The Other Arms Race

In 2024 the world spent $2.7 trillion on weapons, logistics, intelligence infrastructure, contractor margins, and the bureaucratic machinery of organized violence. This is a staggering number. It’s an exhausting number. It’s an investment in institutional muscle memory that takes an outsized toll on the mental, spiritual, and economic health of the entire global economy.

It is also accelerating. Global military spending has increased every single year for the past decade, up 37% since 2015. The United States alone spent nearly $1 trillion, more than the next ten countries combined. Meanwhile, the US has accumulated $36 trillion in national debt, a significant portion of which traces to two decades of post-9/11 wars estimated to have cost $8 trillion. Wars that destabilized entire regions, produced none of their stated outcomes, and whose costs continue to compound through interest, veteran care, and the security architecture built to manage the blowback they generated.

Yet we still fund the economies of death and destruction out of reflex and hypernormalized desensitization. Supply chains, treaties, career tracks, graduate programs, lobbyists, satellite systems, and cultural mythology all conspire to make the production and projection of lethal force feel like the inevitable, prudent, adult thing to invest in.

We are glued to death and destruction because it’s the best way to manage a population. Violence and existential threat garner an outsized response in our amygdalas. It keeps us in shock, in a perceived state of survival mode, too exhausted to imagine alternatives. The defense lobby doesn’t just buy votes. It buys our nervous systems. It makes the trillion-dollar death machine feel like gravity: invisible, inevitable, simply the way things are.

And now we are drafting the most powerful technology in human history into the same machine.

Anduril Industries, backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, recently valued at $30 billion, with a new round reportedly pushing that toward $60 billion, is building a five-million-square-foot weapons factory designed to produce tens of thousands of autonomous drones. Palantir’s AI, Maven, is the connective tissue of the modern battlefield, fusing satellite data and targeting coordinates so that a single soldier can command dozens of autonomous weapons with a few clicks. This week the Pentagon ordered Palantir to strip Anthropic’s Claude model from it following a dispute over AI safety guardrails. Shield AI is flying F-16s with no pilot. OpenAI has entered defense contracts. The 2025 National Defense Authorization Act cleared the legal runway for all of it, mandating the Pentagon accelerate AI adoption across weapons systems, logistics, and threat detection. The best engineering talent in the world. The most transformative general-purpose technology ever built. Pointed, with extraordinary focus and capital, at the optimization of killing.

This is the context. This is what they are choosing.

Yet we still fund the economies of death and destruction because even when the human joy and experience economy is objectively bigger, healthier, and more inspiring on every measurable front, the death machine has the procurement pipeline, the lobbying apparatus, the margins, and the amygdala advantage.

The joy economy beat the death economy a long time ago. We just haven’t organized the money or the narrative accordingly, and we are facing a frightening possibility: that the gravitational pull of the death economy gets strong enough to rebalance the scales in a dark, undesirable direction.

When I invoke the “joy economy” I mean the activities that expand someone’s horizons culturally, emotionally, and experientially: art, music, dance, connection, tourism, fitness, entertainment, and more. Things that fulfill our basic needs for love, work, play, and enrichment of the mind, body, and soul.

Tourism alone generated $11.7 trillion in 2025, nearly five times the entire global defense budget, supporting 371 million jobs, more than the entire population of the United States. The global entertainment and media industry hit $3 trillion last year. The wellness economy, fitness, mental health, nutrition, healing, reached $6.8 trillion and is growing toward $10 trillion by 2029. Add sports, food culture, video games, art, live music, dance… Stack it all together and you are looking at an economy based on human experience and pursuing life to the fullest north of $25 trillion. An economy humans built because they wanted it, that requires no conscription and no propaganda to sustain, that employs one in ten people on the planet, and that exists entirely in service of the species-level need to feel alive.

That institutional muscle memory for violence overrides our embedded biological drive by a long shot in the boardrooms and the defense appropriations committees, but the market tells the truth anyway. People vote with their feet, their wallets, and their weekends. They go to concerts. They book the trip. They find the trail, the gym, the festival, the ceremony. The demand signal is not ambiguous. The supply side just hasn’t been organized with the same force of capital, policy, and cultural will we organized around the death machine.

The joy economy isn’t waiting for permission. It’s already the largest economy on earth. It just doesn’t have a procurement pipeline.

And here is the thing about AI that nobody seems to want to say plainly: the same technology being drafted into autonomous weapons is the first technology in human history capable of actually solving the last-mile distribution problem for human flourishing.

A therapist in your pocket, available at 3am, who knows your history. Personalized movement coaching that adapts to your body and your injuries. Creative tools that give anyone with a phone the production capacity once reserved for people with studios and labels. Nature guides that turn any park into a living classroom. Goal scaffolding that doesn’t require a $300/hour life coach. Mental health care that scales to the billion people who currently have no access to it whatsoever.

The technology exists. The capability is here. The only thing being decided right now, in the boardrooms, in the appropriations committees, in the venture capital partnerships between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon, is which direction we point it.

That is the choice. It is being made, actively, right now, by a very small number of people. And most of the humans whose lives depend on that choice don’t know it’s happening.