In a recent blog post for Opiniojuris, PLATFORM WARS' Marijn Hoijtink and Jasper van der Kist reflect on the growing importance of the platform model in defense tech and warfare, drawing analogies to other domains in which platform corporations have gained extraordinary market power in recent years.
They argue that “adopting the platform model in defense will likely lead to new monopolies and dependencies, which will be difficult to revert once the software platforms running military hardware and operations are in the hands of only a handful of defense tech companies.”
As they highlight, a critical reason for that is the so-called network and lock-in effects typical for the platform business model, which enable corporations to scale and make it “too costly to change software or migrate to another platform.” While these mechanisms are already problematic in other domains, they deserve special attention in the context of war as they significantly impact military decision-making, questions of accountability, and the prominently invoked “responsible use of military AI.”
Finally, diving deeper into the logics of the defense tech and their outspoken views on the current geopolitical situation, particularly the War in Ukraine and great power competition with China, they conclude that “the drive towards platformization in the defense sector brings together two value narratives. The first is financial and pretty straightforward: war is incredibly profitable. On the other hand, the almost religious faith that peace – understood as the absence of war – can only be realized by readying oneself for the next virtuous war.”
Check out the full article here.
