Palantir CTO: Political, economic freedom sustain U.S. security
Public opinion polls – to say nothing of the election last year of Zohran Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, as New York City mayor – indicate that support for socialism in America is rising, especially among Democrats and the young. For an influential segment of the American electorate, socialism’s abysmal track record has not stymied belief that, according to the DSA website, the people should “collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives.” In practice that means that government should manage more of the economy.
Meanwhile, a consequential faction on the right that would probably reject the name has embraced a conviction central to socialism. Within Trump world, enthusiasts suppose that government – at least with them in control – should do more than, as free-enterprise principles require, regulate commerce primarily by establishing and enforcing rules governing voluntary exchange of goods and services. The enthusiasts want the state to play a major role in decisions about what is produced and by whom. Like left-wing counterparts, right-wing proponents of increased central planning generally ignore socialism’s propensity to produce poverty and authoritarian rule.
The attraction to greater government intervention in the economy on both left and right reflects a failure of the American education system. Few graduates of America’s leading colleges and universities studied the principles of political freedom on which America was founded, classic works on free markets, and the disastrous history of 19th– and 20th-century socialism. That’s in significant measure because few higher-education institutions make much effort to teach these subjects, while many professors preach scorn for political and economic freedom.
More is at stake than grasping the sources of American prosperity. In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s quest to orient world affairs around Beijing and advance authoritarian government, it is urgent that American students also learn that political freedom and economic freedom are bound up with America’s ability to defend itself.
Strangely enough for a firm that produces cutting-edge enterprise software – or for a commercial operation of any sort – top executives at Palantir Technologies have been taking time from their corporate responsibilities to educate about the link between freedom, prosperity, and America’s ability to prevail in competition with China. (I have offered seminars at Palantir on the American unalienable-rights tradition, U.S. foreign policy, and Western civilization.) In February 2025, Palantir CEO Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs at the company, published “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.” They argued that maintaining America’s technological edge depends on recovering “value, virtue, and culture, the very things that the present generation was taught to abhor.”
This week Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar and Madeline Hart, a Palantir deployment strategist focusing on national security and space, are publishing “Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III.” Their much-needed book examines the bureaucracy, groupthink, and hostility to competition that hobble the U.S. defense industry. They contend that renewing the American spirit of entrepreneurship will generate innovation and productivity crucial to the U.S. military’s ability to maintain its superiority.
Like Karp and Zamiska, Sankar and Hart glide over the new technologies’ downsides, not least the vulnerabilities to error and abuse inhering in AI-powered software integrated into weapons systems. Neglecting the risks of the breathtaking recent advances in AI, however, doesn’t make the Palantirians – as they call themselves – less correct that fostering cooperation among the Pentagon, Silicon Valley software engineers, and American manufacturing is good for the economy and good for national security.
Principal author Sankar, recently commissioned in the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel, is the son of immigrants to the United States from India by way of Nigeria. In America, Sankar’s father worked hard and suffered setbacks while encouraging his talented and driven son to study and instilling in him a love for American freedom and gratitude for the opportunity that it affords. Palantir’s 13th employee, Sankar built the company’s Forward Deployed Engineering team, which “sends engineers as close to the problem as possible – from remote firebases in Afghanistan to factory floors in America – so they learn firsthand what’s broken and how to fix it.” Although “initially reviled by investors,” Palantir’s approach “has now been adopted by many technology companies.”
In 2024, Sankar created a stir among “uniformed servicemembers, industry insiders, and other patriots” with the publication of “The Defense Reformation,” which consisted of 18 theses “that explained what’s broken with the Pentagon and how to bring innovation back to our military.” Sankar and Hart’s new book picks up where the 18 theses left off.
The authors build their argument for mobilizing government, software engineers, and manufacturers around stories of exemplary government officials, military officers, and business executives who refused to accept the perverse norms, rules, and regulations “that created our broken military-industrial complex.” Among the heroes is industrialist Bill Knudsen who overcame worries about corporations’ profiting from government defense spending to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to adopt policies that facilitated cooperation between private industry and government in the race to build equipment and weapons to defeat the Axis powers. Legendary Intel co-founder Robert Noyce pioneered the non-hierarchical, open workspace typical of Silicon Valley that has created paradigm-shattering products indispensable to American military might. As under-secretary of defense for research and engineering during the Carter administration, William Perry imported something of the spirit of Silicon Valley to the Pentagon to lay the foundation for American development of “stealth technology, GPS, and precision-guided munitions.” In 2016, Palantir filed and won a lawsuit that compelled the Pentagon to follow the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA), which obliges the Defense Department to offer a competitive process for private companies to meet the military’s demands for new technology. And for more than two decades, Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor struggled against inertia, jealousy, and vanity within the ranks to incorporate into the military advanced software, culminating in 2017 in Project Maven, the Defense Department’s first deployable AI platform.
The long-term dysfunctional relationship between the Pentagon and the private sector, argue the authors, stems from two main factors.
First, during the Cold War government officials adopted the view that the Department of Defense should manage procurement based on disinterested and rational top-down planning. Kennedy administration Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his “Whiz Kids” exemplified this overweening confidence. They ascribed to top executives decidedly greater knowledge about bureaucracy, markets, and battlefield exigencies than they possessed or – given the complexity of bureaucracy, markets, and battlefield exigencies – could reasonably hope to possess. Their overreaching squelched creative and enterprising individuals at lower ranks who, close to the action, discerned new ways to streamline operations, cut costs, and develop more effective weapons.
Second, the Department of Defense – now branded the Department of War – has functioned as a monopsony. As the sole buyer of many goods and services, the Pentagon dictates terms to private-sector companies based on bureaucratic convenience, which short-circuits the competition essential to producing the best goods and services most quickly and at the lowest costs.
Together, comprehensive top-down planning and monopsony power at the Pentagon brought about what the authors call “the Great Schism,” which consisted in “the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense.”
To recouple commercial innovation and defense, Sankar and Hart recommend “fierce internal competition within the Department of War for the best technology, enforcement of current laws to buy commercial solutions, and fast and flexible government contracting that values time saved above all else.” Implementing these reforms will require mobilization of “founders and workers from Silicon Valley, the Heartland, and every corner of the country.”
The recoupling for which the authors call is underway, thanks in part to Palantir. While reducing bureaucracy, red tape, and redundancy, government must learn to view the rebellious and heretical American entrepreneurial spirit not as a bug in the procurement process but rather as a feature. And America’s private-sector entrepreneurs must harness their creativity and energy to their patriotic duty – which converges with their long-term interest in a strong America – to cooperate with Washington’s national-security establishment to make available the world’s best technology to the U.S. military.
The long-term transformation of attitudes in government and commerce that Sankar and Hart seek depends in part on higher-education reform. Enduring improvement in relations between the national-security establishment and the private sector rests in part on colleges’ and universities’ willingness and ability to educate America’s rising generations about political and economic freedom and enhance students’ understanding of why America and the West are worth defending. It should be unnecessary to add that such an education involves studying not only classic works in defense of the principles and practice of freedom, but also the leading critics.
If colleges and universities persist in flouting their educational responsibilities, then, for the sake of the public interest, patriotic companies like Palantir must assume even more responsibility to educate their employees, government officials, leaders of high-tech and industry, and engaged citizens from across the political spectrum about the virtues of political and economic freedom.