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Comment by bpodgursky | Hacker News Reader

I mean... the market was handed to the prime defense contractors on a silver platter for decades, and they utterly failed to deliver cost-effective or even working solutions.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs, they just finally realized the market was dominated by the most disruptable enterprises on earth. Good riddance.

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It was not just the VCs. There were also influential people in Pentagon who saw the inefficiency of the prime defense contractors, especially after having seen what SpaceX was able to do.

One of the consequences of this was the meteoric rise of the young Will Roper [1], who in a span of a few years went from a theoretical physicist to being in charge of the Air Force procurement program, and then tried to facilitate the access of startups to defense contracts, through AFWERX and "Defense Pitch Days".

Whether this worked or not is debatable, but the itch to change things was there. One example of a startup which was an early beneficiary of this top-down attention is Ursa Major [2], a rocket engine company. Unless one looks at them in the context of these military programs, their existence would seem quite puzzling.

[1] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/article/1467...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1HZAPPSrE

I hate to say it, but this is mostly true.

reason I hate to say it is because companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

if Palantir and Anduril were observing the same strict separation between political and military matters, and the same strict separation between domestic and foreign activity, that the military itself observes, then the only thing happening here would be the Valley disrupting a poorly-run industry. I have no issue with that. that is what the Valley's supposed to do.

but that's not what's happening.

It's not some 4d chess play by VCs -- this part is just provably false. they're using military contracting as a Trojan horse for some truly crazy shit.

> Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives

How so? I honestly haven't heard this before. I like Anduril's tech and have some friends who work there. I would be excited to work at Anduril but my skills have diverged away from what they do and so I wouldn't make a very good hire.

you might wonder, reading this, how a person could say "I honestly haven't heard this before" about such a widely-discussed topic, in a thread about that topic, when the OP is a paper about a very closely related topic. it is, under the circumstances, a surprising assertion.

the purpose of propaganda is not to convince the ignorant or skeptical, but to exhaust and/or discredit opponents.

What political objectives? The only objective I see with those two companies is making money.

are you being serious? honest question. I assumed you were BSing.

they literally published a manifesto. did you not know about that?

I guess google them, dude. read the paper you're posting on a thread about. good luck

edit: on reflection, I still think he's BSing

There is LITERAL Palantir manifesto. And Thiels political projects are out there in the open too. Including making of JD Vance.

> companies like Palantir and Anduril are clearly pursuing political objectives, including subverting governance by creating tools which set the frame and context that governance happens in.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? How are these companies subverting governance?

We'll still have plenty of utter failures. I was shocked hearing about the IVAS program when it was announced, it was such an obvious loser. I guess it's better to have burned 2billion rather than the full amount but whoever green lit that nonsense should spend the rest of their career peeling potatoes.

The question is whether SV will do better than the prime contractors or just become another one.

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