Shyam Sankar's Four 'Sputnik Moments'

less time--more chaos

Palantir’s Shyam Sankar continues to offer some of the clearest and most precise ideas on how we need to shift our mindset if we want to set the foundation for the next big war.

I’m not going to ask too much of your time today. Nope, just a bit over a minute to ponder Shyam’s four Sputnik moments.

The 1 minute and 19 seconds is an incredibly powerful boil-down of what should drive a lot of our thinking. Really, we should already be well down the road in acting on it.

Here’s the video that starts the bit I’d like folks to ponder on today starting at the 41:05 moment, but if you have time on your commute, give the full interview from the Hudson Institute’s 11 March upload a listen..

Here’s the rough transcript.

I thought over the last probably four years, we we should have had four different Sputnik moments, but we’ve had none. You know, even though they are legitimately Sputnik moments. And so, how is it the Sputnik moment catalyzed such clarity in the mind of the American people? And we’ve had four that we can’t seem to grip.

What are the four?

• Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle.

• The ability for the Russians to sustain the fight as long as they’ve had here.

• The asymmetric ability for people like the Houthis to hold so much of not only world trade but our assets at risk.

• The 10 years of consumption in 10 weeks that effectively we’ve gotten the math completely wrong.

It has a lot of implications. Like an example of this stuff is and to the point that we may not be spending enough. If you’re going to make munitions, we should be treating all these munitions potentially even our exquisite munitions as consumables. They’re not pieces of art that you put on the shelf and you make sure in temperature controlled settings. You make it at the point of making it. You already have a plan of how you’re going to consume it and test. And that means that you’re going to have to make another one to replace it, which drives the stimulus to industry to keep going and an opportunity to drive competition.

That fourth moment—the delta between what we can make and what we need to sustain the fight. We have to solve that problem or we will simply fail to meet the math that mass will bring.

If you notice in the above video, this discussion revolves around a book Shyam coauthored with Madeline Zimm titled Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III that, I realized as I was finishing this post up, comes out today.

In a discussion about the book at The Ronald Reagan Institute (video at link), Madeline made the following comment about the industrial lessons from WWI.

“Money was not enough.”

“We entered the war late, but when we tried to do a mass production push of mainly foreign designs, we were unable to do it because the aircraft at that time were literally— craft. They were made of wood and fabric.”

“Where are the parallel to today? Our missiles are more like a craft, boutique industry and haven’t been designed for mass production.”

“If we want to mass produce them, money is not going to be enough.”

“We need to totally reimagine how we design and produce these things, and the most productive companies need to produce.”

I need to get this book.

As a side note, if you want more Shyam—which I know you do—here is the interview we did with him a bit over a year ago if you didn’t catch it the first time.

h/t Jawwwn.