Former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) has embraced his new role as head of defense business at the controversial Silicon Valley tech firm Palantir with relish, promising to use his connections in government to make it easier for emerging military tech firms to thrive, in large part by securing more of your tax dollars.
Senior government officials passing through the revolving door to cash in on lucrative jobs in the arms industry is not a new phenomenon. In a study I did last fall, we found that 80 percent of the three and four star generals who left government service in the past five years went to work in the arms sector in one way or another. And a 2023 report by the office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) found that at least 700 former senior Pentagon and other government officials now work for one of the top 20 weapons contractors.
At the time of the report’s release, Warren argued that “[w]hen government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting. This problem is especially concerning and pronounced in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the United States’ defense industry.”
Powerful members of Congress also regularly go through the revolving door, including most notably former House Armed Services Committee Chair Buck McKeon, whose lobbying shop has represented both arms contractors like Lockheed Martin and arms buyers like Saudi Arabia.
But Gallagher’s case is particularly egregious, given the central role he will play in his new firm’s business and lobbying strategies. Palantir’s ambitions go well beyond the kind of favor seeking in government weapons buying that Sen. Warren has described. Its goal is to shape the overarching U.S. national security policy that may determine what military technology the U.S. invests in for the next generation. The Gallagher hire fits perfectly with that plan.
Judging from his record as the preeminent China hawk on Capitol Hill during his tenure in Congress, and as chair of the China-bashing House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher’s views are remarkably close to those of his new employers.
For example, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has said the United States will “likely” go to war with China and that the best policy is to “scare the crap out of your enemy” — no doubt in part by wielding systems built by Palantir.
Palantir’s bread and butter is the supply of advanced computing and data management, which it has employed to help the Army share data across the service, from bases in the U.S. to commanders on the battlefield. The firm also does research for the Army on future uses of AI, and on targeting, in a project known as Tactical Intelligence Target Access Node (TITAN).
Palantir’s products are also front and center in the two most prominent conflicts of the moment. The company’s Artificial Intelligence Platform, described by Bloomberg as "an intelligence and decision-making system that can analyze enemy targets and propose battle plans," is currently in use in Ukraine. And in January of this year, Karp and Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, traveled to Israel where they forged an agreement with the Israeli government “to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” This reportedly includes using Palantir’s AI-based systems to select targets in Gaza.
Karp’s views about how to intimidate adversaries like China may be good for his company’s bottom line, but they are an extremely reckless guide to U.S. policy toward China. The most likely result of his counsel would be a staggeringly costly arms race which would make a U.S.-China war more likely. And even if such a war did not escalate to the nuclear level, it would be a strategic, economic, and humanitarian disaster for all concerned. The point is to prevent a war with China, not predict and profit from it.
Karp and Gallagher are virtually brothers in arms with respect to their views on China. Gallagher co-authored a recent article in Foreign Affairs entitled “No Substitute for Victory: America’s Competition With China Must Be Won, Not Managed.” In it, Gallagher and his co-author Matthew Pottinger assert that the United States needs to “put in place a better policy: one that rearms the U.S. military, reduces China’s economic leverage, and recruits a broader coalition to confront China.”
In service of this goal, they advocate ratcheting up Pentagon spending to as much as 5% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, which would push the Pentagon’s base budget to over $1.2 trillion. Gallagher and Pottinger give no clue as to how this enormous sum would be spent, or why a rapid military buildup would somehow bring Beijing to heel rather than stimulating an equally furious buildup by China. They wrongly analogize the current situation between the U.S. and China to the one facing Ronald Reagan vis-a-vis the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. But China has a much more vibrant, technologically sophisticated society and a much larger place in the global economy than the U.S.S.R. did at the end of its reign.
China isn’t going anywhere, and the idea that arms racing and trade wars will change that basic reality is wildly unrealistic.
While Washington and Beijing don’t need to be best friends, they do need to set parameters around their relationship to prevent a catastrophic war. They also need to find ways to cooperate, despite their differences, on addressing existential global challenges like climate change and pandemics. And while it is important to help Taiwan build up its defenses, it is even more important to engage in diplomacy and reassurance to avoid a U.S.-China military confrontation over the island.
The path advocated by Gallagher and Pottinger would destroy any possibility of reaching such common ground, and would likely lead to a dangerous state of permanent antagonism.
Gallagher is just the latest addition to Palantir’s growing web of influence. As the world now knows, Thiel was both a mentor and a donor to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D.Vance. In 2017, before Vance entered politics, Thiel hired him to work at his global investment firm, and then donated $15 million to Vance’s 2022 run for the Senate.
Meanwhile, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has reached out to the other side of the aisle, albeit on a smaller scale, telling the New York Timesthat he gave $360,000 to Biden’s campaign before the president announced that he would not be running for reelection.
It would be one thing if Palantir were the nimble, cost effective producer of indispensable next generation technology it purports to be, but its bulked up political machine and hawkish rhetoric suggest that it is far more than that.
And as for its technological prowess, it remains to be seen whether all the emerging technologies championed by Thiel and his cohorts will work as advertised, and if so whether they will make future conflicts more or less likely. But one thing is clear: if operatives like Gallagher and Karp have their way, the odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Last but certainly not least, the prospect of automated warfare fueled by Palantir’s products could lead to a world in which our ability to curb conflict and prevent large-scale slaughter is even more difficult than it is now. All the more reason to take their claims to be new age patriots, poised to restore American global dominance through the wonders of technology, with an enormous grain of salt.
Regardless of who wins in November, the last thing we need is a Palantir inspired foreign policy.
