From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, across Silicon Valley, tech companies are pursuing contracts with the US military.

Kevin Rus on a cautionary tale of where that can lead.

It's Wednesday, March 6th.

So I'm a tech columnist. I spend a lot of time talking with and looking at the big tech companies and where they're going.

And one of the most interesting threads that's come up in the past year or so is this question of how Silicon Valley should engage with the government and with the military specifically.

And I think we're at a point right now where the government is saying we want the things that you're building.

We want you to be part of our modernization efforts. And within some of these companies, there's a sort of growing divide between the management of the companies and what they want for their business.

And some of the people actually building this technology, the engineers who are working on these advanced systems that are in hot demand by the military and other government agencies.

And we just saw this play out in a pretty meaningful way at Microsoft.

What happened there?

Exactly. So last year Microsoft signed a contract with the Department of Defense to use a technology called HoloLens in the Army.

Good morning, everyone. A few years ago, we started asking ourselves, could we make things so simple that technology would just disappear?

And HoloLens was originally developed. It's kind of like a headset for augmented reality.

Could we place your digital content right into your world, right into your life with more reality than ever before?

I saw a demo of this a couple years ago and they were touting it as kind of the next generation of gaming.

Welcome to a new era of Windows. Welcome to Windows holographic.

People were wearing HoloLens and you would be swinging your imaginary sword and imaginary monsters, but it all looked like it was sort of happening right there in your living room.

And last year Microsoft signed a contract to develop HoloLens technology for use on the battlefield.

To give soldiers the ability to wear these headsets and get information about their surroundings and to increase the lethality of the soldiers on the battlefield.

So the technology will specifically be deployed within the military so that American soldiers are better at killing the enemy.

That's the way it's described in the contract, yes.

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