436 | Shyam Sankar: From the "Last Supper" to the "First Breakfast" - How 30 Years of Consolidation & Financialization Broke the Defense Industry

The Realignment

Saager Enjeti, Technology, Policy, News, Marshall Kosloff, International Relations, Politics, News Commentary, Public Policy, U.s. Politics, National Security, Economics

4.8 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last weekend, the Foundation for American Innovation flew The Realignment out to the Reagan Defense Forum for a series of interviews covering the intersection of national security, technology, and foreign policy. First up, Marshall interviewed Shyam Sankar, Palantir's Chief Technology Officer, about his perspective on the emerging defense tech ecosystem. They discuss why the post-Cold War "Last Supper" and peace dividend led to a financialized and over-consolidated military-industrial-complex, the current lack of a pre-WWII style mobilization of industry, and the need for "founders" in the mold of those who led the U.S. to victory in WWII and the Cold War.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Marshall here. Welcome back to the realignment.
0:04.8	As you can see from this intro if you're watching this on YouTube,
0:12.4	the realignment was flown out to the Reagan Defense Forum at the Reagan Presidential
0:16.3	Library this past weekend where I recorded a bunch of great conversations with folks about
0:21.0	the past, present, and the future of the defense and national security spaces. with the CTO of Palantier, a major tech company founded
0:36.7	in the 2000s.
0:37.7	We're discussing one of my favorite themes I want to develop out moving into the future,
0:42.2	this idea that during the 1990s at the supposed
0:45.3	end of history after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the defeat of the Soviet Union, we really
0:50.4	dropped the ball across so many different categories everything
0:53.4	from finance to politics itself to in the case of today's conversation
0:58.1	defense basically what you had happen is the industry along with the Pentagon decided to consolidate from
1:05.4	upwards of 50 defense companies to just smaller number players that would
1:10.4	consolidate in order to reduce the overall amount of money that was spent on the space and be more efficient because with the defense cuts that you saw during the end of the Cold War, there wouldn't be enough budget to go around and support as big as you saw.
1:23.0	As you know we discussed in this conversation on the one hand that's kind of a good thing.
1:26.1	It's good to have a peace dividend.
1:27.8	It's good to have an opportunity to invest resources into our broader society.
1:31.7	However, as we can now see in the year
1:33.4	2023, there was a very direct cost to that. That cost was we have an
1:38.2	incredibly inefficient system, we've had monopolization, those
1:41.9	remaining defense companies were increasingly
1:43.9	financialized, so they are driven more by Wall Street
	...

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