Page 107 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

served together sixteen years ago in the 10th like college kids staggering to an early- dawns on me: The emphasis on being one
Cavalry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Divi-
sion, which deployed to Iraq in 2003. Both
men are decorated for valor—Szott with a
Silver Star for actions taken during an ambush
near Tikrit. Their firm caught a break in 2017,
when it was brought in to help manage secu-
rity at South by Southwest, the music festi-
val in Austin. Tech contacts—and tech con-
tracts—came after, and Surefox moved its
headquarters to San Francisco the next year.
Unlike in his past life, Rios isn’t armed at
Big Tech Firm. Still, he and his teams stick out
on campus because of their erect postures and
small but noticeable earpieces. They tend to
dress more crisply than their security com-
petition, with shirts tucked and tattoos cov-
ered. You can take the soldier out of the mil,
but you can’t take the mil out of the soldier.
Rios’s teams include both stationary posts
and roaming patrols and occasionally encoun-
ter people who don’t belong—demonstra-
tors, angry ex-employees, vagrants. Mostly
they spend their days checking IDs and giving
visitors directions. When I ask one Surefox
employee, an Army Reservist who deployed
twice to Guantánamo Bay as a correctional-
facility guard, what it’s like to keep watch at
Big Tech Firm, he smiles. “Compared to how
the detainees at Guantánamo treated us,” he
says, “this is fine.”
Not everything translates. “I had to tone
down the alpha-male stuff when I got here,”
Rios says. Less yelling, less swearing. The
golden rule: Talk about anything—anything
at all—except politics and religion. “That’s
something we help our new hires with,” he
says with a knowing wink. “How to find the
balance between the mil and Disneyland.”
Many of Big Tech Firm’s employees look
morning class, with rumpled T-shirts and
bed head that’s never seen a comb. Each and
every Surefox employee speaks well of these
clients, but it’s hard to ignore the class dis- is implementing counterinsurgency tactics
parity on display. In general, the engineers
and other employees, the latter of whom are
identified in the tech ecosystem by the semi-
derogatory title of “non-eng,” attended a very
specific set of schools, studied a very specific
set of subjects, and maintain a very specific
worldview that blends liberal values and lib-
ertarian ideals. When it comes to issues of
national security, they tend to focus on high-
tech, macro questions such as the ethics of us- tion, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
ing armed drones and robot soldiers. They
don’t spend much time considering the pro-
fessional hurdles of former infantry grunts.
As Rios and I walk the campus of Big Tech
Firm, one of his guards reports a medical sit-
uation he tended to. “Guy cut his finger cut-
ting open a box. I stopped the bleeding easy
enough.” Rios looks at me. “Sometimes peo-
ple freak out about things you and I would
consider normal,” he says. “A lot of smoke,”
forty-one-year-old Navy veteran Donnie
Tengco says. “Not a lot of fires.”
HE FIRST TIME I hear Rios
say “winning hearts and minds,”
T I think it’s a joke. Then I hear an-
other Surefox employee use the phrase. Then
a third. Then I notice the acronyms they toss
around—BOLO and POI and SOP and TTP.
It takes me a couple days, but eventually it
Once, you walked point
on combat patrols
through the darkest
parts of the war. Now?
with their clients, on knowing the terrain,
on knowing what right looks like so they can
know what wrong looks like, too—Surefox
in Silicon Valley.
(Re)introduced to the U.S. military a de-
cade ago by General David Petraeus, COIN
was heralded at the time as the magic solu-
tion to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghan-
istan. It was built on the idea that protect-
ing local populations from a common foe
would flush out those enemy insurgents.
It’s like Newton’s third law: For every ac-
De-escalation is a guiding principle. Don’t
lead with blunt force, but be prepared to fin-
ish with it. COIN failed outright in Afghan-
istan. In Iraq, the strategy succeeded for a
time, thanks to a massive economic stimulus
and earnest attempts at reconciliation with
Sunni tribal leaders. The billion-dollar ques-
tion was whether the stability COIN brought
would remain when there weren’t American
soldiers posted at every corner.
It didn’t. Among the many things required
for COIN to succeed, the most important are
near-endless supplies of soldiers and money.
Turns out that wasn’t feasible for the U.S. mil-
itary. Silicon Valley is a different story. Share-
holders don’t ask the same questions as the
general public. And with more billionaires per
capita than anywhere else in the world, the
Bay Area is primed to fund all sorts of pie-in-
the-sky ventures, especially those that focus
on protecting the well-being
of said money. Here, the sense
of exceptionalism is as thick
as the San Francisco fog.
COIN is dead. Long live
customer service.
Surefox’s military mentality
extends beyond operations.
It’s baked into its org chart.
“We intentionally mirrored
the officer/NCO dynamic in
the Army,” Sweigart tells me,
by which he means the dis-
tinction between big-picture
planning and practical execu-
tion. “[Szott’s] great at what
he does. I’ve been trained
for some of these things I
do.” It’s even baked into the
company’s name: Szott was
a 13-Fox in the Army, a fire-
support artilleryman. They
added the “Sure” because,
as Szott says, “we wanted to
convey certainty, security. It
clicked.” Such considerations
were as much about recruiting
employees as they were about
attracting potential clients.
He says one of the company’s