Decades ago, Alexander Cockburn wrote a column pointing out that the true believers in the power and precision of the defence industry’s latest weaponry tend to be (a) their gullible government customers and (b) people on the left, who can be relied on to have an “Omigod, now look what they’ve come up with” response. In reality, the latest new-fangled Pentagon weapons often don’t work anywhere near as well as advertised. However, and as the F-35 saga has shown, the arms industry can still make mountains of money out of its unkept promises.
Cockburn’s warning came to mind in the light of the recent announcement by Defence Minister Judith Collins that the government’s massive $9 billion outlay on new defence spending will offer our private sector tech firms a whole range of profitable opportunities. The worry here is not merely that the Luxon government seems willing to militarise this country’s investment in science, although that is terrifying in itself. The added concern is that government almost certainly lacks the in-house expertise to ensure that taxpayers get value for money from the billions being lavished on Defence.
Will the whizbang stuff that we buy and invest in truly function as promised? In the same week that Collins made her announcement, Reuters was reporting that serious concerns had been raised (within a US Army report released on September 5, 2025) that the US battlefield communication system (called Next Generation Command and Control or NGC2) was prone to being hacked. NGC2 is being devised for the Pentagon by Anduril, a leading US defence technology firm. The major sub-contractors on the project are Palantir (the firm owned by Peter Thiel) and Microsoft. As the Breaking Defense news site reported:
….The [US Army]document said the NGC2 platform “in its current state, exhibits critical deficiencies in fundamental security controls, processes, and governance. These issues collectively create a significant risk to data, mission operations, and personnel by rendering the system vulnerable to insider threats, external attacks, and data spillage,” the document said. …The Army “lack[s] the visibility and controls necessary to ensure the security and integrity of the platform. There seems to be a rush to get capabilities into the system without actual oversight or process to do it, putting greater risk as this system further increases this risk.”
Palantir quickly claimed that the problems detected had been addressed, and fixed. Anduril released a statement to the same effect. This still begs some key questions. Such as (a) how did a system containing such flaws get to such an advanced stage of development, and (b) would those flaws have persisted if the US Army analysis had not succeeded in detecting them?
Does New Zealand have a track record of healthy scepticism in its prior dealings with the key players in US defence technology? Not at all. A previous National government was so star struck by Peter Thiel that it gave him citizenship, a generous gesture from which this country has not benefitted in any visible way at all. (Did Thiel, a major Republican donor, intercede on New Zealand’s behalf over the Trump tariffs? Apparently not.) One can safely assume that our tech companies – and the Luxon government writing the cheques – would jump at any chance of becoming sub-contractors on any military-tech projects that Palantir and its Silicon Valley mates may have in mind.
To repeat: does the MoD possess the expertise to assess whether the battlefields-of-the-future gizmos (on which it is so keen to lavish billions of taxpayer dollars) would actually work as promised under fire?
Op shop security hi-jinks
In case anyone thinks I’m casting aspersions on the in-house competence of our Defence and security intelligence agencies, you’d be dead right about that. Last week’s scoop on Newsroom by Nicky Hager gave fresh reason for concern about whether our spooks know their asses from their elbows when it comes to matters of national (and international) security.
Incredibly, as Hager revealed, the detailed, hand -written minutes from a May 2024 top secret meeting held in Portsmouth England between the Five Eyes security intelligence partners, somehow found their way into a stack of papers found in a Salvation Army op shop in Lower Hutt.
To no-one’s surprise, these papers reveal that China is the intended target of the West’s military and security planning. Under the Morrison government, Australia’s then Defence Minister Peter Dutton had been candid about Canberra’s desire to help develop a long range force projection capability aimed at China. It is useful to have written evidence that (when we go behind closed doors) New Zealand regards our main trading partner in the same paranoid light. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. Think about it. We earn billions selling dairy products and logs to China, and then use those profits to buy and invest in the long range military means to kill our best customers. Moral issues aside, its not a sustainable export plan.
BTW our multi-billion billion investment in Defence has nothing to do with the old WWII concept of repelling a foreign invasion. These days, it is all about being able to launch an attack on a target – China- located far from our shores. Quite some time ago, we stopped talking about the defence of the homeland.
Losing Control
Much of the content of Hager’s Portsmouth papers had to do with progress on battlefield command and control systems. Three dimensions of this work were discussed: GIDE, Project Olympus and Bold Quest. Oddly, while such hush hush terms rarely (if ever) make into the defence and security discourse here, ample information about them in openly available on US defence industry and official US War Department websites.
Before explaining each of those terms, here’s some background info. I referred above to NGC2, the Anduril/Palantir “next generation” battlefield command and control system. Think of this as being the inward-facing US version of its closely related, outward-facing global counterpart called CJADC2, which is the mercifully brief acronym for the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control system that involves New Zealand and the other Five Eyes partners.
Interestingly, the “Combined” part of the acronym is intended to signify that in the conflicts contemplated in future, the US sees a compelling need for all allied forces to be integrated within the same system, in which the key battlefield decisions can then be made by US commanders, who wilk receive “force multiplier” benefits from this level of integration. Here’s the US reasoning for the rebrand:
The focus on the “C” follows what DoD was tasked to do in the National Defence Strategy, which says that interoperable command, control, communications and computers (C4) warfighting capabilities need to be developed with allies and partners to “facilitate global force integration and supportive and combined joint operations,” says Lt. General Mary F. O’Brien. [O’Brien is the Director of the J6 Command for Control, Communications, and Computers/Cyber within the US Joint Chiefs of Staff.]
Moreover
O’Brien also said [she was speaking only a few months prior to the Portsmouth Five Eyes conference]that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are working closely with the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance on how to share applications and data. It is also working with NATO on how to “influence our CJADC2 reference architecture.”
“We’re working very closely with a lot of our partners who want to know what are we going to build to so that their capabilities will be complementary,” she said. “And so the ‘C’ is absolutely for combined, highlighting that we can’t build something and then reverse engineer some sort of all interoperable bolted-on piece — it’s just not going to work in the way we’re designing the command-and-control capabilities for the future.”
There is much more on the US Defense News site along the same lines. It throws a revealing light on what Defence Minister Judith Collins is promoting. It indicates that what New Zealand’s high tech firms can achieve – at best – in this area by way of sub-contracting work with joint US /UK partners, will be serving to enhance the competence of the US war fighting machine under the ultimate battlefield control of US commanders. This road may be paved with gold, but it leads to subservience, not independence.
Tightening The Net
Finally, here’s a brief summary of the terms cited in the Portsmouth papers discovered by Hager.
Bold Quest. This is described on the official US War Department website in these terms : “Bold Quest is an exercise that evolves [CJADC2] Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control tactics, techniques, and capabilities, allowing the U.S., our allies, and partners to build trust, improve interoperability, and advance innovative and resilient capabilities.”
Project Olympus. Elsewhere, the US War Department describes Project Olympus as being a response to the challenges of integrating partner nations and their security agencies within the overall American CJADC2 command structure.
That ability to work seamlessly across warfighting domains and theatres with a range of partners is key to maintaining the United States’ enduring strength around the globe. …. Disparate technologies among forces along with policy hurdles have presented a perennial challenge for integrating partner nations onto a single network. Project Olympus, a Joint Staff J-6-led initiative [i.e. again, under the direction of Lt- General Mary F. O’Brien mentioned above] is working to solve these challenges through digital transformation initiatives that synchronize current warfighting capabilities and enhanced security frameworks that manage access to data at the end-user level.
GIDE. This acronym stands for Global Information Dominance Experiment and IMO, it is the most interesting of the three terms cited in the Portsmouth papers. That’s because GIDE is evidently a series of constantly evolving experiments in command and control optimisation. Meaning: there is no final iteration of GIDE. Here’s a very useful archive of the multiple experiments being carried out under the GIDE umbrella. A principle called Zero Trust is guiding all of the GIDE work. This principle would ensure that nations that may be friendly but are lacking in reliable security protocols – hello, New Zealand – are given only limited, least privileged access to the inner sanctum of the GIDE contracting process.
The Department of Defense’s Zero Trust strategy is designed to defend against sophisticated, persistent threats by eliminating implicit trust at every level of the digital environment. It emphasizes verifying every access request, enforcing least-privilege access, and assuming adversaries may already be inside the network.
OK, lets take a typical GIDE example. This one is about the potential uses of Large Language Models and generative AI for functions that include (but are not limited to) the further automation of CJADC2 functions and capabilities.
Reportedly, this AI dimension of GIDE is being managed by the Defense Innovation Unit, which is the Pentagon’s outreach arm to Silicon Valley, and to other centres of private-sector innovation across the US. Presumably, the Defense Innovation Unit would also be the ultimate contact point for the New Zealand tech companies that Judith Collins is urging to seek partners in the US and the United Kingdom, in order to sub-contract for the CJADC2 work outlined above.
It should be obvious from the above that the nature of the integrated military command and control systems being developed by the US – with the willing participation of the Luxon government – will inevitably erode the ability of New Zealand to make independent decisions about our defence and security. This will especially be the case if we ever need to use this wildly expensive Defence gear in the context of an actual shooting war.
The erosion of our independence to the degree indicated by the Portsmouth papers is simply not worth the 30 pieces of silver that are being thrown in the direction of our high tech companies.
Hello, Goodbye
No one could ever accuse the Scottish band Life Without Buildings of overstaying their welcomer. They formed at an art school in Glasgow, released one album called Any Other City in 2001, and immediately split up because success was starting to get in the way of what they really wanted to do. For singer Sue Tompkins, that meant pursuing a career as a painter and experimental sound artist. She’s done OK at it.
Down the years though, the love for Life Without Buildings has never gone away. Initially, the band had played bass-driven, motorik-style instrumentals before they made the crucial decision to enlist Tompkins, a fellow art school student. She contributed a unique fusion of scat singing, exclamations, incantations (“I’m looking in your eyes!”) and speaking in tongues.
About five years ago, some rare TV footage surfaced of the band. Here’s their live version of “New Town” :
Last week, the last song that the band recorded – a rarity called “Love Trinity” known only to collectors and hardcore LWB fans – finally got an official re-release. It is great to have anything further LWB music. But maybe Tompkins was right to fold things up before her style became a formula.