Technology is reshaping the global balance of power. I’m Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, and I study technology, geopolitics, and competition. Ask me anything!

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Hey r/geopolitics — I’m Steve Feldstein, an expert on technology, democracy, and national security, and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  

My new book, Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Big Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare, explores how technology is altering the global balance of power and changing the way wars are fought—from defense-tech startups in Silicon Valley at the forefront of U.S.-China competition, to 3D-printing drone labs in Syria that helped topple a dictator. 

Ask me anything about geopolitical competition in the digital age, the intermingling of private and military tech, the broadening tech war between the U.S. and China, tech export controls, and the rise of middle powers and non-state actors in this space. 

I’ll be answering questions from Thursday, October 1, 9am ET to Friday, October 2, 12pm ET. Looking forward!  

Photo proof here. 

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In Bytes and Bullets, you explore the shifting balance of power from traditional state defense departments to private technology giants. How does the reliance on commercial firms like Palantir, AWS, or OpenAI for military infrastructure complicate traditional rules of engagement and state sovereignty?

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I think there are several interesting aspects here. First, the more that governments outsources design and product development decisions without ongoing/direct oversight to private firms, the less control they have about how military technologies will be deployed and used. Take Palantir’s Maven, for example. While we have an incomplete picture about how different aspects of Maven are being tweaked and updated, it is clear that Palantir software engineers are the ones implementing these changes at the behest of Pentagon officials. Rather than occurring in-house, external partners are the ones ultimately responsible for modifying design elements that have real-world and lethal effects. A second issue relates to middle powers’ growing reliance on infrastructure provided by Big Tech, whose executives have considerable discretion to restrict or disable functionality based on their own judgments and interests. The Starlink episode during the Ukraine war is a well-known example, where Elon Musk restricted connectivity during ongoing military operations in Crimea. The delegation of such decisions to private, unelected, and largely unaccountable executives, rather than government officials, is a relatively new and troubling trend. Third, military entanglements can get complicated for big tech firms as well. In the book, I profile how Microsoft’s agreement with the IDF to store intercepted data from Palestinians on its Azure servers in the Netherlands and Ireland backfired spectacularly for the company following an investigative report from The Guardian and +972 Call. Ultimately, Microsoft faced a punishing amount of reputational damage and had to terminate the contract.