Are we heading towards World War III?

Or maybe we're already in Cold War II.

This interview was recorded before the recent US-Israeli attack on Iran, but that has only made it all the more

relevant. For the last few years, inside the US military industrial complex, there's been a kind

of quiet struggle going on. On the one hand, you've got the primes. You know them, you love them.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics.

These are the companies that make the big things, mostly, for the US defense sector, planes, missiles, armoured personnel carriers, and so on.

On the other hand, there are another collection of defence companies. You've got Anderil,

Palantir, even SpaceX, to some extent. These come out of Silicon Valley and they pride themselves

on their agility, their ability to pivot to the next big thing in war. They say that the primes

are bloated and slow and anti-competitive, to the extent that one

panentee executive even said that there were two places in the world that still practiced

communism, Cuba and the Department of War. To help me understand all of this, whether or not drones really are the future of warfare,

who exactly is playing the part of the Soviet Union in this new Cold War, and whether the US

and Israel might be about to succeed or fail in their attacks on Iran. I spoke to Susanna

Glickman. She's written widely on the

paradoxes of the military industrial complex, the history of computers, and has even contributed

research on the science of quantum algorithms. So, Susanna Glickman.

Zanah Glickman, welcome to do your own research.

Thanks so much for having me.

We've had a lot in the last year or so from particularly Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth,

about needing to pivot the U.S. military back towards increasing lethality and increasing

...