You Either Die a Startup or Live Long Enough to Become a Prime
Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III by Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart
Earlier this month, the Investigative Journalism Foundation published a piece on the secretive approval of government contracts with Palantir.[1] NDP Leader Avi Lewis quickly condemned the purchases.[2] Clarity around the goods or services procured was not forthcoming. Such secrecy has long been a defining aspect of Palantir’s corporate identity.
But more recently, emboldened by the backlash to woke politics, a much more public version of Palantirology has been demanding attention.
Last year, CEO Alex Karp and Head of Corporate Affairs Nicholas Zamiska published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.[3] If you haven’t read the book, it offers a fusion of anti-woke rhetoric with a strident commitment to re-aligning the private sector with the state to develop the capabilities necessary to deter the threats facing the West.
In Mobilize,[4] Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and employee Madeline Hart make another contribution to this burgeoning field, but with a sharper focus on procurement and the industrial base. Their contribution is persuasive when it shows how badly processes have decayed, but it often forgets that technological innovation is not a replacement for strategic judgment.
Published just weeks into the start of the war in Iran, the book depicts the new realities of warfare with the opening example of Operation Spiderweb, in which Ukrainian drones smuggled into Russian territory self-deployed to destroy a third of Russia’s strategic bombers.
“Billions of dollars of hardware were eliminated for an estimated cost of $1 million,”[5] they write. Reading Mobilize as Iranian drones choked the Strait of Hormuz and brought America to its knees, one could not help but feel the parallels. Better technology -- such as affordable and scalable anti-drone technology -- might have gone far in countering Iran.
Mobilize is a nostalgic book, with a lot of love for a very particular historical period of America -- WWII and the immediate post-WWII era. The historical chapters capture in glowing depiction an America that could build quickly -- very quickly. At the outset of WWII, President Roosevelt set an ambitious goal -- ridiculed at the time -- of building 50,000 planes per year. By the end of the war, they achieved it.
After WWII, procurement success endured. “Military aircraft projects took an average of five years from first contract to first flight,” they write. “The trend was similar for other systems. It took five years for Bernard Shriever to build the Atlas, Minuteman, Thor, and Titan missiles. Hyman Rickover’s first nuclear-powered submarine was delivered in fewer than seven years. The list goes on.”[6]
These examples are best read as evidence that strong institutions worked under the umbrella of informed strategy. Speed served a purpose. Institutions were trusted by citizens. Those institutions trusted founders to build. Today, that is not often the case. Procurement practices seem based on mistrust. Today’s bureaucracies tend to homogenize their assessment of talent, not give talent the latitude to do invent.
Anyone who has worked with government procurement -- or tried to apply for a Tri-Agency grant -- understands the problem in broad strokes. A contortion of competing policy imperatives -- protect the environment, buy local, support X disadvantaged group, maintain research security, etc. -- has generated a procurement / granting process that is often as perplexing as the building of the product or service actually being procured / supported.
In many military circles, despite discussions of reducing the burden of paperwork, the time from application to award to signing has been widening, and the inevitable make-work reporting obligations that come afterward make it dreary beyond imagination.
As the authors point out, it was not always this way: the procurement specifications for the F-4 was just two pages long. With such a wide-open door, the best competed. Chrysler made missiles. Goodyear did aerospace.[7] But the sprawl of process and policy and the professionalization of the bureaucracy after the end of the Cold War made working with the government unattractive. The old industrial base was porous; the new actors simply learned to master the rules. (In Canada, that is why staffing firms, not IT companies, now provide most IT solutions.)
This is where their argument is sharpest. The authors argue that government monopsony has transformed the defense industry by enshrining norms like corporate subsidized R&D research, cost-plus contracting, and “spreading” of contracts to certain non-competitive companies as a way of keeping them alive. The research industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about shaped an industry.
“Monopsony is the root cause of defense dysfunction,” they write, “and the logical result of all the centralizing and controlling ‘reforms’.”[8] They argue for more competition, spurred by the procurement practices that bring it about.
“The monopsony’s fixation on control and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks -- a luxury only affordable at the end of history.”[9] As they write: “[Y]ou either die a startup or live long enough to see yourself become a prime.”[10]
At its best, Mobilize asks the state to recognize exceptional people, buy commercially-viable working products, reward speed, and stop treating requirements documents as if they were substitutes for competence. It is spottier on the financial incentives at play -- figures like von Braun and Kelly Johnson haloed in the book were not chasing money -- but that isn’t surprising coming from at least one author who is a billionaire.
Mobilize is right that the United States cannot regulate, reimburse, and five-year-plan its way into deterrence. It is right that builders matter, that talent matters, and that the government has become too comfortable funding process instead of buying results. But it is incomplete when it lets technological innovation become the sole answer to America’s travails.
As the disastrous terms of another embarassing defeat in the Middle East has recently made clear, strategy matters. Without it, mobilization will only produce faster failure, generate better software for bad or pointless wars, and create more efficient procurement processes for unclear ends that enrich a select few, such as the authors.
Maybe that is why Palantir’s new public confidence deserves real attention.
—The Director
[1] https://theijf.org/brief/canadian-palantir-contract-amendments-obd
[2] https://theijf.org/article/lewis-palantir-secret-contract
[3] https://www.amazon.ca/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-Future/dp/0593798694
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Mobilize-Reboot-American-Industrial-World/dp/B0FQWGC94Z
[5] 1-2
[6] 88
[7] 124
[8] 146
[9] 148
[10] 148