Darren Farber
speaker
722 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 26 May
Darren Farber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I was at the National Security Council looking at a Ukrainian drone that was printed in their AOR, in their theater of war, and they're doing it for 150 bucks. And so I view a lot of what's happening in drone warfare as the arc of flat panel TVs is like they're very expensive and they just keep on dropping in price and the low cost. manufacturer is the leader today. It's why Walmart bought Vizio.
And so I see a lot of that in the drone. And so the backend will be more important, like the software that coordinates it. The shape charge will be more important, just like modifying a grenade. But it's not clear to me that making the drone will be this fabulous profit center. And so I think
The department does best when it lets dual-use commercial technology advance so it can adapt it and pull it in internally as opposed to trying to develop a technology exclusively for defense if there's an adjacent commercial development.
I mean, I was part of a program in Afghanistan where we were trying to create handheld computing for the purposes of contracting officers being able to go outside the wire to be able to conduct commerce on the economy and do our counterinsurgency mission. So that's... We use this little parking ticket. It's called a standard form 44. It looks like a parking ticket.
It's like in in triplicate and there's a carbon copy. It's exactly what you grew up with, a parking ticket. And that's how we give money. We procure resources on the economy in a theater or war. And so there's a special limit that we raise to a few million dollars. And one of my jobs was to clear these tickets into the accounting system in Kandahar.
And I remember looking at one that's a two million dollars to cash ticket. I remember the field ordering officer, I said, what's this? So our general lack of visibility financially, I love to have some compute because for them to trace this route back to base, it's crazy dangerous.
And they're only coming back to meet the general obligation of how we need to clear these tickets in order to give them more cash. So maybe I can do it digitally over the air. And so we built this huge thing. It hung off your belt. It had a huge expensive battery on it. It had a thermal printer attached. It lasted two hours. It was horrible.
And then over a weekend, the first version of the iPhone comes out. A Marine builds an entire app over the weekend. He goes, why don't we use this? Of course, it's so much better. But you have to remember, the department is the largest organization of its kind on Earth. And for many years, it was the largest organization. The Army is still the largest operator of golf courses in the world. So...
The U.S. Army, everything it does is at the limit of size. And so it always thought that its internal requirements would drive the best solution because it could bring so much demand. I'm 47. I never contemplated trillion dollar balance sheet corporations that had In the iPhone, 90% global market share or something crazy for a phone above $1,000.
And so the technology in it, we do so much better doing adaptation of something commercial. And I happen to think that's what's going to happen in a lot of these new emerging technologies. The department didn't come up with its own flat panel TV. It bought it commercially. And if you go on the high side for all the cleared information, it's showing it on a Dell screen.
Yeah, it's not a custom screen that we made for ourselves. So... Then there are instances where in the Palantirs where they've crossed into the commercial domain, and this is wonderful for the department because you're getting more reps. So I happen to think a lot of the autonomy in the commercial world will ultimately be adapted into the defense department. What am I talking about?
Joby and Waymo and Tesla. That commercial adaptation is going to be very helpful for a defense application. So I think there's a huge benefit where we should be kiting off of... the commercial side of industry. By the way, there's legislation to this. And so I was intimately involved in it because we owned a business that benefited from the real legislation and we advocated for it.
But Palantir, it really turbocharged Palantir as a business. And so this was the National Defense Appropriation Act, where there was a line put in at a bunch of our behest to say commercial off the shelf first, if it already exists. That was a new feature of law. And it said, look, If the capability exists off the shelf, then you must try that first.
And at a minimum, if you decide not to use it or if you use it in some capacity, you can't treat it like a military system and demand P and visibility into cost and pricing and all these other things because it's commercially available.
And I believe that piece of legislation was enormously helpful to Palantir because it was commercially available, although it didn't have the size of commercial business today. And the army was... creating a program at 5x the funding of Palantir to do it their own way. And they were attempting to literally just turn off Palantir, which would have been a huge cost to the government.
And I'm sure the system wouldn't have been as effective.
It's so tough. This is a very tough question. Because in your mind's eye, you can say, I think this is where the world's going to go. But the department functions off of these plans, these operational views of how we integrate the force. So they're called OV-1s. And it's a visual concept of planning of how we plan the force.
We haven't come to grips with what we do or don't really need for next generation warfare. The kind of nonlinear warfare may still require... a lot of the old stuff. John Spencer at West Point talks about war is really a combination of old and new. It's never all new and it's never all old. And if you think about the Ukrainian contingency, there are many World War II-esque-like components of this.
155-millimeter shells, small-caliber munitions, bicycle bombs, mines. The minefield in Ukraine is about twice the size of the state of Florida now. Landmines. We're talking about old technology. And so... My concern is I think we're over-indexing to a near-peer threat, maybe, and not thinking about some of the capabilities we may need in, let's say, a nonlinear kind of threat.
Like, what do I worry about? I worry about the ability for... People to make fissile material now with lasers and they don't require centrifuges. And a non-state actor can actually build a nuclear capability. That's pretty concerning. It was usually, oh, you needed these pristine alloys. You needed access to the molecule. That just made it so hard.
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