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revolving door
Palantir’s Latest Hire Is a Particularly Egregious Turn of the Revolving Door
China hawk and former Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) is now the company’s head of defense business; if he had his way, odds of an unnecessary and devastating conflict with China could increase considerably.
Aug 29, 2024
Former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin 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% 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.”
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.
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 former U.S. President 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 USSR 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 JD 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, tellingThe New York Times that 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.
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World-Ending Investments? Inside the $2 Trillion Nuclear Weapon Upgrade Scheme
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons?
Aug 07, 2024
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlante stated: “We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program.
Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote, “If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”
This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.
The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.
Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby
A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.
Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.
In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.
Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.
Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door
The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.
During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.
While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lott received more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.
Playing the Jobs Card
The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.
As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.
Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.
Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.
There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age
Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:
“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”
The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”
Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.
Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.
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A Navy Admiral’s Bribery Charges Are Just Part of a System of Corrupt Dealings
It’s great that our legal system is seeking to hold law breakers to account, but when will members of Congress who place shilling for special interests above crafting an effective defense policy face the music?
Jun 09, 2024
The indictment of four-star Navy Admiral Robert Burke on bribery charges late last month raised eyebrows about the extent of corruption in the Navy and beyond. The scheme was simple. Burke allegedly steered a $355,000 Pentagon contract to a small workforce training firm—described unhelpfully in the Justice Department’s description as “Company A." Less than a year later he took a job at Company A in exchange for a $500,000 annual salary and 100,000 stock options.
The Burke indictment comes on the heels of Washington Post writer Craig Whitlock’s illuminating book on the Fat Leonard Scandal, the biggest, most embarrassing corruption scheme in the history of the U.S. Navy. In the words of his publisher, Simon Schuster, Whitlock’s book reveals “how a charismatic Malaysian defense contractor bribed scores of high-ranking military officers, defrauded the U.S. Navy of tens of millions of dollars, and jeopardized our nation’s security.”
Obviously, the Navy needs to clean up its act, and, if found guilty, Burke should face consequences for his participation in a blatant case of old school corruption.
If skipping a serious conversation on the future nuclear policy of the United States to engage in pork barrel politics isn’t a case of blatant corruption and dereliction of duty, what is?
But this is just part of a pernicious system of corrupt dealings and profiteering in Pentagon procurement practices, and much of it is completely legal. It involves campaign contributions from major weapons contractors to key members of Congress with the most power to determine the size and shape of the Pentagon budget, and job blackmail, in which companies place facilities in as many congressional districts as possible and then stand ready to accuse members of cutting local jobs if they vote against a weapons program, no matter how misguided or dysfunctional it may be.
It also involves the revolving door, in which arms industry executives often do stints in top national security posts, even serving as secretary of defense, or, on the other side of the revolving door, when high ranking Pentagon and military officials go to work for weapons makers when they leave government service.
In fact, this is, by far, the most common path for retired senior military officers. As a Quincy Institute analysis found, over 80% of four-star generals and admirals that have retired in the last five years (26 of 32) went on to work in the arms sector. In short, most retiring four-stars, like Burke, go on to lucrative positions in the arms industry. Unlike Burke, they follow the rules, so this is all perfectly legal corruption.
The revolving door from the Pentagon is also spinning feverishly to foreign governments. A Washington Postinvestigation found that more than 500 former Pentagon personnel, including many high-ranking generals and admirals, have gone on to work for foreign governments known for political repression and human rights abuses, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Last, but certainly not least, there are the lobbyists. Last year alone, Pentagon contractors spent nearly $138 million on lobbying and had 905 lobbyists working on their behalf, according to OpenSecrets. That’s almost two lobbyists for every member of Congress, and more than 600 of them had gone through the revolving door—previously working at the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive branch.
All of the above is about money and jobs, not crafting an effective defense strategy or buying weapons systems that are appropriate for carrying out that strategy. A case in point was a hearing last October to review a report on America’s strategic (meaning nuclear) posture from a congressional commission, almost all the members of which have financial ties to the arms industry.
First off, the commission co-chair who testified at the hearing was former Arizona Senator Jon Kyl, a lifelong opponent of nuclear arms control who also did a stint as a lobbyist for Northrop Grumman, which makes nuclear bombers and land-based nuclear missiles. Surprise, surprise, Kyl recommended that Congress pony up more for nuclear weapons on top of the Pentagon’s current $2 trillion, three decades long nuclear weapons “modernization” program.
But surely the gathered members of the Senate Armed Services Committee would ask some tough questions before accepting the commission’s proposals for an accelerated nuclear buildup. Think again. The bulk of the questioners essentially touted nuclear-related missiles or facilities in their states and asked a variation on the penetrating question, “Shouldn’t we spend more on this wonderful weapon [or facility] in my state?”
What wasn’t mentioned at the hearing was the fact that defense contractors—including Northrop Grumman, which makes the nuclear weapons in question—are some of the top campaign contributors to members of the committee, according to OpenSecrets.
It fell to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to bring the discussion down to Earth by asking how much the commission’s ambitious plan would cost. With a straight face, Kyl said that the commission hadn’t calculated a cost, since the investments proposed were so urgently needed. This seems highly unlikely given that the United States already deploys over 1,700 nuclear warheads that can hit targets thousands of miles away, with thousands more in reserve.
But Kyl’s statement went largely unchallenged in the rush by members to flak for their local weapons of choice.
If skipping a serious conversation on the future nuclear policy of the United States to engage in pork barrel politics isn’t a case of blatant corruption and dereliction of duty, what is? If even a conversation that touches on the future of the planet can’t rouse money-conscious senators to engage in an actual debate, what will? And isn’t this dereliction of duty ultimately more dangerous than trading cash or a cushy job for doing the bidding of a weapons contractor?
It’s great that our legal system is seeking to hold participants in illegal schemes to account. But when will members of Congress who place shilling for special interests above crafting an effective defense policy face the music? If not soon, we can expect much of the tens or hundreds of billions of new money likely to be thrown at the Pentagon in the next few years to go to waste. If that’s not a scandal of the highest order, we don’t know what is.
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