First Breakfast sat down with Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense at Palantir, to discuss “The 12 Day War” and Operation Midnight Hammer, the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Mike shares his takeaways from the conflict—what we learned about ourselves, our technology, and our enemies, as well as what these events could mean for future conflicts.
Below are excerpts from the conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
The Importance of Lethal Allies
“I think the most important takeaway, in my opinion, is the importance of having lethal allies that are willing to take a proactive role in the regional security order. I've often thought that if we didn't have an ally like Israel, we would probably have to invest a lot of time and money in sort of creating one in the Middle East.
To have an innovative and daring ally like that is paying off—as a complement to the American military's effective Operation Midnight Hammer, the Israeli military and the Israeli intelligence service destroying key aspects of the Iranian nuclear complex, taking out key mental infrastructure, for lack of a better term, and taking out I think eight of the top 13 scientists—and that combination of American power and Israel power I think is restoring deterrence in a region that has defied our efforts to impose some semblance of deterrence.
Israel’s Culture of Risk-Taking
[Israel] is a relatively small country, albeit one that punches well above its weight and is a technological superpower.
I think the proximity of threats from all sides on all of its borders sharpens thinking and creates a risk acceptance that would be difficult for us in America to have, particularly when we, you know, continually get lulled into this false sense of complacency and the sort of false sense of security that our advantageous geography provides us.
But I really think, you know, you got to step back and look at the the beeper operation. And if you believe what's been written publicly, this was cooked up by an early 20s female intel analyst in Israel.
Incredibly complex, daring operation that required an extraordinary amount of imagination and patience and operational security.
And then ask yourself, like, would we in America ever been able to pull that off? Certainly we have the capability to pull it off, but will we have the risk acceptance? I don't know.
I tend to think as organizations get bigger and they become more bureaucratized, they develop this natural risk aversion that is very self-defeating on the modern battlefield, where, to use your Boydian phrase, closing OODA loops and closing kill chains as fast as possible is going to be the difference between victory or defeat.
So I think in Israel, they have a nimbleness and a risk accepting culture born of this sort of existential struggle that they're in every single day.
What can we learn from that?
I think we need to do a better job of allowing for original mistakes, particularly among operational commanders, and devolving decision-making authority down as low as we can possibly tolerate.
I think a rebalancing our tooth-to-tail ratio, so we have less resources concentrated in the Pentagon and more resources at the tip of the spear, is also a wise move and in some ways connected to the lessons we're learning on the battlefield in Israel.
‘High-Low Mix’
The most obvious thing that we can learn from the high-low mix is that we need the high-low mix.
I was in this debate for eight years in Congress on the Sea Power Subcommittee. It's most pronounced in the Navy, right?
Where it's like, it seems like one side says, we only need small robot boats everywhere, surface and undersea. And then the other side is like, no, we need 15 carriers and destroyers.
Okay.
Recognizing that the essence of strategy is prioritization and hard choices, and we don't have infinite dollars so we can't have everything, nevertheless, of course, we need both of these things.
We need a lot of subs. We're currently not able to build as many as we need to fulfill our own needs as well as the commitments we've made under AUKUS. We need destroyers. I believe we need small surface combatants. And then I would love to see a fleet of killer robot boats that can disrupt the OODA loop of the PLA Navy and help put it on the bottom of the Taiwan Strait when and if the time comes.
That being said, there are trade-offs we can make, right? Congress should look at instead of building a carrier every four years, build it every six years. There's savings you could harvest to apply to our submarine industrial base.
There are smaller platforms that we've invested money in that aren't working.
There's obviously money being wasted on inefficient—obviously I say this working at a software company—but the biggest competitor we face at Palantir is not other software companies. It's the government itself. Tens and hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted on homegrown software projects that don’t work, that don’t deliver. So there’s a ton of room for efficiency.
And there are trade-offs you have to make between exquisite systems and less exquisite systems. But you need both.
Asymmetric Warfare
I think we can get pretty creative with, on the low end, the type of innovative things that we do.
For example, I've long thought the idea of containerized fires, which we're starting to see play out in Ukraine and Israel's employed effectively, is really intriguing.
What would mess up Xi Jinping's OODA loop more than if there were a bunch of CONEX boxes scattered throughout the first and second island chain and he didn't know if those CONEX boxes were empty, or had commercial items in them, or were filled with missiles that could sink his ships?
That's an idea that was ripe two years ago, and we should be investing $10 billion a year toward making it a reality.
Now that we are no longer bound by the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which China was never a signatory to and thus was never bound by it, we can start to do to them what they did to us and build an allied rocket force with the goal of putting the entire PLA Navy on the bottom of the Taiwan Strait within 72 hours of the conflict breaking out.
You can start to pre-position systems in southern Japanese islands, northern Philippine islands. You can, of course, turn Taiwan itself into a porcupine, taking all the Harpoon missiles that we're putting into storage, reconfiguring them, giving them to Taiwan. Longer range fires with advanced energetics in the second island chain, things that get pretty exciting when you start to kind of build out those rings of fire and run that playbook against our enemy—the same playbook they've run against us.
Production Is the Weapon
When I was in Congress, I thought the problem was just the stockpile. I thought we just needed to preposition stockpiles of critical munitions west of the international deadline and, you know, magically deterrence would happen.
Then I started to really dig into the wargaming and then, you know, have multiple conversations with Shyam to really understand and embrace the point that he's making. And I think it is the right one.
What we're seeing in our business here is all the non-traditional companies get it. They're investing their own capital to buy our Warp Speed product to do truly cutting-edge, commercial-grade, AI-enabled, software-first manufacturing. We need everybody in the defense industrial base to embrace that ethos.
And how great would it be if the Secretary of the Navy or Secretary of the Army or the Under Secretary of Defense for whatever could track on a near real-time basis the production of certain systems, or, to take it a step further, when we decide to run a certain strike package against the Houthis in CENTCOM, understand how not only that decision to expend munitions in CENTCOM affects our readiness in INDOPACOM today, two weeks from now, two months from now, but the demands it then places on the munitions industrial base and how we need to crank up production in key areas to make sure our global needs are met.
I think having that modern system—let's call it the Munitions Command Center—for key decision makers using software is vital. Connecting the factory to foxhole allows you to identify all the chokepoints and the single points of failure. And there are many right now.
The Free World’s Momentum
I think we're living in a world where people, once again, fear and respect us.
That's a good thing.
I mean, when you use words like fear, people get uncomfortable. But you want our enemies, the bad guys—whether they're the communists, the totalitarians, the Salafi jihadists, the Iranians—you want them to fear American power.
And at least for now, in the aftermath of the actions that the Trump administration is taking, in the aftermath of the systematic campaign that Israel has been waging, I think the free world has some wasta, has some momentum.
Now it's a fleeting thing. We have to build upon it. We have to do all the things that we've talked about in this conversation. Now is the moment to reimagine our entire defense industrial base and to build off this deterrence momentum we have in other theaters around the world. But at least we have a chance right now.
For the first time in my like adult life, I'm starting to see tectonic plates shifting in the defense industrial base. Add on to this the fact that we now have a lot of allies in the world of finance and venture capital that are getting in the defense technology game.
That's a good thing.
There's a lot of traditional technology companies or big corporations that five years ago were would have been extremely hesitant to go out there and say, yes, we want to work with the United States military, that now are following Palantir's lead and unabashedly seeking ways to work with the military.
That's a beautiful thing.
We need to seize the moment we have right now because, to go back to another Shyam-ism, we shouldn't have a defense industrial base. We should have an American industrial base, where commercial companies do work with the government.
