The Tartan

Author’s Note: This may bear some small resemblance to an assignment for a class I currently take. Said resemblance is entirely coincidental and ought not be examined closely by any professors of mine.

I have been thinking about getting a Lockheed internship. Not in the sense that I am “applying” to their “positions” due to my “qualifications.” I mean that I’m thinking about the abstract concept of applying for, and accepting, internships at defense companies.

This school has the unfortunate trope that its students, particularly those in engineering, are callous and indifferent about the effect that their work has on society. The archetype of the money-hungry CIT or SCS student who doesn’t care about science and only wants that high-paying gig at Dr. Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated is well-established. I am here to provide a take nobody is asking for.

Several weeks ago, there was a protest in front of Hamerschlag Hall because Lockheed Martin was hosting a recruiting event on our campus. The speakers talked of Carnegie Mellon’s deep involvement in defense research, focusing on how Lockheed’s products are being used to kill civilians in Gaza. Leaflets passed around at the event read, “With just one internship at Lockheed Martin, you too can be complicit in the slaughter of endless civilians across the Global South!”

I used to feel that it was reasonable, if not even morally appropriate, to condemn those who got jobs in the military industrial complex. But I had peers that were attending that event, not protesting. Condemning the decision to work for Lockheed is easy when those are hypothetical people, but harder when they’ve given you homework answers. Maybe I’m just morally spineless and I should stop talking with these people, or maybe I was naive and arrogant for thinking there was anything wrong with working at Lockheed in the first place.

Personally, I do not want to work at Lockheed, nor would I ever. The way I’ve bridged this contradiction is by realizing that people who get tech jobs in defense are just operating in the same space of cognitive dissonance we are all in. It’s the headspace we all must enter when trying to rationalize our lack of responsibility for all the global suffering that happens for our own personal enrichment. It feels wrongs to point fingers when they’re not the only ones benefiting from American military hegemony.

Let me clarify my position a bit more. I think it’s absolutely fair to condemn people with high-ranking jobs in these companies. These people and their companies often have a very direct and active role in facilitating armed conflict. They’re not passive, neutral parties selling bullets to the highest bidder (which, to be clear, I also think is morally condemnable). Often, they are also deliberately using their power to create a world where their products are more necessary. This grand tradition of politically-expedient arms dealers began in the early 1900s, with Basil Zaharoff’s decision to deliberately play the European powers off of each other to sell more of his cannons. He profited off the arms race that led Europe into World War I. There are people for whom global conflict increases their profits and vice versa; this is probably the closest thing to evil that actually exists in the real world.

But do we have the moral right to condemn the individuals who have any old job at Lockheed? Does the entry-level technician, or newly hired process engineer have the same level culpability for the deaths that occur in the wars fought with the weapons they worked on?

I can’t think of any argument which doesn’t demand some condemnation of the decision to work for Lockheed. But the very same argument which condemns my classmates can pretty easily be used to condemn me as well.

Our unfathomably complex society is made possible by a web of innovation and ideas that allows us to do things like change the climate, treat cancer, and send missiles at hospitals. Nobody is fully removed from culpability because everything in our world is connected. And choosing to get a degree in science or engineering, we are preparing ourselves for a career that is deeply involved with that web. A student who gets an internship at Lockheed does indeed bear some responsibility for the civilian deaths that occur in front of the barrel of an American-made jet (do jets have barrels?), but in another sense, don’t we all?

What if you designed the cooling system on the furnace where they casted the wheels of the train that hauled the missiles to the airfield? What if you wrote the code for the software that let researchers simulate the aerodynamics of the rudder of the wing of the plane that took those bombs overseas? What if you’re the civil engineer who made the HVAC system for the offices where the lawyers hammered out the contract to sell their company’s weapons to the government? Sure, those engineers may seem more distant from any atrocity than, say, the project leader who designed the plane which dropped the bomb or the technician who assembled it — but without the work of all those people I mentioned, the bombs couldn’t have traveled from Omaha to Oman. There’s no clear barrier between those who are complicit and those who are not, there’s only a spectrum between victim and perpetrator on which we all fall. Some people choose to draw the line between the guilty and innocent at “person who gets a job at a defense company,” but that line is ultimately arbitrary.

The ethics of this don’t get any easier when you consider the actual stuff that defense companies make. What if you’re on the Lockheed team that developed the Hellfire R9X knife missile? If you’re not a weird sicko for military technology (or a listener of “Behind the Bastards”) you’ve probably never heard of it. It is (I promise am not joking) a missile filled with six gigantic sharp blades that fly radially outward upon impact; no payload, no explosion, minimal collateral damage. The U.S. government has never confirmed its use in an assassination, and its suspected uses have only been pieced together by journalists. When a high-profile Al-Qaeda leader was killed on the balcony of his villa in August 2022, his room was shredded and so presumably was he. But his wife and children across the house survived, and no civilian casualties were reported by the U.S. military.

The implications that there is such a thing as an “ethical” drone strike feels absurd, and the idea that you are somehow a good guy for building, I cannot stress this enough, a missile filled with giant knives, feels ridiculous. But strictly speaking, the mad geniuses behind the R9X Hellfire have very likely “saved” the lives of those civilians who might have been killed by a conventional missile.

A lot of the jobs at a defense company seem pretty neutral on their own, actually. There is a lot of work that gets done at a defense company that doesn’t strictly involve making newer and deadlier weapons. You need people to develop radar systems, make the bombs safe so they don’t accidentally blow up, run the I.T. department, and all sorts of other things that merely facilitate the construction and delivery of weapons — and like I said, won’t all of our jobs do that to some extent?

The problem isn’t that these are evil people taking evil jobs. The problem is that these jobs are being done in the context of a society where blowing up other people is a common means to an end. Anybody who makes, builds, or fixes anything — not just weapons — is a part of that society and thus bears some responsibility.

This societal diffusion of responsibility is why every bad thing has ever happened. You aren’t responsible for the terrible working conditions of the factory where your socks are made, but you bought them didn’t you? You’re not responsible for the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent million deaths, but you fill your car at the gas station, don’t you? I don’t bring these up to imply that there aren’t some people who have more responsibility, or to defend people with more active roles in these atrocities. I’m instead trying to show that it’s not a debate about who is guilty or innocent. You live in America right now (and statistically speaking, you’re also college-educated), so you bear at least a little responsibility.

Globally, weapons sales are increasing and military spending is just ballooning, due to a combination of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, and just good-old-fashioned arms racing between countries that used to be on the global periphery but are now trying to establish their own regional military presence. This demands that more people be qualified to develop new weapons tech, build said weapons, and oversee the building of said weapons. Bombs on bombs on bombs, and there’s a hell of a lot of money to be made in it all.

Sometimes, condemning people who work in defense feels an attempt to throw stones to feel better about our own moral culpability, and these people are just a convenient (and obvious) target. It can definitely be argued that they are a bit more responsible by actually accepting a paycheck from the company that makes the weapons — I won’t argue that that’s not true — but that difference feels almost trivial in the grand scheme of things.

I have no idea what my opinions on it are any more. I hate the culture of this school, and I hate the way this callous attitude about the use of technology seeps into our classes. I heard a professor this week unironically tell a project group that the product they had designed was too resilient, and that in the real-world investors would want to see components break from fatigue after a few thousand cycles of use. Please leave the capitalism to Tepper and just teach us how to make things that work well. And I mostly hate how these defense companies are commonly understood (not incorrectly so) to be one of the best places to get a job post-graduation.

While I don’t have the solution to global war (yet), I just wish that the culture of CIT (or more broadly, that of any STEM college) was just the tiniest bit more conscious of the impact our work can have. If people thought about this more, there might just be that many fewer people eager to work on weapons systems, causing weapons to be that much more slow and expensive to make, causing the U.S. government’s check to buy that many fewer bombs, causing the residents of Gaza (or Yemen, or Syria, or Afghanistan, or any of the hundred-odd places we’ve sent our weapons in the last two hundred years) to have a fraction of a percent lower chance of being killed by Uncle Sam’s hellfire. But the only way for things to get better is for us (yes, that’s you and me) to be a little more thoughtful about what we do with our education.