Palantir CTO talks 'blueprint' to resurrect US defense industry
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Palantir (PLTR) CTO and executive vice president Shyam Sankar sits down with Asking for a Trend's Josh Lipton to talk about the company's new defense report titled "The American Reformation," which it says is "a blueprint for the resurrection of the American industrial base."
"I think it first starts with acknowledging that we're in this state of undeclared emergency. We have North Korea firing off ballistic missiles. North Korean soldiers now in the front with Ukraine. We've had a pogrom in Israel. We have the Russians providing targeting information to the Houthis to hold 15% of world trade hostage. What more would we have to see to actually kind of mobilize now?" Sankar tells Yahoo Finance.
One of his theses is the lack of industrial competition within the government and branches of the US military:
"When we were building the ICBM program (intercontinental ballistic missile), it was the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force competing against each other to make the very best product. When we were building the submarine-launched ballistic missiles, we had four competing programs inside the Navy itself. Today, we would find that wasteful [and] duplicative. We grant these monopolies, which actually if you really step back and squint at it, that looks like central planning and communism. We're saying there's just one approved way of doing this.
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"I think at a deep, fundamental level, we believe in competition as a country. We believe in the innovation that comes from the free market, and what excites me [and] what catalyzed me to really write this right now is that the founders are back... folks like [Oculus VR and Anduril Industries founder] Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk. It's folks like [Palantir co-founder and CEO] Alex Karp. This is how we're going to resurrect the American industrial base."
Watch the video above for more on the Palantir CTO's perspective on the American defense industry.
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.