The Death of the Business System
Business systems are warfighting systems. Why don’t we treat them like it?
GREG LITTLE is a senior counselor at Palantir Technologies.
AARON JAFFE is a deployment strategist at Palantir Technologies.
Operation Epic Fury exposed something most people across the Department of War (DoW) already understand at some level, but rarely say directly: a large portion of what we call “business systems” do not work in the conditions of a real fight.
For years, we’ve operated under a convenient mental model that separates the enterprise into two distinct worlds. On one side are warfighting systems: the ones that find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. On the other are business systems: the machinery that keeps the institution running (think sustainment, supply chain, finance, human resources, procurement, and acquisition). It’s a clean division; one side wins wars, the other runs the business. But that distinction was always more administrative than real, and Epic Fury made it impossible to ignore.
Business systems are warfighting systems.
When the War Machine Breaks Down
Because Epic Fury was distributed across domains and coordinated through multiple commands, systems were forced to function as one war machine. Decisions depended on data that had to be current, trusted, and immediately usable. There was no pause between operating and sustaining, no buffer where latent systems could catch up. And that’s where the cracks began to show—because for all the progress the Department has made in seeing the enemy, it still struggles to see itself in real time.
Take air-defense interceptors, the multi-million-dollar missiles critical for protecting U.S. forces, facilities, and allies. Data on where interceptors are, what condition they are in, and whether they have been expended is spread across multiple legacy business systems that are not integrated. At any given moment, the Department does not know how many of these critical munitions it has or where they are. Shortly after Epic Fury began, the Department found it could no longer rely on its business systems. It reverted to phone calls, spreadsheets, and paper-based reporting.
Over the past decade, the Department has integrated the kill chain to make the soldiers working in targeting cells one hundred times more effective. During that same time, business systems that support critical functions across the Department have barely evolved. In many ways, they’ve become less integrated, intermediated by data lakes and layers of analytic tools that separate them from the Department’s warfighting mission.
Within a warfighting environment, the Department’s business systems do not provide relevant data that they were designed to track, including: how may aircraft are operational, where units and service members are, and if it has the munitions needed to supports its plans. Operation Epic Fury showed us that the systems that support critical functions—managing personnel, equipment, and munitions—cannot live on a back-office island; they are a subset of warfighting systems that are inextricably linked to the Department’s core mission.
Know the Enemy and Know Yourself
We often talk about the fog of war as something imposed by the enemy—something external that obscures clarity and complicates decision-making. Epic Fury suggests something different: that a meaningful portion of that fog is self-inflicted.
Sun Tzu’s maxim to “know the enemy and know yourself” is oft-repeated but rarely interrogated. We have spent decades investing in the first half of that equation. Our ability to sense, track, and understand adversary behavior has improved dramatically. But our ability to understand our own posture—our true readiness, our real constraints, our capacity to act—lags behind.
You can see this most clearly when you imagine the moment of decision. A commander is planning a strike package. The target data is current. The threat environment is continuously updated. Weather inputs are live. That entire side of the equation has been engineered for speed and precision. But when attention turns inward, the picture degrades. Munitions data trails reality. Fuel status reflects yesterday’s conditions. Maintenance readiness is fragmented across systems. Everything about the enemy is immediate; everything about ourselves is historical.
The discrepancy between how we fight and how we understand our ability to fight is a direct result of the fragmented way we designed our systems. Conway’s Law has shaped the Department more than any formal architecture. Systems mirror the structures that build them, so we ended up with Army systems, Navy systems, and Air Force systems, as well as logistics systems, financial systems, and personnel systems. Each system is aligned to its organizational owner, optimized for its specific function, and evolves on its own timeline. That approach made sense when coordination happened through meetings and staff processes and forces were sustained by nearby stockpiles of materiel. It does not hold in a world where decisions are distributed, timelines are compressed, supply chains stretch across continents, and outcomes depend on the seamless interaction of all parts of the enterprise.
What Epic Fury underscores is that the need for speed is no longer confined to warfighting systems. The Department largely has the data it needs, but it lacks the ability to act on it. Many of the systems that underpin readiness continue to operate on timelines measured in days or weeks. Systems that require manual intervention at every step are fundamentally misaligned with the speed of modern operations. Attempting to compensate with dashboards and reporting layers has not resolved this mismatch. If anything, it has made it more tolerable by providing an acceptable level of visibility during peace time—allowing programs to claim progress that’s “good enough.” Storing and displaying information is too low of a bar. Critical systems must participate in operations, translating data into warfighting decisions.
This leads to an obvious conclusion: if a system does not function in a warfighting context, it does not function for the Department of War. Compliance, reporting, and even efficiency are poor proxies for the true objective: fight and win. Systems that cannot support that objective under realistic conditions are liabilities.
Fight and Win
The separation between business systems and warfighting systems is an artifact of the past and now a critical risk in the present. This is a problem that requires a solution more fundamental than “modernization” in the traditional sense. Instead it requires a shift in how these systems are conceived, built, and evaluated.
They must be tied directly to mission outcomes, fully integrated into warfighting platforms, and exercised in conditions that resemble real operations. They must be designed to operate at the speed of the fight, not the speed of administrative process. Like warfighting systems, they must speed the integration of AI to accelerate and improve decision making. They must provide a continuous, accurate understanding of our own posture—because without that, every other advantage begins to erode.
There is no longer a meaningful distinction between the systems that run the business and the systems that fight the war. There is only the war machine itself, and in the end, it either enables the mission—or it does not.