Marine Corps Officer: ‘Dear Google, Please Help Your Country Defend Itself’

Marine Corps First Lt. Walker D. Mills published an opinion piece in DefenseNews recently asking Silicon Valley giant Google to help America defend against foreign adversaries, something the company has become seemingly unwilling to take part in.

1st Lt. Walker D. Mills published an article in DefenseNews recently titled “Dear Google, please help your country defend itself,” in which he discussed the impressive technology he saw when he toured Google’s X lab in Mountain View, California. But Mills has found himself disappointed by Google’s refusal to work with the U.S. military in advancing technology to better protect American soldiers.

Lt. Mills discussed his tour of Google’s labs and the symposium he presented on innovation sponsored by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory later that summer:

Inside these doors were the same bright and idealistic people I had gone to school with only a few years earlier. They probably chose to work for Google for many of the same reasons my peers and I joined the Marines — we were impressed with the organization’s values and we wanted to make the world a better place.

Later that summer I presented at a symposium on innovation sponsored by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. There was an air of excitement among many of the military participants. We were used to a slow and bumbling bureaucracy, but here was a meeting of people that envisioned a future of rapid change and innovation. Marines talked about small projects they had been working on, and leaders from Amazon and IBM came to talk about innovation management and their relationships with the Department of Defense.