



The chief intelligence officer for the 82nd Airborne overseeing all Army activity in southern Afghanistan, Lieutenant Colonel Michelle A. Schmidt, agreed with her analysts: Palantir was mission-critical, something they had to have. The request put in by Schmidt’s command in late November 2011 didn’t mince words. Relying on the more cumbersome Army product, DCGS-A, “translates into operational opportunities missed and unnecessary risk to the force.” By contrast, Palantir actually worked and would probably save lives. Its price tag to the 82nd was $2.5 million—a fraction of what the Army had been spending on its new Stryker vehicles and, for that matter, its vaunted data platform. For soldiers like the Arctic Wolves who were literally walking through mine fields, spending loose change on software to protect thousands of young American warriors would seem to be a no-brainer.

But Schmidt’s request for Palantir was denied. Instead, the Army sent over more DCGS-A equipment and personnel to Kandahar. The consequence, as one internal memo from the 82nd would state, was that the troops on the ground continued to “struggle with an ineffective intel system while we’re in the middle of a heavy fight taking casualties.” This was not the first time the Army brass had rejected a unit’s urgent request for Palantir—and, owing to the Pentagon’s stubborn refusal to concede that there might be a better way than their own, it would not be the last.

America’s struggle to understand, anticipate, and outsmart its enemies has been rigorously discussed since 9/11. Where the story becomes turgid—where we stop paying attention—is on the decidedly unsexy but crucial question of how that intelligence, once gathered, is organized and made available in a way that will allow it to actually be put to use. Where the days following the September 11 attacks found us painfully groping for on-the-ground assets in Afghanistan, today our intel units have gobs of information they have no idea what to do with, such as thousands of detainee cell-phone numbers that have yet to be analyzed. The immortal Donald Rumsfeld litany of “known unknowns” leaves off the most infuriating conundrum of all—namely, that there are also unknown knowns: disjointed facts that languish in a warehouse or in the ether, unreachable to the cops or colonels who urgently need them but aren’t aware that such facts are already there for the asking.

A longtime high-level Pentagon intelligence analyst walked me through the reasons why the government tended to do a lousy job of producing military intelligence tools. An ambitious Army intelligence commander might want to impress his superiors by coming up with some new way of graphing intel. The procurers at the Pentagon go through the motions of ordering up the visionary new graphing software, secure in the knowledge that the commander will soon be promoted and out of their hair. The idea gets kicked over to some government agency’s development shop, which issues a design contract to one of the big defense contractors within the military-industrial complex that has developed a tight relationship with the Pentagon and has “no incentive to deliver something on time and on cost,” said the veteran analyst. At no point would anyone second-guess the ambitious commander. The agency bureaucrats were, he told me, “amateurs, essentially, who are incentivized to make their customers, the government requester, happy—to the point where they engineer things that won’t work. They accept everything as a requirement, and they judge every requirement to be equal. You say to them, ‘I want something with a bell that’ll go off whenever something interesting comes up.’ So they spent five million dollars on that, and no one asks, ‘Why the fuck would you want a bell?’”