained at a radically lower cost and using less than state-of-the art GPU chips. DeepSeek also made public enough of the details of the model that others can run it on their own computers without charge.

AI going DeepSeek

Previously:

Interview with Deepseek Founder: We’re Done Following. It’s Time to Lead

Interview with Deepseek Founder: We’re Done Following. It’s Time to Lead

Interview with Deepseek Founder: We’re Done Following. It’s Time to Lead

An Yong: After your price cuts, ByteDance was the first to follow, suggesting they felt threatened. How do you view the new competitive landscape between startups and giants?

Liang Wenfeng: To be honest, we don’t really care about it. Lowering prices was just something we did along the way. Providing cloud services isn’t our main goal—achieving AGI is. So far, we haven’t seen any groundbreaking solutions. Giants have users, but their cash cows also shackle them, making them ripe for disruption.

Related:

DeepSeek’s Geopolitical Impacts