Featuring Shana Marshall, Edward Ongweso Jr., Jonathan Guyer, Madison Lipson, & William Hartung

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Bankers & Bombs: How Venture Capital and Private Equity are Feeding the Military Industrial Complex
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This event is co-sponsored by Security in Context and the Middle East Policy Forum at The George Washington University.

Ties between the financial sector and the weapons industry are not new. The very first venture capital firm in the US was founded to profit from new technologies developed for use in WWII ([link removed]) , and the role of military spending in turning Silicon Valley into a tech hub ([link removed]) is well documented. But the rapid proliferation in the number of VC and private equity firms investing in weapons and intelligence technologies is a more recent phenomenon. Firms like Veritas Capital, Civitas Group, and Paladin Capital specialize in steering more private capital into weapons development and pushing tech start-ups to develop military applications for their products.

Will this surge of private investment in weapons technologies divert scarce resources from addressing other urgent problems? Will it fast track the development of high tech systems like robotic weapons controlled via artificial intelligence that pose serious risks of automated killing outside of human control? And will it cement an alliance between the Pentagon, arms makers, and Silicon Valley that could supersize the military-industrial complex and bring it unprecedented influence?

September 2023

27
11:00 AM EDT
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Join us for a timely and important discussion with:

Shana Marshall

Shana Marshall is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and associate director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. Her research focuses on the political economy of militaries in Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE, and has appeared in The Middle East Report, Jadaliyya, and the Carnegie Middle East Center.

Edward Ongweso Jr.

Edward Ongweso Jr is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, focusing on finance, technology, and labor. He is currently the finance editor at Logic(s) magazine and was previously a staff writer at Motherboard, VICE's tech desk. He's also the co-host of This Machine Kills, a podcast focused on the political economy of technological innovation.

Jonathan Guyer

Jonathan Guyer is a senior foreign policy writer at Vox. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at the American Prospect, where as managing editor he reported on Biden’s and Trump's foreign policy teams. His accountability stories have won top prizes from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and Society of Professional Journalists.

Madison Lipson

Madison Lipson is a research analyst at Swaps Monitor Publications, a financial data vendor in New York City. She recently completed a masters in International Business and Negotiation at the Universidad de Salamanca. Her research focuses on the effect reconciliation and peacebuilding have on domestic security in post-conflict states.

William Hartung (Moderator)

William D. Hartung is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His work focuses on the arms industry and U.S. military budget. He is the author of "Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex" (Nation Books, 2011), and the co-editor of "Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War"(Paradigm Press, 2008).

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