Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalries, Big Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare

by Steve Feldstein

Genres: War, Technology, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published September 8, 2026

About the author

Steve Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. His research focuses on technology and geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy, war, and democracy.

Feldstein's new book, Bytes and Bullets: Global Rivalry, Private Tech, and the New Shape of Modern Warfare will release September 8, 2026 by St. Martin’s Press.

Feldstein is the author of The Rise of Digital Repression: How Technology is Reshaping Power, Politics, and Resistance, which was the recipient of the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

He has published research on digital technology’s impact on war, the role of artificial intelligence is reshaping repression, the geopolitics of technology, China’s advancing digital authoritarianism, and new patterns of internet shutdowns.

He has served in senior foreign policy roles at the U.S. Department of State, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. He was also the holder of the Frank and Bethine Church Chair of Public Affairs at Boise State University.

He is a graduate of Princeton University and Berkeley Law. He was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana.

Reviews

[Cindy]

My main takeaway from this well-researched, informative book is that a significant power shift is underway, and it's one of our own making.
In the past, the US government funded military research at US universities and kept the resulting innovations close. It would take focused, covert operations for other countries to get hold of the blueprints to our military innovations before we were ready to sell or share them. But that all changed when universities like Stanford Business School started spinning off startups. When such startups needed funding, it was not difficult for foreign governments to get in on the ground floor of US innovation. Now that many of our military contracts are outsourced to private companies, the government has only a modicum of influence on how those businesses operate. In other words, private companies can (and often will) sell to the highest bidder, or to opposing sides, so long as their shareholders are happy.
Feldstein uses the advent of drones on the battlefield to illustrate his points, tracing the evolution of their use, where drones (and their components) are manufactured, and how that has been changing the balance of global power. This is not a very political book: He traces some of today's problems back to Bush and Clinton, but he does point out that our situation is more precarious today due to the incumbent. Significant time is also spent on the Russia vs. Ukraine war and how military one-upmanship is playing out faster than ever due to the speed of innovation.
There were several times when information was repeated, as if the chapters were from different essays or addresses given on different occasions that needed to reference some core information. This aside, I found the audiobook engaging and the material interesting and sobering, especially with the ongoing advances in AI.
My thanks to the author, publisher, @MacmillanAudio, and #NetGalley for early access to the audiobook of #BytesandBullets for review purposes. Happy publication day! It is now available.

[Dan]

Geopolitics, the economy, war, and technological advancement are far more complex than most of us can imagine, and far more intertwined than we’d like to admit. Bytes and Bullets is a dense, comprehensive look at the current state of the world and the ways dual-use technologies (technologies with consumer and military applications) are shaping the future we are all going to live in.

Whether it’s FPV drones changing the battlefield in Ukraine, remote AI-assisted assassinations in the Middle East, or China gaining ground in the global AI race by rapidly following and adapting the work of U.S. firms, the implications are staggering. It is genuinely insane to realize that technology I could buy off the shelf at Best Buy, or license from a website, is helping change the trajectory of our future as a species.

I won’t pretend this was a “fun” read. It is dense, detailed, and often unsettling. But it is also necessary. If you are even remotely interested in where the world is headed with AI, drones, cloud infrastructure, and modern conflict, you should give this a read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC. All opinions are my own.

[Arathy]

This was a difficult book to get through mainly because of the doomerism I'm feeling about the state of the world. This only contributed to it, but doesn't at all mean it's a bad book. In fact, we should all be reading this to go into the future with our eyes open.

I feel like I knew the general idea of how things work, but this book gave me many specifics, which made things worse for me existentially. It's a comprehensive book about complex, interconnected, unsettling topics.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Doe]

Excellent, very informative