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Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

228 points by tcp_handshaker 6mo ago

superkuh 6mo ago
Palantir is a more dangerous enemy of the USA (or any people of Earth) than, say, Iran. There's no point in addressing their propaganda, but the idea that that a draft leads to everyone from every class of life having to be involved in war equally is so obviously untrue it's a joke.
shevy-java 6mo ago
Alex Karp needs an army. I think the proper counter move is to seize all assets of oligarchs and distribute it among The People. That way those Vietnam 2.0 loving guys won't get any say in anything anymore.
- lokar 6mo ago
  I like to think that Eisenhower would punch Karp in the face if he met him today.
intothemild 6mo ago
OK, Lets put Alex Karp in the frontlines.
- raffael_de 6mo ago
  He's just overcompensating - can't even get his stock up no more!
  - intothemild 6mo ago
    oh what a shame.. I'm sure he can reach out to Elon to ask him how to inflate it
- jazzpush2 6mo ago
  He can lead that way with that sword he's been showing off!
dylan604 6mo ago
Opening graph: "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," says military contractor and all-around surveillance-enabler Palantir. If that's the case, then every war to be fought needs to have the say so of those that will be doing the fighting and not the solitary decision made by a delusional leader that had already circumvented the required process from Congress.
- lokar 6mo ago
  Exactly. Enforce the war powers of congress and require a non-delegatable per-war approval. Hell, require the approval of 3/4 of governors as well.
  - teeray 6mo ago
    How about a random sample of registered voters too? It would be nice to have a cohort that cannot be bought and paid for.
    - lokar 6mo ago
      At some level you have to trust a sustained strong majority of elected officials. You could imagine requiring a referendum if the war goes past N years or something.
- raffael_de 6mo ago
  what war? 'tis but a skirmish ... o.O
- LoFiSamurai 6mo ago
  Having those sent to fight in a war being the ones to decide if the war should be fought was on of the major points in General Butler’s 1935 book War is a Racket
  - ceejayoz 6mo ago
    Great example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot > Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt.
Dezvous 6mo ago
Surely he means that himself and his billionaire buddies will be the first boots on the ground when we decide to plunder another country for oil again. No?
- throwaway173738 6mo ago
  No he just wants to send our kids to die in the desert for Palantir’s profits.
jmclnx 6mo ago
> This Big Tech Firm Wants To Reinstate the Draft I still cannot help but look at Palantir as a company that just sends $ to the "oligarchs". I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov. After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?
- wahnfrieden 6mo ago
  Palantir is CIA-founded
- gradyfps 6mo ago
  Different deployments of Palantir Foundry exist in the US gov't/military and do provide real data science/analytics value. > After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ? Cyber in the military has abysmal retention because of the pay. You can get an immediate ~$50k pay raise doing the same work as soon as you leave the military.
- mrhottakes 6mo ago
  > I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov. Their "product" has always been some hacky database joins behind a web app with a dark mode interface that makes the baby brains at DOD feel like they're in a 90s hacker movie
criddell 6mo ago
Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes. Now we have no idea how much they cost. How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? How many years (decades?) was the Iraq war funded through annual (unbudgeted) emergency measures? How many trillions in promised healthcare does America owe its veterans? If the President had to make the case that taking on Iran would cost each American around $1000 on top of higher prices for fuel and food, how many would sign off on that? So I guess I agree with Palantir. Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.
- yapyap 6mo ago
  > Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes in the long term maybe, in the short term its mass debt of trillions
  - actionfromafar 6mo ago
    Inflation sort of is a tax, on those who do not hold appreciating assets. I.e. mostly people on the poorer side.
- sleepybrett 6mo ago
  > How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? The pentagon has NEVER been successfully audited.
  - datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
    All caps “NEVER” made me double check how many audits they’ve failed, and it’s only been since 2018 that the first “audit” occurred. Eisenhower warned of the industrial military complex in his farewell address in 1961, 57 years prior.
    - sleepybrett 6mo ago
      indeed.
- 6mo ago
yapyap 6mo ago
Big tech supercorp wants war efforts to increase
- trueno 6mo ago
  the absurdity to even entertain this dorks musings. imagine if tim cook or satya came out and talked about how there needs to be a draft. people would say lol shut up nerd and move on. some dorkus who heads a company that's just providing over reaching surveillance data to governments so they can do dumb data analytics should have no say in these affairs, and we should promptly discard what they have to say. peter thiel is a sociopath, karp is a dork, these people just want to be known as "the guy with the ideas" and they've crossed deep into the "what are you even saying right now" territory. tbh we should jettison them into the sun they're kind of a scourge on civilization and clearly lake any real stakes that keep them grounded in the world.
- morkalork 6mo ago
  May as well be a post by Weyland-Yutani or Tyrell corp.
dfee 6mo ago
This article has a strong slant. If we can look past that, we should consider the claim: everyone having skin in the game is more democratic and leads to a better aligned government. Perhaps this would lead to more peace.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
  Bone spurs
- _doctor_love 6mo ago
  Agree - the key is that everyone MUST include people in power.
  - wahnfrieden 6mo ago
    It's not how conscription is ever implemented in practice.
    - _doctor_love 6mo ago
      Of course it's not. Once upon a time quite long ago kings and generals got on the field. But as we industrialized leadership moved to "the back." See concepts like Auftragstaktik, command intent, mission command.
      - boelboel 6mo ago
        Not even that long ago, nobility died at higher rates than normal people in ww1 and ww2. Many lines were killed during them. I still know of nobles in my own country in the army. Generals died in WW2 at a decent rate as well. Nobility lost most relevance now so I'm sure it's different now, owning a castle or a weird last name doesn't make you rich or powerful.
    - throwaway173738 6mo ago
      But it’s how it will be sold to us. It’s sure a lot warmer in the abbatoir for some reason. And they give some of us cigarettes. Bill says they even feed him.
nayroclade 6mo ago
> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible I would agree with that, but its debt is to the people of that country, not their current government. But instead, Palantir conspires to surveil and repress those people at the bidding of an elite, anti-democratic minority. And would the leaders of Palantir still argue it had a moral debt to serve the government if it was a left-wing one, engaged in a process of wealth redistribution? No, they wouldn't. This supposed moral ideology is a facile sham.
- smm11 6mo ago
  Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country, and the country now has to serve. What?
  - throwaway173738 6mo ago
    Silicon Valley could easily pay their moral debt by not evading taxes.
_doctor_love 6mo ago
Other countries have compulsory military service, for example Finland. Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Military service would just be one option, could be other kinds of civic engagement. This can really help people feel connected to their society and understand that there is something to show up for. BUT - this really only works if there's a social contract in place. In the United States it's hard to see how compulsory service works if people don't feel like the country is showing up for them. These days, what are American soldiers dying for? A society with great health care? Fantastic education? Wealth and social stability? Absolutely not! Until that changes I don't see any good reason why we should send our young people off to die. (EDIT: if you want a sobering experience, visit a military graveyard and pay special attention to the ages of the soldiers. We might as well call a military graveyard a children's graveyard). And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.
- wahnfrieden 6mo ago
  > And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker. It never happens because those in power use their power to avoid it, even if they bind the rest of us with rules they enforce. By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
  - _doctor_love 6mo ago
    > By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent. I am not.
    - 6mo ago
deleted 6mo ago
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drivingmenuts 6mo ago
"We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," OK, sure, but only if we agree that a war should be fought. No more fighting a war because six rich guys in a back room decide we need unobtanium. Or because one rich guy doesn't like some other rich guy's religious values.
tootie 6mo ago
Karp has a right to his opinion as bonkers as it may be but it is doubly bonkers to release this as company policy. Especially coupled with all the other bonkers things that went into this manifesto. Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? Toss in some unsubtle racism and you're really just staking your company position as aligned with a very narrow political niche. Seemingly at odds with the company's interest to provide services to whoever will pay.
- Alive-in-2025 6mo ago
  They are simply following along with the basically fascist direction of Trump, or maybe leading them.
- abdelhousni 6mo ago
  Aiding and abetting to a current genocide does that to the appetite for more corpses.
- mrbnatural 6mo ago
  > Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? New markets to sell genocide tools to.
- sidewndr46 6mo ago
  Unless I'm mistaken Germany has US-owned nuclear weapons on it's soil at all times. There are some part of the German military that could use a serious rethinking because of a decay of operational capacity. But exactly what else would we be arming them with?
robotburrito 6mo ago
Doesn’t ycombinator and hacker news have links with this company? Makes it hard to maintain the hacker ethos when this entire site seems so closely linked with such forces.
- mrhottakes 6mo ago
  The hacker aesthetic has always been largely reactionary and hyperfocused on the individual and individual freedoms. See also the politics of "generation X"
  - sph 6mo ago
    The saddest thing of our age is that "reactionary" and "individual freedom" is equated to authoritarian movements that are anything but. The hacker aesthetic has always been anarchist in nature, until the rich Californians decided that a hacker is an entrepreneur that participates into the game of capitalism. To be fair, even the concept of libertarianism was an offshoot of anarchism, until the Americans decided that it means right-wing party politics of the rich elite. Words don't mean anything any more, any concept that can equated to its opposite if it rewards one with internet points.
    - mrhottakes 6mo ago
      "Right wing politics dominated by the rich" is the natural endpoint of libertarianism, so that makes sense. Whether they're "real" libertarians or not, the elite techies leading the charge are people with politics like Karp, Andreessen, Musk, etc.
      - mindslight 6mo ago
        Libertarianism is abused by capital in the same exact way that conservatism and progressivism are - by getting primed with easy feel-good answers that are ultimately disempowering and self-defeating. In the case of libertarianism, this is so-called "right-" libertarianism that actively rejects qualitative judgements of freedom and coercion while hyper-emphasizing an axiomatic framework that can be used to justify authoritarianism as long as the logical preconditions have been met.
feverzsj 6mo ago
[flagged]
- jjgreen 6mo ago
  A bit greasy ...
- gopher_space 6mo ago
  We can’t discuss eventualities on this platform. It has to be a surprise for some people, apparently. The problem is that you can’t argue against violence if the topic has been banned.
russellbeattie 6mo ago
To those HNers working at Palantir - and there's bound to be a few - what's your deal? You do realize what sort of company you work for, right? Is it cognitive dissonance or are you really a paranoid right winger that's fully on board with Palantir's efforts to enable authoritarian governments akin to 1984's Big Brother? I'm curious. Please feel free to explain how you go to work every day and do what you do. Fair warning, the rest of us are pretty disgusted with you.
- JohnMakin 6mo ago
  Money can paper over a lot of moral dilemmas - everyone has a price, whether or not we're necessarily aware of it. I refuse to interview with any company in the "defense," space, but I'm sure if someone threw enough money at me I might entertain it. For true believers though, which I'm sure exist there, I do wonder much the same things.
  - burnt-resistor 6mo ago
    > everyone has a price False. People with integrity exist who have moral absolute boundaries.
- mrhottakes 6mo ago
  They are fascists that like money
abdelhousni 6mo ago
The Nazi government would not have gotten this far without the help of industrialists and oligarchy.
- idfyicuyciy 6mo ago
  The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has extensive ties to the Israeli government and is a self-avowed Jewish-supremacist. Peter Thiel was also featured extensively in the Epstein Files, and the two collaborated on creating Palantir to serve Israeli interests.
__MatrixMan__ 6mo ago
Of course they do. They make stalkerware at scale. Their products would be used to track down draft dodgers.
b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
Unless you have popular support behind you, a draft is a great way to make your military less effective. You get a bunch of soldiers who don't want to be there, who may not do their job to the utmost either out of apathy or active malice. It also gives lots of people, who might otherwise passively disagree with your war, a great incentive to actively resist your war and your attempts to force them to fight in it. It worked in WWII because of Pearl Harbor and the Axis being cartoon villains. Direct US involvement also only lasted 4-5 years. Vietnam demonstrated that an unpopular, long-term conflict is ill-suited to the draft.
- sheikhnbake 6mo ago
  This is very much anecdotal but the concept of fragging has gone mainstream in my social media feeds. Mostly gen z joking about ww3 when the Iran conflict kicked off
  - vaylian 6mo ago
    What is fragging?
    - ishouldstayaway 6mo ago
      > The premeditated murder of one's superior officer in a military unit https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fragging https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fragging
    - jasomill 6mo ago
      Soldiers on the same side deliberately killing one another.
    - lamasery 6mo ago
      Situation: you are a poor draftee being led by some other kid who happens to have a college degree (an officer). There are several of you, and one of him. Your living conditions are terrible and you're often asked to do things that might get you killed, and all of the reasons you're told you have to do this sure smell like bullshit. Solution: you make your officer (another kid) piss-pants scared that if he doesn't lie and say you all totally went on that combat patrol you were sent on (rather than hanging around in the woods somewhere relatively safe for a couple hours, then walking right back to base) he might go to bed and not wake up because someone tossed a hand grenade in his tent and killed him. Or if he confiscates your drugs or hooch. Or tries to enforce grooming standards. Or anything else that makes your life worse. Basically, make him deathly afraid of upsetting "his men" in any way. Grenades were the threat/weapon of choice because one tossed into a tent was pretty damn certain to kill the person sleeping there; deploying a grenade is very quiet (up until the boom, of course); they're much smaller than a firearm (easier to conceal even than a service pistol); and the slight delay between throw and detonation gave time to get some distance. In practice, it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders, especially if others in the unit weren't inclined to be honest about things they'd seen and heard that night. This was A Thing toward the later end of the Vietnam War, and contributed mightily to reduced effectiveness of US ground forces. Turns out when you threaten people with death for no good reason they get kinda pissed off and murdery. "Fragging" comes from "fragmentation grenade", or "frag" for short.
azangru 6mo ago
What does it mean for Palantir to want to reinstate the draft? And why is this newsworthy?
- mrhottakes 6mo ago
  The movements and announcements of large tech companies tend to be newsworthy, whether it's "we made a new iPhone", "our new model is so good it's dangerous!" or "we should have a draft to support new American imperialism"
  - azangru 6mo ago
    I understand why your first two examples would be newsworthy – they are 1) about technical products that 2) are produced by the company that is making the announcement. But what does Palantir have to do with the draft? Isn't this comment on the same level as, I dunno, Elon Musk tweeting that families should have at least 3 kids?
throw4847285 6mo ago
Service guarantees citizenship!
diego_moita 6mo ago
Bilionaires talking about morals sound like Tony Soprano talking about morals. And let's be clear: Palantir executives want "other" people to die in wars, not them or their children.
souravroyetl 6mo ago
[flagged]
souravroyetl 6mo ago
[flagged]
anigbrowl 6mo ago
I'm in favor of mandatory public service (not exclusively military) but I also don't think a private company should be weighing in on such topics, since it's just a bunch of capital owners preaching about what everyone else should do.
- joquarky 6mo ago
  Who will pay for it? We can't even pay for education or healthcare.
  - anigbrowl 6mo ago
    We can, we just choose not to because of how we prioritize accounting. I see no reason why a well-run program shouldn't pay for itself since people would be doing some work as well as getting trained. Obviously, I'm picturing this as part of a broad realignment of national priorities and governance mores, not as a drop-in solution that we could just put in place tomorrow.
  - the_sleaze_ 6mo ago
    USA pays the most for education per capita of any other nation on the planet. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country#:~:text=*%2014%20countries%2C%20including%20the%20United%20States%2C,each)%20than%20the%20average%20of%20OECD%20countries. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
feb012025 6mo ago
Bizarre for them to suggest this right after the US unilaterally launched the most unpopular war in modern history. A war with almost no tangible upside for US citizens, and a war many people think was started on the whims of another country. What are they thinking lol
beedeebeedee 6mo ago
I've read their tweet: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312 https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312 It's hard to take them seriously given the omission of the biggest catastrophe of the 2000s-2020s that underlies everything they do, i.e., wealth inequality, the creation of a parasitic ruling class that uses propaganda to control the political narrative (and seeking AI for even greater control with less support), and the destitution of the poor by the rich, from the manufactured opium epidemic, gig economy, financial crises, etc. Their sundry list reminds me of the smarty boys in undergrad philosophy who pretend to be great philosophers before they have taken even one step into self-criticism and self-knowledge.
- outlore 6mo ago
  What even is that list lol? So edgy
  - guzfip 6mo ago
    These people snort a line of adderall, start writing, and call it a ”maifesto”.
tempodox 6mo ago
I thought we were supposed to have autonomous killer robots. What do we need a draft for?
- general1465 6mo ago
  Meat for kill bots.
- __MatrixMan__ 6mo ago
  The question isn't what do we need a draft for, we don't. The question is: Who would profit from a draft? Answer: Panatir.
blast 6mo ago
Whatever its other merits or demerits, reinstating the draft would cut back on needless wars. Abandoning the draft is what ended the anti-war movement, and to reinstate it would be to revive those protests. For this reason, if nothing else, it probably won't be reinstated. What this has to do with the argument Palantir is apparently making, I have no idea. I can't make any sense of it.
JuniperMesos 6mo ago
Even though the title of the Reason article is "Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft", suggesting that point 6 is what the Reason editorial staff found most striking about their manifesto, the actual text of what Palantir wrote about conscription is: > 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. which is actually more of a hedge than most of their other points. "National service should be a universal duty" is vague enough to be compatible with a few different concrete policies. And "seriously consider" moving away from an all-volunteer force is rather different from a specific recommendation to literally re-instate the draft! I suspect that the people inside Palantir responsible for this copy are close enough to the actual military that they're aware of the good arguments for why an all-volunteer military is more effective at achieving its goals than one with a bunch of draftees who really don't want to be there. And because Palantir frames this point as a way to make "everyone share[...] in the risk and the cost" of wars, there's actually quite a lot of measured agreement even here in this HN thread full of people who dislike Palantir in general. Making everyone share in the risk and the cost of wars does have emotional resonance that makes people a bit less reflexively opposed to bringing back the draft than they might otherwise be. Anyway, I'm against mandatory national service. The US military works well as an all-volunteer force, the US government is perfectly capable of hiring people at a wage to do other types of national service work, and I don't think it's actually socially desirable to force every US citizen to do some amount of mandatory, low-quality work to make them feel connected to the rest of society or whatever other vague benefit people think it would have on the citizenry at large. I'm also skeptical that mandatory service would involve enough young people actually entering combat roles against their will, to incentivize meaningful change to how the US uses its military in the world.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
rich_sasha 6mo ago
I never liked activist for-profit companies. Not "woke SV", not the new "anti-woke", well, everything in the US. IMO companies should focus on profits and activing within the law, and we shouldn't expect them to go beyond that. If their behaviour seems socially net negative then the law, or it's enforcement should change. But activist corporations, especially big ones, are a weird chimera where they have a loudspeaker for opinions that are neither representative (it's an owners/C-suite persons PoV, or marketing) nor high quality from a journalistic PoV, yet somehow dressed up as a noble civic duty. SV was so big on allyship and diversity, until Trump said too much woke, and they put it all in the bin, alongside their crumpled backbone. There is no virtue in corporate activism and hypocritical opportunism only. It feels so off that late-middle-age CEO Karp and his military contractor AI company should be even taking a side in a debate about the state compelling young people (men?) to do something they wouldn't do of their own volition.
TrackerFF 6mo ago
Having grown up in Norway, I did my conscription when I was 18. Not really a big deal - even though I was incredibly unmotivated in the beginning. Back in the old days (read: Cold War days) everyone had to serve, but then as Russia became less of a threat, so did military funding, and the number of conscripted. Today around 15%-20% will be conscripted. But interestingly enough, for the past 10 years we've seen a trend here in Norway where conscription service is viewed almost as a prestigious thing - due to how selective the military can be. When I served, everyone would be called in. It wasn't a prestigious thing to do, just something you pushed through. We had one guy in our platoon during boot camp that was so big and heavy, he could not get into any standard issue boots. He was completely unable to run. Eventually he was discharged for medical reasons - but these days someone like that wouldn't have gotten past the screening stage. They can pretty much pick and choose among the fittest and brightest.
- gbnwl 6mo ago
  I'd wager that being conscripted in Norwary carries a different level of risk of deployment than being conscripted in the US, given the fact that we've been essentially been nonstop involved in wars for my entire lifetime. When you were conscripted did you fear you might be sent to Iraq or Afganistan? It just feels like given our history an American conscript will litearlly always have some active warzone to possibly be sent off to. Our contries and our armies are not the same. Is Norway today chomping at the bit to send its soldiers to Iran? Or, per Trump, "our next conquest" Cuba? I really don't think you can think of being drafted into the American army the same way you think of the compulsory service of countries like South Korea or your own. Being conscripted in a defensive army is materially different than being conscripted into one that takes every opportunity to engage in conflicts across the globe.
  - TrackerFF 6mo ago
    I did my service right around the time GWOT started, and it was around this time that our military started to focus more on transitioning to a professional (we do have professional units) military aimed at fighting terrorism in the middle east(Afghanistan/ISAF) as part of our NATO duties. By the time you were finishing up your service (6-12 months depending on where you were stationed), you'd get a presentation on "the road ahead" if you wanted to continue military life: military school/college, become a professional soldier, etc. With that said, I think maybe 10%-15% of the guys in our platoon decided to go with the Afghanistan route. IIRC that meant transferring / trying out for the professional battalion (TMBN), training for some time, and then deployed. I don't think sending all conscripted soldiers to some foreign war will yield good results. But I do think that by the end of their service, some will be hyped up and "thirsty" enough to just go for it.
jasomill 6mo ago
The notion that the work done by "the engineering elite" at tech companies and research organizations aren't contributing to the national defense unless they're pressed into military service or working directly on weapons systems is absurd. Who does he think invented, designed, and implemented the hardware and software underlying modern military technology? Or for that matter, the tech that makes running any organization at the scale of the modern US military even possible. Consider: with computer technology, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service employs over 12,000 people responsible for the Department of Defense's basic accounting functions like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll. Forget building bombs and drafting soldiers. Without computer technology, you'd need to draft an army of clerical workers.
guzfip 6mo ago
The only way to save America at this point is to take a raw power of the US military and focus it to destroy Silicon Valley. They are the biggest enemies of the people, the nation, and everything else people ever pretended to care about in this country. Leveling it, and beasts running is our only hope.

228 points by tcp_handshaker 6mo ago

Palantir is a more dangerous enemy of the USA (or any people of Earth) than, say, Iran. There's no point in addressing their propaganda, but the idea that that a draft leads to everyone from every class of life having to be involved in war equally is so obviously untrue it's a joke.

shevy-java 6mo ago

Alex Karp needs an army. I think the proper counter move is to seize all assets of oligarchs and distribute it among The People. That way those Vietnam 2.0 loving guys won't get any say in anything anymore.

lokar 6mo ago
I like to think that Eisenhower would punch Karp in the face if he met him today.

intothemild 6mo ago

OK, Lets put Alex Karp in the frontlines.

raffael_de 6mo ago
He's just overcompensating - can't even get his stock up no more!
- intothemild 6mo ago
  oh what a shame.. I'm sure he can reach out to Elon to ask him how to inflate it
jazzpush2 6mo ago
He can lead that way with that sword he's been showing off!

dylan604 6mo ago

Opening graph: "We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," says military contractor and all-around surveillance-enabler Palantir. If that's the case, then every war to be fought needs to have the say so of those that will be doing the fighting and not the solitary decision made by a delusional leader that had already circumvented the required process from Congress.

lokar 6mo ago
Exactly. Enforce the war powers of congress and require a non-delegatable per-war approval. Hell, require the approval of 3/4 of governors as well.
- teeray 6mo ago
  How about a random sample of registered voters too? It would be nice to have a cohort that cannot be bought and paid for.
  - lokar 6mo ago
    At some level you have to trust a sustained strong majority of elected officials. You could imagine requiring a referendum if the war goes past N years or something.
raffael_de 6mo ago
what war? 'tis but a skirmish ... o.O
LoFiSamurai 6mo ago
Having those sent to fight in a war being the ones to decide if the war should be fought was on of the major points in General Butler’s 1935 book War is a Racket
- ceejayoz 6mo ago
  Great example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot > Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow Roosevelt.

Dezvous 6mo ago

Surely he means that himself and his billionaire buddies will be the first boots on the ground when we decide to plunder another country for oil again. No?

throwaway173738 6mo ago
No he just wants to send our kids to die in the desert for Palantir’s profits.

jmclnx 6mo ago

> This Big Tech Firm Wants To Reinstate the Draft I still cannot help but look at Palantir as a company that just sends $ to the "oligarchs". I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov. After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ?

wahnfrieden 6mo ago
Palantir is CIA-founded
gradyfps 6mo ago
Different deployments of Palantir Foundry exist in the US gov't/military and do provide real data science/analytics value. > After reading the article, are they looking for cheap tech labor. Is that because no one in tech wants to join the military due to pay ? Cyber in the military has abysmal retention because of the pay. You can get an immediate ~$50k pay raise doing the same work as soon as you leave the military.
mrhottakes 6mo ago
> I still wonder what real value Palantir provides the US Gov. Their "product" has always been some hacky database joins behind a web app with a dark mode interface that makes the baby brains at DOD feel like they're in a 90s hacker movie

criddell 6mo ago

Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes. Now we have no idea how much they cost. How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? How many years (decades?) was the Iraq war funded through annual (unbudgeted) emergency measures? How many trillions in promised healthcare does America owe its veterans? If the President had to make the case that taking on Iran would cost each American around $1000 on top of higher prices for fuel and food, how many would sign off on that? So I guess I agree with Palantir. Be honest about the actual costs of war and chances are we will get into fewer.

yapyap 6mo ago
> Wars used to be paid for by raising taxes in the long term maybe, in the short term its mass debt of trillions
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
  Inflation sort of is a tax, on those who do not hold appreciating assets. I.e. mostly people on the poorer side.
sleepybrett 6mo ago
> How many years in a row has the Pentagon failed it's audit? The pentagon has NEVER been successfully audited.
- datsci_est_2015 6mo ago
  All caps “NEVER” made me double check how many audits they’ve failed, and it’s only been since 2018 that the first “audit” occurred. Eisenhower warned of the industrial military complex in his farewell address in 1961, 57 years prior.
  - sleepybrett 6mo ago
    indeed.
6mo ago

yapyap 6mo ago

Big tech supercorp wants war efforts to increase

trueno 6mo ago
the absurdity to even entertain this dorks musings. imagine if tim cook or satya came out and talked about how there needs to be a draft. people would say lol shut up nerd and move on. some dorkus who heads a company that's just providing over reaching surveillance data to governments so they can do dumb data analytics should have no say in these affairs, and we should promptly discard what they have to say. peter thiel is a sociopath, karp is a dork, these people just want to be known as "the guy with the ideas" and they've crossed deep into the "what are you even saying right now" territory. tbh we should jettison them into the sun they're kind of a scourge on civilization and clearly lake any real stakes that keep them grounded in the world.
morkalork 6mo ago
May as well be a post by Weyland-Yutani or Tyrell corp.

dfee 6mo ago

This article has a strong slant. If we can look past that, we should consider the claim: everyone having skin in the game is more democratic and leads to a better aligned government. Perhaps this would lead to more peace.

2OEH8eoCRo0 6mo ago
Bone spurs
_doctor_love 6mo ago
Agree - the key is that everyone MUST include people in power.
- wahnfrieden 6mo ago
  It's not how conscription is ever implemented in practice.
  - _doctor_love 6mo ago
    Of course it's not. Once upon a time quite long ago kings and generals got on the field. But as we industrialized leadership moved to "the back." See concepts like Auftragstaktik, command intent, mission command.
    - boelboel 6mo ago
      Not even that long ago, nobility died at higher rates than normal people in ww1 and ww2. Many lines were killed during them. I still know of nobles in my own country in the army. Generals died in WW2 at a decent rate as well. Nobility lost most relevance now so I'm sure it's different now, owning a castle or a weird last name doesn't make you rich or powerful.
  - throwaway173738 6mo ago
    But it’s how it will be sold to us. It’s sure a lot warmer in the abbatoir for some reason. And they give some of us cigarettes. Bill says they even feed him.

nayroclade 6mo ago

> Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible I would agree with that, but its debt is to the people of that country, not their current government. But instead, Palantir conspires to surveil and repress those people at the bidding of an elite, anti-democratic minority. And would the leaders of Palantir still argue it had a moral debt to serve the government if it was a left-wing one, engaged in a process of wealth redistribution? No, they wouldn't. This supposed moral ideology is a facile sham.

smm11 6mo ago
Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country, and the country now has to serve. What?
- throwaway173738 6mo ago
  Silicon Valley could easily pay their moral debt by not evading taxes.

_doctor_love 6mo ago

Other countries have compulsory military service, for example Finland. Generally speaking I am a fan of the idea that everyone should be required to do some kind of community service for 2 years once they turn 18. Military service would just be one option, could be other kinds of civic engagement. This can really help people feel connected to their society and understand that there is something to show up for. BUT - this really only works if there's a social contract in place. In the United States it's hard to see how compulsory service works if people don't feel like the country is showing up for them. These days, what are American soldiers dying for? A society with great health care? Fantastic education? Wealth and social stability? Absolutely not! Until that changes I don't see any good reason why we should send our young people off to die. (EDIT: if you want a sobering experience, visit a military graveyard and pay special attention to the ages of the soldiers. We might as well call a military graveyard a children's graveyard). And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker.

wahnfrieden 6mo ago
> And to agree with others on this thread, the folks who push for war should 100% be required to participate in them and lead from the front. Don't sell the rest of our lives while you hide in a nice air conditioned bunker. It never happens because those in power use their power to avoid it, even if they bind the rest of us with rules they enforce. By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent.
- _doctor_love 6mo ago
  > By saying they "should be required", you are promoting the idea that their desire for war is acceptable as long as they codify certain standards, which they are able to use their powers to personally circumvent. I am not.
  - 6mo ago

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drivingmenuts 6mo ago

"We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost," OK, sure, but only if we agree that a war should be fought. No more fighting a war because six rich guys in a back room decide we need unobtanium. Or because one rich guy doesn't like some other rich guy's religious values.

tootie 6mo ago

Karp has a right to his opinion as bonkers as it may be but it is doubly bonkers to release this as company policy. Especially coupled with all the other bonkers things that went into this manifesto. Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? Toss in some unsubtle racism and you're really just staking your company position as aligned with a very narrow political niche. Seemingly at odds with the company's interest to provide services to whoever will pay.

Alive-in-2025 6mo ago
They are simply following along with the basically fascist direction of Trump, or maybe leading them.
abdelhousni 6mo ago
Aiding and abetting to a current genocide does that to the appetite for more corpses.
mrbnatural 6mo ago
> Rearming Germany and Japan? Why does Palantir care about that? New markets to sell genocide tools to.
sidewndr46 6mo ago
Unless I'm mistaken Germany has US-owned nuclear weapons on it's soil at all times. There are some part of the German military that could use a serious rethinking because of a decay of operational capacity. But exactly what else would we be arming them with?

robotburrito 6mo ago

Doesn’t ycombinator and hacker news have links with this company? Makes it hard to maintain the hacker ethos when this entire site seems so closely linked with such forces.

mrhottakes 6mo ago
The hacker aesthetic has always been largely reactionary and hyperfocused on the individual and individual freedoms. See also the politics of "generation X"
- sph 6mo ago
  The saddest thing of our age is that "reactionary" and "individual freedom" is equated to authoritarian movements that are anything but. The hacker aesthetic has always been anarchist in nature, until the rich Californians decided that a hacker is an entrepreneur that participates into the game of capitalism. To be fair, even the concept of libertarianism was an offshoot of anarchism, until the Americans decided that it means right-wing party politics of the rich elite. Words don't mean anything any more, any concept that can equated to its opposite if it rewards one with internet points.
  - mrhottakes 6mo ago
    "Right wing politics dominated by the rich" is the natural endpoint of libertarianism, so that makes sense. Whether they're "real" libertarians or not, the elite techies leading the charge are people with politics like Karp, Andreessen, Musk, etc.
    - mindslight 6mo ago
      Libertarianism is abused by capital in the same exact way that conservatism and progressivism are - by getting primed with easy feel-good answers that are ultimately disempowering and self-defeating. In the case of libertarianism, this is so-called "right-" libertarianism that actively rejects qualitative judgements of freedom and coercion while hyper-emphasizing an axiomatic framework that can be used to justify authoritarianism as long as the logical preconditions have been met.

feverzsj 6mo ago

[flagged]

jjgreen 6mo ago
A bit greasy ...
gopher_space 6mo ago
We can’t discuss eventualities on this platform. It has to be a surprise for some people, apparently. The problem is that you can’t argue against violence if the topic has been banned.

russellbeattie 6mo ago

To those HNers working at Palantir - and there's bound to be a few - what's your deal? You do realize what sort of company you work for, right? Is it cognitive dissonance or are you really a paranoid right winger that's fully on board with Palantir's efforts to enable authoritarian governments akin to 1984's Big Brother? I'm curious. Please feel free to explain how you go to work every day and do what you do. Fair warning, the rest of us are pretty disgusted with you.

JohnMakin 6mo ago
Money can paper over a lot of moral dilemmas - everyone has a price, whether or not we're necessarily aware of it. I refuse to interview with any company in the "defense," space, but I'm sure if someone threw enough money at me I might entertain it. For true believers though, which I'm sure exist there, I do wonder much the same things.
- burnt-resistor 6mo ago
  > everyone has a price False. People with integrity exist who have moral absolute boundaries.
mrhottakes 6mo ago
They are fascists that like money

abdelhousni 6mo ago

The Nazi government would not have gotten this far without the help of industrialists and oligarchy.

idfyicuyciy 6mo ago
The CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, has extensive ties to the Israeli government and is a self-avowed Jewish-supremacist. Peter Thiel was also featured extensively in the Epstein Files, and the two collaborated on creating Palantir to serve Israeli interests.

__MatrixMan__ 6mo ago

Of course they do. They make stalkerware at scale. Their products would be used to track down draft dodgers.

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago

Unless you have popular support behind you, a draft is a great way to make your military less effective. You get a bunch of soldiers who don't want to be there, who may not do their job to the utmost either out of apathy or active malice. It also gives lots of people, who might otherwise passively disagree with your war, a great incentive to actively resist your war and your attempts to force them to fight in it. It worked in WWII because of Pearl Harbor and the Axis being cartoon villains. Direct US involvement also only lasted 4-5 years. Vietnam demonstrated that an unpopular, long-term conflict is ill-suited to the draft.

sheikhnbake 6mo ago
This is very much anecdotal but the concept of fragging has gone mainstream in my social media feeds. Mostly gen z joking about ww3 when the Iran conflict kicked off
- vaylian 6mo ago
  What is fragging?
  - ishouldstayaway 6mo ago
    > The premeditated murder of one's superior officer in a military unit https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fragging https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fragging
  - jasomill 6mo ago
    Soldiers on the same side deliberately killing one another.
  - lamasery 6mo ago
    Situation: you are a poor draftee being led by some other kid who happens to have a college degree (an officer). There are several of you, and one of him. Your living conditions are terrible and you're often asked to do things that might get you killed, and all of the reasons you're told you have to do this sure smell like bullshit. Solution: you make your officer (another kid) piss-pants scared that if he doesn't lie and say you all totally went on that combat patrol you were sent on (rather than hanging around in the woods somewhere relatively safe for a couple hours, then walking right back to base) he might go to bed and not wake up because someone tossed a hand grenade in his tent and killed him. Or if he confiscates your drugs or hooch. Or tries to enforce grooming standards. Or anything else that makes your life worse. Basically, make him deathly afraid of upsetting "his men" in any way. Grenades were the threat/weapon of choice because one tossed into a tent was pretty damn certain to kill the person sleeping there; deploying a grenade is very quiet (up until the boom, of course); they're much smaller than a firearm (easier to conceal even than a service pistol); and the slight delay between throw and detonation gave time to get some distance. In practice, it turned out to be extremely hard to prove who had committed these murders, especially if others in the unit weren't inclined to be honest about things they'd seen and heard that night. This was A Thing toward the later end of the Vietnam War, and contributed mightily to reduced effectiveness of US ground forces. Turns out when you threaten people with death for no good reason they get kinda pissed off and murdery. "Fragging" comes from "fragmentation grenade", or "frag" for short.

azangru 6mo ago

What does it mean for Palantir to want to reinstate the draft? And why is this newsworthy?

mrhottakes 6mo ago
The movements and announcements of large tech companies tend to be newsworthy, whether it's "we made a new iPhone", "our new model is so good it's dangerous!" or "we should have a draft to support new American imperialism"
- azangru 6mo ago
  I understand why your first two examples would be newsworthy – they are 1) about technical products that 2) are produced by the company that is making the announcement. But what does Palantir have to do with the draft? Isn't this comment on the same level as, I dunno, Elon Musk tweeting that families should have at least 3 kids?

throw4847285 6mo ago

Service guarantees citizenship!

diego_moita 6mo ago

Bilionaires talking about morals sound like Tony Soprano talking about morals. And let's be clear: Palantir executives want "other" people to die in wars, not them or their children.

souravroyetl 6mo ago

[flagged]

souravroyetl 6mo ago

[flagged]

anigbrowl 6mo ago

I'm in favor of mandatory public service (not exclusively military) but I also don't think a private company should be weighing in on such topics, since it's just a bunch of capital owners preaching about what everyone else should do.

joquarky 6mo ago
Who will pay for it? We can't even pay for education or healthcare.
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  We can, we just choose not to because of how we prioritize accounting. I see no reason why a well-run program shouldn't pay for itself since people would be doing some work as well as getting trained. Obviously, I'm picturing this as part of a broad realignment of national priorities and governance mores, not as a drop-in solution that we could just put in place tomorrow.
- the_sleaze_ 6mo ago
  USA pays the most for education per capita of any other nation on the planet. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country#:~:text=*%2014%20countries%2C%20including%20the%20United%20States%2C,each)%20than%20the%20average%20of%20OECD%20countries. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

feb012025 6mo ago

Bizarre for them to suggest this right after the US unilaterally launched the most unpopular war in modern history. A war with almost no tangible upside for US citizens, and a war many people think was started on the whims of another country. What are they thinking lol

beedeebeedee 6mo ago

I've read their tweet: https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312 https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312 It's hard to take them seriously given the omission of the biggest catastrophe of the 2000s-2020s that underlies everything they do, i.e., wealth inequality, the creation of a parasitic ruling class that uses propaganda to control the political narrative (and seeking AI for even greater control with less support), and the destitution of the poor by the rich, from the manufactured opium epidemic, gig economy, financial crises, etc. Their sundry list reminds me of the smarty boys in undergrad philosophy who pretend to be great philosophers before they have taken even one step into self-criticism and self-knowledge.

outlore 6mo ago
What even is that list lol? So edgy
- guzfip 6mo ago
  These people snort a line of adderall, start writing, and call it a ”maifesto”.

tempodox 6mo ago

I thought we were supposed to have autonomous killer robots. What do we need a draft for?

general1465 6mo ago
Meat for kill bots.
__MatrixMan__ 6mo ago
The question isn't what do we need a draft for, we don't. The question is: Who would profit from a draft? Answer: Panatir.

blast 6mo ago

Whatever its other merits or demerits, reinstating the draft would cut back on needless wars. Abandoning the draft is what ended the anti-war movement, and to reinstate it would be to revive those protests. For this reason, if nothing else, it probably won't be reinstated. What this has to do with the argument Palantir is apparently making, I have no idea. I can't make any sense of it.

JuniperMesos 6mo ago

Even though the title of the Reason article is "Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft", suggesting that point 6 is what the Reason editorial staff found most striking about their manifesto, the actual text of what Palantir wrote about conscription is: > 6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost. which is actually more of a hedge than most of their other points. "National service should be a universal duty" is vague enough to be compatible with a few different concrete policies. And "seriously consider" moving away from an all-volunteer force is rather different from a specific recommendation to literally re-instate the draft! I suspect that the people inside Palantir responsible for this copy are close enough to the actual military that they're aware of the good arguments for why an all-volunteer military is more effective at achieving its goals than one with a bunch of draftees who really don't want to be there. And because Palantir frames this point as a way to make "everyone share[...] in the risk and the cost" of wars, there's actually quite a lot of measured agreement even here in this HN thread full of people who dislike Palantir in general. Making everyone share in the risk and the cost of wars does have emotional resonance that makes people a bit less reflexively opposed to bringing back the draft than they might otherwise be. Anyway, I'm against mandatory national service. The US military works well as an all-volunteer force, the US government is perfectly capable of hiring people at a wage to do other types of national service work, and I don't think it's actually socially desirable to force every US citizen to do some amount of mandatory, low-quality work to make them feel connected to the rest of society or whatever other vague benefit people think it would have on the citizenry at large. I'm also skeptical that mandatory service would involve enough young people actually entering combat roles against their will, to incentivize meaningful change to how the US uses its military in the world.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

rich_sasha 6mo ago

I never liked activist for-profit companies. Not "woke SV", not the new "anti-woke", well, everything in the US. IMO companies should focus on profits and activing within the law, and we shouldn't expect them to go beyond that. If their behaviour seems socially net negative then the law, or it's enforcement should change. But activist corporations, especially big ones, are a weird chimera where they have a loudspeaker for opinions that are neither representative (it's an owners/C-suite persons PoV, or marketing) nor high quality from a journalistic PoV, yet somehow dressed up as a noble civic duty. SV was so big on allyship and diversity, until Trump said too much woke, and they put it all in the bin, alongside their crumpled backbone. There is no virtue in corporate activism and hypocritical opportunism only. It feels so off that late-middle-age CEO Karp and his military contractor AI company should be even taking a side in a debate about the state compelling young people (men?) to do something they wouldn't do of their own volition.

TrackerFF 6mo ago

Having grown up in Norway, I did my conscription when I was 18. Not really a big deal - even though I was incredibly unmotivated in the beginning. Back in the old days (read: Cold War days) everyone had to serve, but then as Russia became less of a threat, so did military funding, and the number of conscripted. Today around 15%-20% will be conscripted. But interestingly enough, for the past 10 years we've seen a trend here in Norway where conscription service is viewed almost as a prestigious thing - due to how selective the military can be. When I served, everyone would be called in. It wasn't a prestigious thing to do, just something you pushed through. We had one guy in our platoon during boot camp that was so big and heavy, he could not get into any standard issue boots. He was completely unable to run. Eventually he was discharged for medical reasons - but these days someone like that wouldn't have gotten past the screening stage. They can pretty much pick and choose among the fittest and brightest.

gbnwl 6mo ago
I'd wager that being conscripted in Norwary carries a different level of risk of deployment than being conscripted in the US, given the fact that we've been essentially been nonstop involved in wars for my entire lifetime. When you were conscripted did you fear you might be sent to Iraq or Afganistan? It just feels like given our history an American conscript will litearlly always have some active warzone to possibly be sent off to. Our contries and our armies are not the same. Is Norway today chomping at the bit to send its soldiers to Iran? Or, per Trump, "our next conquest" Cuba? I really don't think you can think of being drafted into the American army the same way you think of the compulsory service of countries like South Korea or your own. Being conscripted in a defensive army is materially different than being conscripted into one that takes every opportunity to engage in conflicts across the globe.
- TrackerFF 6mo ago
  I did my service right around the time GWOT started, and it was around this time that our military started to focus more on transitioning to a professional (we do have professional units) military aimed at fighting terrorism in the middle east(Afghanistan/ISAF) as part of our NATO duties. By the time you were finishing up your service (6-12 months depending on where you were stationed), you'd get a presentation on "the road ahead" if you wanted to continue military life: military school/college, become a professional soldier, etc. With that said, I think maybe 10%-15% of the guys in our platoon decided to go with the Afghanistan route. IIRC that meant transferring / trying out for the professional battalion (TMBN), training for some time, and then deployed. I don't think sending all conscripted soldiers to some foreign war will yield good results. But I do think that by the end of their service, some will be hyped up and "thirsty" enough to just go for it.

jasomill 6mo ago

The notion that the work done by "the engineering elite" at tech companies and research organizations aren't contributing to the national defense unless they're pressed into military service or working directly on weapons systems is absurd. Who does he think invented, designed, and implemented the hardware and software underlying modern military technology? Or for that matter, the tech that makes running any organization at the scale of the modern US military even possible. Consider: with computer technology, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service employs over 12,000 people responsible for the Department of Defense's basic accounting functions like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and payroll. Forget building bombs and drafting soldiers. Without computer technology, you'd need to draft an army of clerical workers.

guzfip 6mo ago

The only way to save America at this point is to take a raw power of the US military and focus it to destroy Silicon Valley. They are the biggest enemies of the people, the nation, and everything else people ever pretended to care about in this country. Leveling it, and beasts running is our only hope.