Palantir CTO: Pentagon better off "spending half as much" twice as fast
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Shyam Sankar, seen at the Palantir Technologies offices in Georgetown. Photo: Colin Demarest
Keeping abreast of the evolving defense landscape requires talking to those shaping it.
- This week's conversation is with Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies.
- We recently sat down at the company's offices in Georgetown. A Chewbacca statue greeted me in the lobby; the Olympics were blasting on a massive screen farther in; and a TITAN model was lurking behind Sankar during the interview.
Why he matters: Palantir's digital tendrils touch everything from vaccine logistics to demining efforts in Ukraine. The Denver-based company has been billed as a "software prime."
Q: When you hear future of defense, what comes to mind?
A: It's a return to the American industrial base, not the defense industrial base. Production does matter. You're not going to win the war with bits alone. But we can use the bits to bend atoms in new ways.
Q: When will wars be waged solely by robots?
A: I'm on the "never" side of that. War is politics by other means, as Clausewitz said. And, you know, politics today don't have a lot to do with robots. I think there are going to be people involved.
- And if you really think about national security, it's not an end unto itself. It exists to underwrite economic prosperity, which is for people.
Q: What's the biggest challenge defense industry faces at the moment? What can be done to alleviate it?
A: The biggest challenge is speed, actually. Speed is a quality all its own. I think the Department of Defense would be better off spending half as much money twice as quickly, and we seem to have lost our ability to value time.
Q: What region of the world should we be watching? Why?
A: America would be my answer to that, actually. We probably don't spend enough time thinking about the assets we do have and how we leverage it. Deterrence is a whole-of-society effort.
Q: What's your secret to a successful overnight flight?
A: Don't do it. If you have to do it? Then lots of Celsius energy drinks.
Q: What's a piece of gear or tech you can't go without?
A: It's a toss-up between the AirPods and my Whoop — this fitness band here. Mostly it reminds me how poorly I slept and how much more I need to work out.
Q: What are you currently reading, or what's a book you'd recommend?
A: I'm in the midst of "This Kind of War," a classic about the Korean War. The book I read right before that, which I would highly recommend, is Annie Jacobsen's "Nuclear War."
