Is the world already sliding into a global conflict without quite realizing it? That is the unsettling question posed by Shyam Sankar, the outspoken chief technology officer of Palantir, whose new book argues that the foundations of a third world war may already be in place. In interviews reported by Times UK and echoed across policy and tech circles, Sankar paints a stark picture of a West that has grown complacent, bureaucratic and dangerously underprepared for the pace of modern warfare.
Sankar, 43, speaks with the confidence of someone who has spent nearly two decades straddling Silicon Valley and the battlefield. As employee number 13 at Palantir, the US data analytics firm co-founded by billionaire investor Peter Thiel, he joined in 2006 when the company was a tiny operation focused on counterterrorism in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Today, Palantir generates about $4.5 billion in annual revenue and supplies AI-driven decision-making software to militaries and governments around the world.
His forthcoming book, Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, co-authored with defence historian Madeline Hart, is both a warning and a rallying cry. At its heart is a provocative idea: that the early stages of a global conflict are already visible in the steady erosion of international norms, from Russia’s annexation of Crimea to China’s militarisation of the South China Sea and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. These acts, Sankar argues, would have been unthinkable a generation ago, yet were met with insufficient deterrence.
For Sankar, the problem is not a lack of talent or technology in the West, but a failure of culture. He is fond of contrarian observations, including his belief that building transformative companies, and by extension national power, depends less on technical brilliance than on tolerance for risk and eccentricity. He notes that neither China nor India has produced a globally competitive enterprise software giant, despite their vast engineering talent pools, and that Europe has similarly struggled. His explanation is blunt: truly world-changing organisations require “crazy people”, founders and rebels willing to defy convention, something the US has historically been better at cultivating.
That same mindset, he argues, is missing from Western defence procurement. In the book, and in remarks highlighted by Times UK, Sankar describes a US military-industrial system weighed down by bureaucracy, slow decision-making and supply chains overly dependent on China. In a major conflict, he claims, the US would run out of critical munitions within a week, while modernising parts of its nuclear deterrent is taking longer than it took to build them during the Cold War.
His critique is informed by personal experience. As Palantir’s first “forward deployed engineer”, Sankar embedded himself with military units in war zones, helping adapt software in real time. He recounts one operation in Iraq in which intelligence from US, British and Danish sources had to be fused rapidly to stop an Islamic State cell from turning a downed US drone into a flying bomb. Where traditional intelligence-sharing processes would have been too slow, Palantir’s systems enabled secure, machine-to-machine data exchange that allowed the threat to be neutralised in time.
That blend of technology and patriotism runs deep for Sankar. Last year he became a reservist in the US Army, taking the oath of office after years of working alongside soldiers. He traces his sense of duty to his father, who grew up in extreme poverty in India, later running a pharmaceutical factory in Nigeria before fleeing to the United States after their family home was attacked by armed robbers. Growing up, Sankar recalls being told that without America, his father might have died “in a ditch in Lagos”.
The book’s tone, however, is not purely alarmist. Sankar insists it is ultimately optimistic, arguing that Western democracies still have the agency and industrial capacity to deter catastrophe if they act decisively. He sees signs of a cultural shift already underway. Once ostracised in Silicon Valley for working with the military, Palantir is now part of a broader defence tech ecosystem that is booming. Venture capital funding for US defence technology firms nearly tripled last year to $14.2 billion, according to CB Insights, and companies such as Anduril, founded by former Palantir engineers, are poised to follow it into the public markets.
Ukraine looms large in his analysis. He describes it as the first large-scale drone war and the first true AI-enabled conflict, demonstrating that static stockpiles of weapons no longer deter adversaries. What matters instead, Sankar argues, is a “dynamic factory floor”, the ability to rapidly design and manufacture new systems in response to evolving threats. In that sense, deterrence is less about what weapons a nation has today than about how quickly it can build the weapons it will need tomorrow.
Sankar’s views place him firmly within a rising “tech right”, a movement of entrepreneurs and engineers pushing to modernise Western militaries through software, automation and artificial intelligence. Yet Palantir’s role has also attracted controversy. In the US, critics have attacked its work with immigration authorities, particularly during President Donald Trump’s deportation drive. In Europe, concerns have been raised about data sovereignty and the risks of relying on US technology, especially amid trade disputes and geopolitical tension.
Sankar responds to those fears by emphasising transparency and control. He says allied governments conduct rigorous technical reviews and consistently conclude that Palantir’s systems have no hidden back doors and that customers retain ownership of their data. He acknowledges, however, that emotional and political concerns about sovereignty are legitimate and must be addressed, insisting that countries should adopt the technology because they want to, not because they feel coerced.
His message to Europe is particularly pointed. Turning to China as an alternative partner, he warns, risks “conquest capitalism” that could hollow out entire industries. He urges European nations, especially the UK, to rediscover their historic strengths in collaboration, citing wartime efforts such as Bletchley Park, radar development and the Manhattan Project as models for transatlantic innovation.
Whether Sankar’s stark warnings prove prescient remains to be seen. But his central question, posed at the start of his book and amplified by Times UK, lingers uncomfortably: if history is written decades from now, will this moment be remembered as the quiet beginning of a global conflict that democracies failed to recognize in time?
