The two trends described here—NSEs [Non-State Entities] limiting states, and states dominating NSEs—each stress existing frameworks for political and legal governance of national security.

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Existing scholarship illuminates but does not fully capture the two trends discussed here. Foundational political science on state-NSE relations focus on NSEs engaging in regulatory capture or other manipulation of states for commercial gain. This article describes the inverse: In the first trend, NSEs effectively regulate states by enabling, conditioning, or withholding core national security capabilities; and in the second trend, states capture NSEs. Both trends are therefore distinct from the 20th century experience in which U.S. foreign policy aided NSEs such as United Fruit Co. and various oil interests.

More recent scholarship worries that states may evade accountability by directing NSEs to perform traditional state security functions. By contrast, the first trend discussed here involves states insourcing capacities from NSEs rather than outsourcing functions to them: Uniformed personnel may fire the missile, but the targeting depends on a private algorithm running on a commercial cloud. The second trend is also distinct from this literature: It sometimes involves government contracts, but they are contracts that allow states to influence traditionally private activity by NSEs, not contracts for NSEs to carry out traditionally governmental activity.

Finally, recent studies on digital network architecture, surveillance intermediaries, digital Switzerlands, and cyber checks and balances generally (not always) view NSEs as potentially benign counterweights to state surveillance. They come closest to this article’s focus in the first trend, albeit with a narrower focus on the digital realm and less skepticism as to the role of NSEs in limiting state activity. And these studies are less focused on the second trend, in which states dominate NSEs and thereby expand their power over private life.