President Donald Trump’s unprecedented (depending on your benchmark) state visit to the United Kingdom is underway and the deals are flowing. Sir Keir Starmer’s government desperately needs good news, not only economically but also to distract from the chaos everywhere else. He and his ministers will be hoping that a contract between the Ministry of Defence and Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies will be one of many positive outcomes.
Palantir’s software essentially integrates the customer’s data with a large language model and allows ultra-fast decision-making drawing on huge amounts of information. The Ministry of Defence’s £750 million deal will enable commanders across the three armed services to have a comprehensive view of the battlefield, tracking the location of tanks, aircraft and warships on both sides. This will assist planning and deployment as well as targeting of enemy assets based on a level of data impossible to manage without artificial intelligence.
Accurate, timely information is one of the most valuable weapons any military leader can have
The system will also perform more mundane but equally critical tasks in terms of monitoring the capability, maintenance and readiness of UK military assets, including equipment and personnel. It can keep track of when parts will need to be replaced and when planned maintenance periods will fall, and it is also expected to collate data from medical records, payroll and training documentation to provide an accurate and up-to-date assessment of the fitness and availability of personnel.
The Royal Navy is already working with Palantir. Since the early 2020s, as part of the wider Defence Data Strategy, Project Kraken has provided this kind of ‘stock-taking’ function – or ‘situational awareness platform’ – and has led to major advances in efficiency and effectiveness. The deal announced this week is ten times the size of existing contracts, however, and will be much broader in scope.
This is reportedly Palantir’s first billion-dollar (£730 million) deal outside the United States. It is also reported that, in recognition of the major expenditure by the Ministry of Defence, Palantir will invest heavily in the UK over the next five years, promising to spend £1.5 billion; what form this investment will take is not yet clear, but it is a substantial figure.
Accurate, timely information is one of the most valuable weapons any military leader can have. During Operation Banner, the British Army’s deployment to Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007, it developed a joint intelligence database, MACER (originally CAISTER), with the Royal Ulster Constabulary and its successor, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. This was designed to integrate information from as many sources as possible about terrorist and paramilitary activities. When Operation Banner came to an end, MACER was handed over as a closed archive to PSNI.
There has not been a comparable integrated database in the armed forces more generally, and operations have undoubtedly suffered for its lack. The available technology is now unfathomably more powerful, and the potential benefits are accordingly greater. Colonel Philip Ingram, a former Intelligence Corps officer who served in Northern Ireland and commanded 1 Military Intelligence Battalion in Iraq, summed up the Palantir deal to me: ‘This capability is long overdue and badly needed now.’
There will undoubtedly be unease, even opposition. Peter Thiel, the chairman and co-founder of Palantir, describes himself as a ‘conservative libertarian’ and has criticised DEI programmes, affirmative action, elements of welfare benefits and ‘capitalist democracy’. On the other hand, he has in the past supported the presidential bids of the late John McCain, Mitt Romney and Carly Fiorina, as well as Donald Trump.
In truth, Palantir’s broad client base cannot be dismissed as ideological fellow-travellers. As well as many US federal organisations, it includes the NHS, Europol, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the police forces of three German states. The relevant questions are, do the UK armed forces need this kind of software and will it work? The answer to the first question is emphatically yes, and the evidence points towards a positive response to the second.
The Strategic Defence Review published in June emphasised the need to create an ‘integrated force’ to perform all the tasks required of the armed forces. This, it went on, ‘must be underpinned by the common digital foundation and shared data that are central to today’s software‑defined warfare’. This is a long-term transformation, but the capabilities provided by Palantir will be a vital part of it. As Margaret Thatcher once said, just rejoice at that news.
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