Gloria Guillo, Tortilla con Sal.
How a Shared Global Technology Supply Chain Serves Transnational Elites Against Workers Everywhere.
The story sold to populations is that the United States, China, Russia, and Iran are locked in geopolitical rivalry, each building separate military-industrial systems to confront the others. That narrative conceals the deeper structure. The weapons carry national markings. The technological base that makes them possible does not. Semiconductors, sensors, power electronics, microcontrollers, RF components, machine tools, and industrial equipment move through the same global commercial networks. Components pass through distributors, brokers, front companies, and third countries before they appear in missiles, drones, radar, or electronic-warfare systems on every side.
What looks like interstate competition is better understood as a transnational class project. A layer of technocrats—executives in semiconductor firms, private-equity and defense-finance networks, logistics conglomerates, and the political managers who write export rules and sanction lists—operates across borders. Their interest is not the security of any particular population. It is the continuous expansion of high-margin dual-use technology markets, the extraction of surplus from workers who fabricate and assemble the components, and the management of scarcity and conflict that keeps demand high. Workers in Taiwanese fabrication plants, Chinese assembly lines, American distribution warehouses, Russian military factories, and Iranian workshops are all inputs to the same circuit. The impoverished in every country pay the taxes, endure the austerity, and absorb the destruction when those circuits feed actual shooting wars.
One Supply Chain, Multiple Flags
Military budgets in 2026 remain enormous. The U.S. national-defense request approached or exceeded $1 trillion when reconciliation and related measures are included (with the formal DoD request at roughly $961.6 billion). China’s official 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 1.94 trillion yuan, with central-government expenditure of roughly 1.91 trillion yuan—about a 7% increase. Russia’s 2026 military expenditure is budgeted at approximately 14.9 trillion rubles, equal to about 6.3% of GDP, according to SIPRI analysis of the wartime economy. Iran operates with a fraction of those resources but invests heavily in relatively inexpensive drones, missiles, and asymmetric systems.
These numbers are presented as national strength. In practice they recycle capital through the same commercial layers. A processor or power-management chip does not know whether it will end in a consumer device or a guidance package. The same is true of sensors, memory, connectors, and machine tools. Once a component leaves the factory, layers of intermediaries can move it across sanctioned and non-sanctioned jurisdictions. Documented cases show U.S.-origin electronics reaching Iranian UAV and missile programs through Chinese and Hong Kong fronts (DOJ indictment of Chinese nationals), with parallel patterns for Russian systems and repeated Treasury designations of procurement networks involving China, Hong Kong, and other transit points. The originating firm often never sees the final military end-user. The profit has already been taken at the commercial stage.
This is not a conspiracy of one secret corporation. It is the ordinary functioning of a globalized production system in which dual-use technology is the most valuable commodity. The technocratic class that designs the chips, owns the foundries, finances the distributors, and staffs the regulatory bodies benefits whether the final buyer is a Western defense prime, a Chinese state-linked enterprise, a Russian wartime manufacturer, or an Iranian procurement network. National flags provide the political cover; class interest provides the continuity.
Workers as the Common Exploited Base
The labor that produces these components is performed by workers whose wages, conditions, and political power are systematically subordinated. Fabrication, packaging, testing, and logistics are concentrated in locations chosen for cost and control. The U.S. Government Accountability Office has documented that the Department of Defense relies on more than 200,000 suppliers and cannot fully identify where all of the microelectronics in the products it purchases are manufactured. According to Defense Department estimates cited by GAO, approximately 88% of microelectronics production and 98% of semiconductor assembly, packaging and testing occur overseas, primarily in Taiwan, South Korea, and China.
That overseas dependence is not an accidental vulnerability; it is a feature that allows capital to discipline labor by threatening relocation or by pitting workforces against one another under the banner of national competition. When governments announce new defense spending, the immediate beneficiaries are the contractors and their financiers. The money then flows downward into subcontractors, component makers, chemical suppliers, and logistics firms—extracting value at every step while the social costs of militarization (debt, inflation, environmental damage, and eventual battlefield casualties) fall on broader working populations.
Sanctions and export controls are presented as tools of national security. In practice they function as instruments of selective scarcity. They raise the price of dual-use goods, create rents for those who can navigate the gray markets, and force poorer states or sanctioned populations into more precarious procurement channels. The same networks that move restricted electronics also move the profits upward. Workers in the sanctioned economies face shortages and intensified exploitation; workers in the sanctioning economies face higher taxes and the ideological demand to identify with “their” military-industrial complex. The technocratic layer remains insulated.
Opacity as Class Power
Supply-chain visibility is weak even inside the largest military systems. The inability of major defense bureaucracies to map every microelectronic origin is not merely bureaucratic failure. Opacity protects the circulation of dual-use technology and the intermediaries who profit from it. When diversion occurs through shell companies and false end-user declarations, the system continues to function for capital while the political narrative of “adversaries” is maintained for domestic audiences. The real common denominator is not shared nationality but shared dependence on a commercial technology base controlled by a narrow transnational stratum.
Disrupting the Machine Means Disrupting Class Power
If the shared technological substrate is what enables large-scale militarization across rival states, then genuine disruption of war requires breaking the class monopoly over that substrate. Nationalist solutions—more sanctions, more domestic production under the same ownership structures, more spending funneled to the same contractors—reproduce the circuit. They merely rearrange which faction of capital captures the rents.
A class-oriented approach starts from the opposite premise: the workers who design, fabricate, assemble, transport, and maintain the dual-use base have no objective interest in feeding any military-industrial system. Their interest lies in converting that productive capacity toward social needs and in denying its conversion into instruments of destruction. That requires transparency forced from below, refusal of dual-use labor discipline, international coordination that ignores official enemy lines, and collective control over the lower tiers of the technological pyramid—the machine tools, specialized materials, and distribution nodes that currently serve capital’s ability to arm multiple sides.
The flags will continue to wave. The budgets will continue to be justified in the language of national survival. But the underlying circuit is class power operating through technology. As long as a transnational technocratic layer can move dual-use components across borders while workers on every side remain divided by nationality and subordinated by wage discipline, the capacity for industrialized war remains intact. Breaking that capacity means treating the supply chain not as a national security problem but as a site of global class conflict—technocrats and their state managers on one side, the workers who actually produce the material basis of modern warfare on the other.
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