Setting Terms with America’s Tech Giants

If China attacked Taiwan tomorrow, the question might not be which aircraft carrier sails first to the Pacific, but whether a private company will activate satellite coverage over a small island. As Ukraine does today, Taiwan could soon depend on the choices of executives running commercial networks that sustain modern life. Ukraine’s wartime resilience has relied on more than 40,000 Starlink terminals and the voluntary actions of technology firms that became, in effect, auxiliary actors of national defense.Strategic decisions once made only by governments—allocating aid, managing escalation, defining battlefield conditions—are now also being made by corporate boards and CEOs. These companies control platforms and infrastructure that shape the global balance of power. This is not an anomaly; it is the new reality of modern conflict.America’s largest technology firms now command tools that function like strategic assets, weapons, and utilities. Satellite constellations and undersea cables are the new sea lanes of the digital era. Cloud infrastructure and AI systems are the power grids of national productivity and security. Semiconductors are the jet fuel of artificial and human inte...