Palantir Wants to Reinstate the Draft

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

OK, Lets put Alex Karp in the frontlines.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Big tech supercorp wants war efforts to increase

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.

I've read their tweet: 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.

"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.

> 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 ?

Service guarantees citizenship!

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.