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COLLECTIVE PROPERTY, PRIVATE CONTROL  
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Laleh Khalili
June 2, 2025
London Review of Books
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_ The U.S. was born in war and has waged a war of some sort in every
year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for
business. Many of its most powerful people want us to stop worrying
about ethics or ecology and love the bomb. _

, Palantir Technologies (screen grab)

 

The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of
the West 
by Alexander C. Karp
[[link removed]] and Nicholas
W. Zamiska
[[link removed]].
_Bodley Head, 295 pp., £25, February, 978 2 84792 852 5_

Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the
Future of War 
by Raj M. Shah
[[link removed]] and Christopher
Kirchhoff
[[link removed]].
_Scribner, 319 pp., £20, August 2024, 978 1 6680 3138 4_

You may remember​ Palantir as the company that was given access to
all of NHS England’s data in November 2023, in order to create a
Federated Data Platform. The cost was £330 million – the
largest NHS technology contract to date. Palantir’s first sales
pitch to a UK agency came much earlier, in 2008, when its
representatives gave a demo to an enthusiastic audience at GCHQ. At
some point after that, GCHQ appears to have acquired Palantir
software, despite misgivings about the use of a commercial product to
store national intelligence. Project Gotham, Palantir’s main
data-mining application, is used by the US military and security
services and by approved allies, including the UK and Israel.

Data is the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. Technology
firms collect it on a vast scale; find patterns in it to make billions
from advertising; use it to train artificial intelligence models; and
sell tools for analysing it to anyone who will pay. Palantir claims
that its software allows customers hampered by incompatible digital
platforms – an old IBM mainframe running COBOL programs, for
instance, alongside a network of computers with UNIX operating
systems, Excel spreadsheets, SQL databases and so on – to find
information they never knew they had. Its name comes from the
indestructible crystal balls in _The Lord of the Rings. T_he wizard
Saruman’s misplaced faith in this uncertain technology, which
provides only a partial view of events, eventually leads to his
downfall.

The head of Palantir UK is Louis Mosley, a Tory activist and the
grandson of Oswald Mosley. The company’s seed money was furnished by
In-Q-Tel, which functions as the CIA’s private venture capital
firm. One of Palantir’s founders, the billionaire Peter Thiel,
described Christopher Columbus as ‘the first multiculturalist’,
accused Aimé Césaire of not understanding the transcendental value
of _The Tempest_ and advocates for cyberspace, outer space and
sea-steading as routes of escape from ‘the unthinking demos’. His
co-founders include Joe Lonsdale, better known for footing the bill
for the ‘anti-woke’ University of Austin (its first cohort
matriculated last autumn), and Alex Karp, Thiel’s classmate at
Stanford, now Palantir’s CEO and the author, with Nicholas
Zamiska, of _The Technological Republic_, a critique of Silicon
Valley’s unadventurousness that effectively serves as a sales
brochure for his firm.

Karp prides himself in being a rebel and disruptor and describes
himself as a ‘socialist’ (his socialism may need some sort of
qualifier). He is, more than anything else, a consummate salesman. He
appears on Palantir’s earnings calls dressed in standard-issue white
T-shirts and with a quasi-punk haircut. He rattles off quarterly
earnings and throws out jargon like ‘ontology’ and ‘user-centred
machine learning’ as if Palantir invented them. (Object-oriented
ontology was already in vogue in the 1990s with the spread of the C++
programming language; user-centred machine learning simply entails a
human user tweaking an algorithm by designating elements of the data
as relevant or irrelevant, correct or incorrect – a bit like
choosing attributes for a potential partner on a dating app.) At the
end of one earnings call, which you can watch on YouTube, Karp throws
his arms above his head and announces:

We have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the
United States of America. And we’re super-proud of the role we play,
especially in places we can’t talk about ... Palantir is here to
disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the
world, and when it’s necessary to scare enemies and, on occasion,
kill them.

In the same call, Palantir’s chief technology officer, Shyam Sankar,
argues that the US is at war with China, that China is using
fentanyl as a weapon against US citizens, and that the Belt and Road
Initiative is a means of forcing other nations into ‘indentured
servitude’ to the Chinese Communist Party. Sankar regularly
denounces the Pentagon’s ‘monopsony’ power, the ‘deep state’
and the dominance of the ‘primes’ – the five major aerospace and
electronics contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman,
Raytheon and General Dynamics – which he characterises as lumbering
giants holding back the US military’s technological capabilities.

This complaint is also central to Raj Shah and Christopher
Kirchhoff’s _Unit X_. Shah is a former fighter pilot who, while
bombing Iraq in 2006, discovered that US air force jets lacked
widely available and inexpensive GPS mapping software. Kirchhoff,
whose Cambridge doctoral thesis was called ‘Fixing the National
Security State’, worked as an adviser to the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff and later to the National Security Council under
Obama. The two men met at the Pentagon in 2015 and the next year
joined the Defence Innovation Unit set up in Silicon Valley by the
then secretary of defence, Ash Carter. In his previous role as
undersecretary of defence for acquisition, technology and logistics,
Carter had chafed at the Pentagon’s complex, incongruous and
impenetrable procurement practices.

Obama had attempted to woo West Coast technology entrepreneurs without
much success. The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was the main
exception: he endorsed Obama in 2008, managed the data analytics for
his 2012 election campaign and was described as the administration’s
chief technology officer. Just before leaving office in 2016, Obama
appointed him to the Pentagon’s Defence Innovation Board. Carter
also invited In-Q-Tel to use Pentagon money to acquire new
technologies. In the mirror world of US defence tech, it seems that
the Pentagon is wooing a reticent Silicon Valley, not the other way
round.

The US Department of Defence is a leviathan. In 2024, its budget was
$800 billion, nearly 40 per cent of the global spending on defence,
and more than that of the next nine countries (including Russia, China
and Saudi Arabia) combined. As if this wasn’t enough, Trump has
increased next year’s budget request by 30 per cent, to more than $1
trillion: $962 billion for the Pentagon and $107 billion for the
Department of Homeland Security. This doesn’t include the $100
billion allocated to eighteen federal agencies dedicated to
intelligence gathering.

The structure of the Department of Defence can seem impenetrable.
There are deputy secretaries, under-secretaries and assistant
secretaries to whom various agencies and field activity offices
report. The heads of the army, the navy and the air force are members
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the military side. The Combatant
Commands under the Joint Chiefs are largely organised around
geographic areas, sitting alongside the Special Operations Command,
Transportation Command and Strategic Command. The department employs
almost three million civilian and military staff. This doesn’t
include contractors in US or overseas installations, or those who
provide products and services to the Pentagon. More than 170,000
active-duty troops are stationed at 750 US military bases overseas.
The department is the largest institutional consumer of petroleum and
producer of greenhouse gases in the world.

Since 2001, the Pentagon has spent $14 trillion, between a third and a
half of which was spent on contractors. In 2023 alone, 55 per cent of
defence appropriations were outsourced. A good chunk of the money was
spent on LOGCAP, the Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme, set up
under Reagan to privatise military food provision, construction,
civilian base maintenance and transportation. The beneficiaries are
firms such as Halliburton, once chaired by the former vice president
Dick Cheney. Some of the payments are to companies that supply
overseas ‘force protection’, as Blackwater did during the war on
Iraq. In 2022 Pfizer received $16.7 billion to provide Covid vaccines
for US forces. But the rest goes to the development of weapons and
technologies of war – tanks, aircraft, aircraft carriers, software,
electronic equipment, satellites etc – by the ‘primes’. Silicon
Valley wants a piece of this bounty.

When​ colonists in North America began to mobilise against British
rule, the army found itself short of the engineering skills required
for fighting a war. Many French officers joined the Continental Army
as sappers and miners, and as builders of fortifications, trenches,
naval batteries, ammunition stores and protective walls. Even before
the colonies declared independence, George Washington ensured that the
Continental Army had a chief engineer; the founding of the US Army
Corps of Engineers followed that of the United States itself by just
three years.

In 1802, Congress authorised the founding of the US Military Academy
at West Point and the Engineers’ Corps was tasked with supervising
it. In the following century, the corps was at the heart
of US colonial expansion westwards and into the Caribbean, as well
as being central to wars against Britain, Mexico, the Confederacy and
Spain. Army engineers built aqueducts, dams and canals, dredged and
fortified rivers, built roads and ports and harbours, and eventually
provided support to railway development across the continent. In the
so-called Indian Wars of the 19th century, infrastructure was
designed simultaneously for civilian use by settlers and to aid the
enclosure, expropriation and pacification of Indigenous communities.

The manufacture of armaments was a different matter. The colonial
reliance on foreign manufacturing and materiel was anathema to the
military men who were procuring the weaponry for the new republic,
even as they made use of French methods of military engineering.
Federal arsenals and armouries at Springfield, Massachusetts and
Harpers Ferry, Virginia had foundries for the manufacture and storage
of arms. The Ordnance Department, mandated by Congress to oversee the
armouries, was soon given authority to procure from private firms. The
historian Merritt Roe Smith has shown that it oversaw the standardised
and automated industrial processes that came to be known as the
‘American system of manufacturing’. Novel methods of production
entailed the ‘division of labour and application of machinery in the
production of firearms with interchangeable parts’. The federal
armouries competed against private weapons manufacturers and
supposedly acted as the standard against which the probity of
suppliers’ estimates could be measured.

Shipbuilding was another area in which US military investment
underwrote the expansion of heavy industry. By the end of the
19th century, the navy had phased out wooden-hulled ships in favour
of iron-clad and later steel-hulled vessels. Initially, the
construction of such ships in federal yards was possible only by
procuring high-grade steel from Britain. But Congress wanted to
facilitate local industry. Senator John Miller of California, a former
general in the Union Army, argued in favour of ‘constructing
American men-of-war from American material, by American workmen, to be
manned by American seamen, and to be used in the service of the
government of the United States’.

In response, the Department of the Navy, seeking to build up a fleet
that would enable it to seize islands in the Caribbean and Pacific,
cultivated relationships with Carnegie Brothers and the steel
companies Bethlehem and Midvale. The historian Benjamin Cooling has
described the four decades before the First World War as ‘the birth
of the US military-industrial complex’, and traces its
characteristics – ‘kickbacks, cost overruns, favoured contractors,
political interest in defence-related industries’ – back to this
early marriage between US navy procurement and firms engaged in
steel production and shipbuilding.

Some of the oldest and best-known American corporations got their
start by feeding the insatiable hunger of the US military. DuPont
was founded in 1802 at the behest of Thomas Jefferson to manufacture
‘black powder’ (a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal) for
the army. Over the next hundred years it specialised in gunpowder and
explosives, until diversifying in the early 20th century into the
production of other chemical compounds and later into nylon and rayon
textiles. When industry was mobilised during the Second World War,
DuPont’s chemical engineers were put in charge of the production of
the plutonium that was used on Nagasaki in August 1945. Dow Chemicals,
founded in 1897, was also indebted to warmaking for its fabulous
profits. It provided magnesium (used in the manufacture of plane
hulls) and styrene (used to make synthetic rubber) to the Department
of War, enabling massive corporate expansion. The air force used
Dow’s herbicides and defoliants, including Agent Orange, to destroy
jungle cover and food crops used by guerrillas in Vietnam.

Napalm was developed in 1942 at Harvard by a team of scientists from
the US Chemical Warfare Service. It is a sticky gel containing a
gasoline-based incendiary, which clings to and burns whatever it
touches. CWS scientists tested the viability of napalm as an
airborne weapon by rigging bats with tiny napalm bombs and letting
them loose in various testing grounds in the US. Once it was
considered deadly enough to be of use, napalm was manufactured by Dow
in large quantities and then deployed in the firebombings of Berlin
and Tokyo. Robert Neer, a historian of napalm, quotes a Japanese
medical professor describing the carnage: ‘There was no one to
rescue. If you touched one of the roasted bodies, the flesh would
crumble in your hand. Humanity was reduced to its chemical properties,
turned into carbon.’ Dow’s first subsidiary outside the US was
established in Japan in 1952, where it supplied the US in its war on
Korea. The US military also used napalm in Iraq in 1991 and during
the so-called war on terror.

In the later 20th century, the relationship between the military and
industry became closer still. By the 1950s, as Roe Smith shows,
military enterprise was behind the development of ‘computers, sonar,
radar, jet engines, swept-wing aircraft, insecticides, transistors,
fire and weather-resistant clothing, antibacterial drugs, numerically
controlled machine tools, high-speed integrated circuits nuclear
power’. The Pentagon not only funded the development of new products
but also controlled the diffusion of knowledge about new technologies:
the attendees at Bell Labs’ first industry-wide demonstration of the
transistor in 1951 were vetted by the Department of Defence.
Transistors were particularly important in the following decade
because they were integrated into long-range missile systems.

Space and nuclear technology were the engines of the Cold War missile
race between the US and Soviet Union. The Pentagon saw space as a
new frontier for reconnaissance and surveillance satellites, and for
experiments in meteorology and communication, supersonic flights and
high-altitude aviation. US Brigadier General Homer Boushey (a name
ripped from _Dr Strangelove_) gave a speech to the Washington Aero
Club in 1958 about the merits of establishing ‘a retaliation base of
unequalled advantage’ on the Moon, from where missiles, hidden on
the dark side, would zero in on the Earth. The US was already the
only country to have used nuclear weapons in war; that same year it
secretly tested a nuclear weapon on the edge of outer space.

Around the same time, the Army Ballistic Missiles Agency, the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and other military bodies gave a briefing about
their plans for space colonisation to Boeing, Republic Aviation,
Douglas Aircraft, General Electric and several other firms. The
companies suggested that such a programme would cost around $20
billion. In the end, the military and Nasa spent possibly as much as
$50 billion to land a man on the Moon. Much of that, of course, was
channelled to the manufacturers of the spacecraft, launch vehicles and
auxiliary equipment. A 1960 guide to _Investing in American
Industries_ phlegmatically notes that since the early 1930s, ‘no
airliner programme of any size has been developed without some
military aid’ and that ‘aid from the Pentagon will remain
prerequisite to major advances in the state of the art of commercial
air transport.’

The justification usually made for such expenditure is that the $50
billion funded inventions which had more widespread uses: LED lamps,
artificial limbs, even the nutrient additives in baby formula. Perhaps
the biggest beneficiaries were electronics firms. The microprocessors
sold by Intel were invented in conjunction with the Pentagon.
Programming languages like COBOL and FORTRAN were written in labs
funded by the Pentagon. The internet emerged out
of ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), created in
1969 to connect UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, Stanford and the University
of Utah to the Pentagon. Sensors that recognise motion (and turn on
lights or a tap) or heat (and turn off the oven or your smartphone)
were developed during the Second World War and tested in Vietnam to
track and bomb guerrillas on the Ho Chi Minh Trail (though the
guerrillas easily confounded them with decoys).

In the US the debate over lavish defence spending takes place
between conservatives who want to concentrate defence spending in a
few firms (preferably run by their allies) and liberal hawks who want
to spread the munificence far and wide and use it as an engine of
growth. This narrow set of options has shaped the US defence
apparatus all the way from _The Federalist Papers_ to DOGE.
Whatever the domestic repercussions, the US imperial machine gets
the money it needs. Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry
Stimson, was sanguine about this: ‘If you are going to try to go to
war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to
let business make money out of the process or business won’t
work.’ The journalist I.F. Stone put it differently: the firms
getting rich on public funding were ‘collective property but under
private control’.

According to the historian Ira Katznelson, between 1808 and 1848
federal military spending accounted ‘for at least 72 per cent of the
total each year and sometimes up to 94 per cent of federal
spending’. After 1848, as the federal government expanded its
civilian bureaucracy, the military still accounted for around half of
all federal expenditure. In the years between the Civil War and the
First World War, even as the national debt and government deficit
soared, defence expenditure remained steady at around a quarter of the
budget, before rising again to 80 per cent during the Second World
War.

In 1969, as the US air force rained defoliants, napalm and bombs on
Indochina and the US army hunted guerrillas in the jungles and river
deltas of Vietnam, the former commander in chief of US forces there,
General William Westmoreland, had a fantasy:

On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located,
tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data
links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire
control ... Today, machines and technology are permitting economy of
manpower on the battlefield ... But the future offers even more
possibilities for economy ... With co-operative effort, no more than
ten years should separate us from the automated battlefield.

Fifty-six years later, in March this year, the Atlantic Council
published a report with a crude AI-generated cover image of soldiers
seated at computers with a giant Reaper drone hovering above. The
Final Report of the Commission on Software-Defined Warfare recommends
that the Pentagon ‘rapidly transform from a hardware-centric
organisation reliant on Industrial Age practices and legacy software
to a software-centric one more prepared to meet the demands of
deterring and combating Digital Age threats’. The recommendations
are just what the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
has been waiting to hear for six decades.

DARPA was originally managed by a relatively small group of
scientists and engineers who guided scientific research in top-tier
universities and industry labs, and provided long-term research
funding. The agency, which had already spawned the internet, was also
an incubator for the development of supercomputers, microprocessors
and artificial intelligence (or in the words of J.C.R. Licklider,
who worked there, ‘man-computer symbiosis’), as well as the
Strategic Computing Initiative (SCI) of the Reagan years, out of which
battlefield automation, drone technology, advanced command and control
systems and data-mining and intelligence analysis projects were born.
In _The Closed World_ (1996), a magisterial history of Cold War
computing in the US, Paul Edwards argued that to make the SCI’s
extravagant budget palatable to the public, DARPA touted the
commercial applications of such innovations and ‘frequently gave
Japanese competition equal billing with military need in promoting the
plan’.

The Pentagon’s plans​ for a ‘revolution in military affairs’
– the introduction of automation and information technology into all
aspects of warfighting – weren’t revolutionary enough for Silicon
Valley technology firms and their venture capitalist patrons. In 2016,
Thiel and Palantir successfully sued the army over its plans to
develop its own in-house data-mining and intelligence analysis system
rather than use Palantir’s commercially available software. Thiel
was following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, whose SpaceX, using the
same attorney, had sued the US air force for not awarding it the
contract to launch military satellites.

Shah and Kirchhoff of the Defence Innovation Unit found Palantir and
SpaceX’s legal actions useful: ‘Little by little, the lawsuits
were forcing the Pentagon to rethink its acquisition process – in
part by shaming the DoD and exposing to the public its outdated,
oligopolistic methods.’ Their book names another start-up, Anduril,
as one of the firms that benefited from these lawsuits. Anduril –
named after Aragorn’s sword in _The Lord of the Ring_s; the sword
is also known as the Flame of the West – was set up by Trae
Stephens, a former army intelligence officer and Palantir alumnus, and
Palmer Luckey, a young inventor who had sold his virtual reality
headset to Meta for $2 billion. Stephens and Luckey, who planned to
produce software to control swarms of drones, received advice from the
Defence Innovation Unit and funding from Andreessen Horowitz, one of
Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms. One of Anduril’s
products is a miniature stealth drone that senses motion and is used
overseas by the US military, and by the Departments of Homeland
Security and Customs and Border Protection inside the US and along
its borders.

Although the billionaire start-up founders and defence tech venture
capitalists like to think of themselves as scrappy underdogs fighting
the ogres of congressional oversight and unhelpful Pentagon
bureaucrats, they have already shifted the patterns of technology
ownership not only in commercial spaces, but in the military itself.
Instead of the Pentagon – or any other public or private institution
– owning the software they pay for, corporations now turn their
products into ‘services’. They retain control of these services
through a subscription model which ensures continuous rent extraction
and the ability of the corporations not only to update or fix the
software remotely (and get paid handsomely for it) but also to switch
it off at source (as Musk briefly removed Ukraine’s access to his
Starlink satellites in 2023).

Musk has since muddied the waters further. The White House has become
an advertising backdrop for Tesla, with Trump posing beside the cars;
the State Department planned to procure armoured Teslas worth $400
million; and as part of Trump’s tariff and trade orders, Marco
Rubio’s diplomats have been badgering other countries to lower their
regulatory thresholds for satellite communications. Starlink is named
in the diplomatic cables.

Palantir provides a platform for start-ups to access military data
useful for pitching projects to the Pentagon. It also offers companies
the chance to ‘build their software atop Apollo and Rubix, two
already accredited platforms built by Palantir’, presumably in order
to guarantee deeper defence dependency on its services. Andreessen
Horowitz has a web page dedicated to ‘DoD Contracting for Startups
101’. Pitching to the Pentagon requires patience, it warns, but
‘defence contracts offer not just funding, but also long-term
sustainment.’ Marc Andreessen is the author of the self-aggrandising
‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, which includes a list of enemies
(such as universities, the woke mind virus, degrowth, sustainability
and, inexplicably, ‘Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision,
Alexander Kojève’s Universal and Homogeneous State, Thomas More’s
Utopia’) and demands a return to the origins of Western
civilisation, which was built, he claims, on technology.

Karp’s book is a call for Silicon Valley to heed its ‘affirmative
obligation to participate in the defence of the nation and the
articulation of a national project’. He criticises Silicon
Valley’s focus on advertising and customer service, the ‘defanging
of Germany’ and the ‘highly theatrical commitment to Japanese
pacifism’. The US, he warns, has not come to terms with ‘the rise
of an assertive and capable China as well as a newly ambitious
Russia’. The correct response to this state of affairs is, of
course, to invest in the technologies that Palantir, Anduril and
others provide.

The United States was born in war and has waged a war of some sort in
every year of its existence. Silicon Valley knows that war is good for
business. And many of its most powerful people want us to stop
worrying about frivolities like ethics or ecology and love the bomb.
In _Male Fantasies_ (1977), a psychoanalytic reading of the rise of
fascism in Germany, Klaus Theweleit described the ecstatic commitment
of the Freikorps to their mission. What a soldier demands is ‘a war
in which he experiences the whole of his being and his future
potential. In and across the machines with which he sets off to war,
the man consolidates his existence as man; it may be in war that he
becomes a man in the first place.’ For the armchair techno-warriors
of Silicon Valley, the barbarians at the gate are a useful solution.

_[xxxxxx moderator - related article: _

_Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
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By Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik
New York Times
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the
government, spreading the company’s technology — which could
easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.]_

* Big Tech
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* corporate profits
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* robot warfare
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* military industrial complex
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