Thoughts on being pro defence and national security pilled
Some of the most important work happening anywhere right now is being done at companies like Anduril and Palantir. Drones, autonomous systems, serious software for the people whose actual job is keeping the free world standing.
And somehow the fact that this matters is still up for debate.
I first properly clashed on this with a friend at Oxford. I can't even remember how we got onto it, but at some point it was clear she wasn't bothered by the values of a large authoritarian state seeping into the West, didn't think sovereignty counted for much, and didn't really clock that a West which stops taking its own security seriously is basically an open door for terrorists and bad actors.
I couldn't let it go.
And the longer I've been here, the more I've realised how alone that puts me. Some of it is just where I landed: Wadham is about as left-leaning as colleges come, sitting inside Oxford, which was hardly a hotbed of the right to begin with. Lots of clever people, near-total agreement, and me as the odd one out.
So this is me trying to work out, as honestly as I can, why I'm standing on the opposite side of nearly everyone I know.
What I actually believe
Let me start with what I'm actually sure of, because there isn't loads of it.
Sovereignty. A free country gets to decide what it is. It shouldn't have to quietly dissolve itself into whoever happens to be strongest that decade.
Ordered liberty and free markets, roughly the American version of both. Free speech, no censorship, capitalism that actually rewards building things, people mostly left alone to get on with their lives. The boring, load-bearing stuff you only notice once it's gone.
And the big one, the thing everything else hangs off: people should be able to choose their government, and then change their minds. Throw the bums out. Look at a decision that aged badly and reverse it. A society where ordinary people can still push back against the people in charge is, to me, the entire point.
Here's what my friend didn't see (or didn't care about): none of this defends itself.
Free societies aren't the default setting of the world. They're rare, recent, and fragile, and they exist because in every generation enough people decide they're worth defending. That, to me, is what national security actually is. Not a boot on anyone's neck. The thing standing between an open society and the people who'd happily slam it shut.
And if there's going to be a hard edge keeping the free world free, I'd much rather the good guys had the best technology, the best deterrent, and the best people. Peace comes from strength, not from hoping the other lot stay nice.
The obvious hole: these firms grow by selling more, so the incentives tilt towards conflict, lobbying and all. Probably true, but a West that won't let them build just gets out-built and then outgunned, which costs more lives than the lobbying ever will. So I bite the bullet: let them build, and bind the incentive like any other power, keeping the people who profit from conflict away from the call on when there's conflict. How much the lobbying really distorts things I'm not sure, but my gut says it's a price worth paying.
What national security actually is (and what it isn't)
When people my age hear "national security" they picture surveillance. Cameras everywhere, your messages getting read, the state poking around in your business. I'll be honest, some of that is real. Domestic security does sometimes have to look inward. You can't catch a threat that's already inside your country while promising never to look inside it.
But "the state has power" was never an argument for giving it none. It's an argument for binding it.
The freedoms I listed up there are the leash. A security service in a free country answers to courts, to a free press, to elections it can't cancel. That's the actual difference between us and the authoritarian model my friend shrugged at: not that we don't have power, but that ours is accountable and theirs isn't. We get to watch the people watching us. They don't.
I'll own the hole in that, though: the leash leaks. Super-injunctions and files locked away for fifty years mean the public often can't see what it's meant to be checking, and real abuse has usually only surfaced because someone on the inside broke the law to force it. I think that's a feature, not a bug: a free country isn't one where it never happens, it's one where the person who drags it into the open gets a trial and a press, instead of just disappearing. The exit again, pointed back the other way.
Where that line sits, I don't really know. What if AI did the first pass, and only the genuinely dangerous messages ever got flagged for a human to look at? Maybe that's a real fix, maybe it's just mass surveillance with extra steps. Open question.
Worth saying before I move on: surveillance and the foreign-policy stuff coming up are two separate arguments, and you can buy one without the other.
The hardest part
The bit I actually find hard, the bit I don't think anyone should ever say lightly, is that innocent people sometimes die.
We should do everything humanly possible to stop that, and when it happens it's awful. Full stop, no caveats. But the honest truth is that when you go after the people actively trying to kill us, the terrorists and the genuinely bad actors, you don't always get a clean shot, and sometimes people who did nothing wrong get caught in it.
It's a horrible call to have to make, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But I land, uncomfortably, on the side that the trade is usually worth it. A West that refuses to act at all, that lets people planning mass murder carry on untouched because acting carries risk, ends up with more innocent people dead, not fewer. The lives count on both sides of the ledger, and doing nothing is also a choice with a body count.
What I'd never sign up for is treating any of it as easy, or clean, or cost-free. It's the worst part of an argument I still believe in.
The things I haven't figured out
And here's where the certainty runs out.
I don't know where I stand on intervention.
Part of me thinks: if I actually believe people should choose their own government, that has to include them choosing things I don't like. I can't be a champion of self-determination only when people self-determine the outcome I was hoping for. That's not a principle. That's a preference with better PR.
But then, what about a regime that takes power and welds the door shut behind it? No choosing, no changing your mind, no throwing anyone out, ever. That's the exact thing I said I care about most, being trampled right in front of me, and something in me refuses to just sit and watch.
I think, and I'm genuinely working this out as I type, that my real line was never about outcomes at all.
It's about the exit. A free people can choose something I think is wrong, and that's their right, as long as they can unchoose it later. What I can't stomach is the door being welded shut. Defend the exit, not the outcome.
Which drags me to the one I keep chewing on: Afghanistan. My gut says we shouldn't have left. But when I actually interrogate that, I'm not sure what's underneath it. Is it that I wanted our way of doing things to win, which, if I'm honest, cuts clean against everything I just said about letting people choose? Or is it something I can actually stand behind: that we made a promise to people who bet their lives on us, women especially, and walking out welded the door shut behind them? I don't know enough history to plant a confident flag here, and I'm not going to fake one. But I think the second version is the one I actually mean, and clocking the gap between those two is, honestly, most of what this whole post has been.
And one more I'll flag: defending the good sometimes means getting into bed with the bad, funding dodgy rebels, leaning on private armies, backing one villain to stop a worse one, and I've no idea where that line falls.
Where I land
So no, I haven't tied this up nicely, and I don't want to, because it'd be a lie and the people I most want to reach would smell it instantly.
But I know which way I'm pointed. For everything I can't resolve about the how, I'm not remotely confused about the why. Free societies are worth defending. They don't defend themselves.
I'm compelled to work in defence some day.
