People are talking a lot about how good machine learning engineers don't want to work for the defense industry. But I think the bigger problem is that defense

People are talking a lot about how good machine learning engineers don't want to work for the defense industry. But I think the bigger problem is that defense work is really high pressure. If you're working on a radar system to detect an incoming missile and deploy countermeasures if your system doesn't work the pilot dies. So relying on a definable program is more comforting than some kind of unproven machine learning model. So even though the military has pioneered other technologies, they were pretty reluctant to try out anything close to machine learning on something that could potentially kill american soldiers. It was short sighted because machine learning does classification really well, and now nobody in the defense contracting space really knows how to do this now. And the government is forced to get help from companies that can do machine learning like google.