Senator John McCain: Maverick of the Senate
Much of today's defense tech renaissance is owed to the seeds that McCain planted
They don’t make Senators like John McCain anymore. He was a rare breed.
A war hero and a statesman, John S. McCain came from a family of decorated veterans and still managed to distinguish himself among his forefathers. He was known for his hot temper. His independent streak. His toughness and resilience. His ability to shame others into having a conscience. Perhaps most famously, he was known as a maverick for bucking trends and never letting politics get in the way of his conscience and doing what he thought was right. This was enshrined in the very early hours of July 28, 2017, as the Senate was taking a vote on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. McCain walked onto the floor, dropped a thumbs down to audible gasps in the chamber, and went about his business.
There are many amazing stories in Senator McCain’s life. The most inspirational was his time as a political prisoner in Hanoi. In 1967, John McCain’s plane was shot down while on a bombing mission over Northern Vietnam. He ejected from the plane but was badly injured on the landing. He was captured and placed in prison where he was routinely beaten and tortured. When the North Vietnamese learned that his father was a senior Naval officer, they offered to release him as a propaganda tactic. John would not leave however, until the prisoners captured before him were released. He wanted no preferential treatment. Despite enduring the unimaginable, he would not leave his fellow troops behind. John McCain spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war in terrible conditions in Vietnam until his release in 1973. How many of us would have that same resilience and strength?
Upon visiting Vietnam several years later as a statesman, McCain was presented with a photograph taken October 26, 1967 that the Vietnamese believed showed McCain’s downed plane being encircled while McCain was being pulled from the wreckage in Truc Bach lake by local Hanoi residents. McCain confirmed that this was indeed his plane, and he kept it displayed on a center shelf in his office as an unspoken reminder of that time.
So much of today’s defense tech renaissance is owed to the seeds that John McCain planted during his rein as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Over a decade ago, before Venture Capitalists poured billions of dollars into defense tech, before the Defense Innovation Unit was founded, before companies like Palantir and SpaceX were well known names, Senator McCain recognized that America’s best commercial technology companies would be instrumental in securing our national security. Writing in Wired Magazine in 2015, he noted:
Maintaining our military technological advantage is about much more than a larger defense budget or a better fighter or submarine. These things are important, but to give our military the capabilities it needs to defend the nation, the Department of Defense must be able to access innovation in areas such as cyber, robotics, data analytics, miniaturization, and autonomy, innovation that is much more likely to come from Silicon Valley, Austin, or Mesa than Washington.
(The entire Op-Ed is worthy of your time, as it is a precursor to the debates we have today).
From his powerful perch as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and with the collaboration of then-House Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry, McCain leveraged the National Defense Authorization Act to streamline commercial item preference acquisitions, expand commercial-like “other transaction authorities,” introduce middle-tier acquisitions, and reduce bureaucracy and burdensome requirements for commercial companies to support the DoD. He did all this to better leverage America’s superior technology industry. During this era of acquisition reform, McCain did not take lightly to DoD regulating in the opposite direction of the change he felt it so desperately needed. In 2015, when DoD issued a new rule forcing commercial companies to report overly burdensome cost and pricing data, adding new layers of bureaucracy to doing business with the Department outside of commercial business practices, Senator McCain did not mince words in his letter to Secretary Carter:
I therefore urge you to rescind this proposed regulation immediately. I would also encourage you to send a clear message to those in the Department who are working to maintain the current acquisition status quo that they are not only doing serious damage to our national security, but that they also appear to be completely out of step with one of your highest priorities as Secretary.
He did not ask for a study about the rule—he took direct action to stop it before any implementation could take place and further entrench the status quo.
Chairman McCain knew that America’s competitive advantage in national security had historically relied on close partnership with commercial industry and its maverick entrepreneurs and would need to again. Appropriately, he didn’t offer mealy mouthed support—he went all in. There would be no tacit agreement, just on-the-record conviction about what needed to be changed.
It should then be no surprise that two of the keynote speakers at his funeral, President Barack Obama and President George W Bush, had both been political opponents at various times (one of the co-authors of this piece worked on an opposing campaign as well!). But that is the respect Senator McCain’s character demanded from the history of his actions, which spoke even louder than his fiery words.
A hero and a heretic, Senator McCain refused to let special interests interfere with America’s interests.
Mehdi Alhassani leads Palantir’s work at the intersection of business strategy, government affairs and public policy. He previously served as Special Assistant to the Deputy National Security Advisor at the National Security Council where he received an award for distinguished service.
Samantha Clark is a Senior Counselor at Palantir. She previously served in a number of senior staff positions on the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, including as Deputy Staff Director and General Counsel for Chairman John McCain.
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