Andrew, the Duke of York, has said he “ceased all contact” with the businessman accused of being a Chinese spy after receiving advice from the government.
Sources close to the government of the United Arab Emirates claim the Duke of York is considering a permanent move to the Gulf, where his royal status would still confer a degree of respect, according to the Sunday Times.
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From The Defence Reformation
We, as a culture, are inundated with manifestos. Most are by self-indulgent lunatics but the culture is broad and forgiving. And curious.
This notebook has often been a sounding board for ideas of varying merit but this article, by the CTO of Palantir, is arresting, radical, and hopeful.
It is an analysis of the DoD--and may have implications of our efforts to homogenize decisions in our suicidal war on merit that makes life so much easier for administrators..
These snippets are followed by a link, 4000 words. I think it's worth the read.
"In 1993, after the end of the Cold War, America wanted a Peace Dividend and defense spending was slashed by 67%. The Secretary of Defense held a dinner at the Pentagon — the so-called “Last Supper” — to tell the 51 primes they would not all survive. Today, there are 5.
The most important consequence of the Last Supper wasn’t a reduction in competition in the Defense Industrial Base, but the decoupling of commercial innovation from defense and the rise of the government Monopsony. Consolidation bred conformity and pushed out the crazy Founders and innovative engineers. This was the Great Schism of the American Industrial Base.
Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, only 6% of defense spending went to defense specialists — so called traditionals. The vast majority of the spend went to companies that had both defense and commercial businesses. Chrysler made cars and missiles. Ford made satellites until 1990. General Mills — the cereal company — made artillery and inertial guidance systems.
But today that 6% has ballooned to 86%. The Monopsony’s fixation on cost-plus contracting, control, and tedious regulation has made working in the national interest bad business, suitable only to risk-averse investors who are addicted to dividends and buybacks — a luxury only affordable at the end of history. That is not what the most dynamic parts of the American economy do — only the dying parts.
Working with the Monopsony as a defense contractor is so unappealing that Ball would rather make beer cans than satellite buses. That is depressing.
The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. That resembles Europe’s sclerotic capital markets, not America’s.
Working with the Monopsony as a defense contractor is so unappealing that Ball would rather make beer cans than satellite buses. That is depressing.
The S&P 500 last added a defense company 46 years ago — until Palantir’s addition in September 2024. That resembles Europe’s sclerotic capital markets, not America’s.
But Palantir’s addition will not be the last. Because today the Founders are back — in the hundreds — and they are backed by hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital to build in the national interest. However, their effort and capital alone is not enough to resurrect the American Industrial Base. We need a defense Reformation to upend the Monopsony and transform the way the government does business. Here is my treatise on how to get that done.
Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD. The only problem is that we are bad commies.We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market. Bill Greenwalt explains the sins of our poor attempts at copying the Communists:
'This [ideology and management] approach, now deeply engrained in defense management culture, process, law, and regulation, is based on the concepts of scientific management that were once fashionable in the Soviet Union and at the vanguard of the 1950s U.S. auto industry before it was outcompeted by Japan in the 1970s. Centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight were then thought to be superior to the trial and error and messiness of time-constrained, decentralized experimentation and the seemingly wastefulness of having multiple sources rapidly prototyping potential solutions.'
There is no process that can save us. Reform will be painful. We must be very careful not to conflate pain with error. As world champion cyclist Greg LeMond said, “It doesn’t get easier, you just go faster.” Just as there is no pain-free world class cycling performance, innovation will always be painful, messy, and subject to retrospective bureaucratic critiques from those not in the arena.
Our centralized, predictive program budgeting, management, and oversight process values time spent, not time saved. It values costs and effort, not value and outcomes.
The Great Schism has created a religion in government that is unaware or dismissive of power-law outcomes from power-law talent. In Silicon Valley we call them 10x or 100x engineers, meaning they are 10x to 100x as valuable and productive as normal engineers. We once understood this in defense, too: Rickover, Kelly Johnson, Ed Hall and countless legendary talents fought the bureaucracy and got stuff done. We seem to generally appreciate that Usain Bolt is more than a generational talent — even the gold medalist at Paris 2024 was not faster than him. But this is also true for Tom Mueller, Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, Brian Schimpf, Ryan Tseng, and the Founders at the First Breakfast. Reforming the system means renouncing the communist conformity that’s slowing us down and unleashing the charismatic leaders who can drive outcomes — in the boardroom and on the battlefield."
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