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Palantir's Manifesto: "Move Away From an All-Volunteer Force" (April 2026)
Palantir's Alex Karp or other defense-tech leaders saying America should consider moving away from the all-volunteer force.
Palantir PUSHES NATIONAL DRAFT · Breaking Points · uploaded 2026-04-21 · 16:20
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=O_UHDUBzxeo · IPFS Qma3YNrfGBUv8nWNPikZ577we7yFbmpBfxxS1RKCuqnx2d
What this video is evidence for
Palantir is one of the Pentagon's most important technology contractors. Its data and AI platforms run targeting, intelligence and logistics for the US military and for Israel's. In April 2026, during the Iran war, Palantir published a 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic. Point six:
"National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force, and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost."
Breaking Points (April 21, 2026) reads all 22 points on air. Co-host Krystal Ball names the conflict of interest:
"A military technology company whose bottom line is dependent on us being in forever war, and selling technology also to Israel... conveniently, they have a manifesto that argues in favor of endless war... and you're gonna enlist our entire population to fight these endless wars that you yourselves profit from... Who are you, Palantir, to come out and tell us we should have a draft?"
Among the other points: "The question is not whether AI weapons will be built. It is who will build them," and "the post-war neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone."
The company that builds the software behind the war, and the data systems a modern draft would run on, is publicly arguing that Americans should be conscripted. See the forced-draft software pages for how that data machinery connects.
Where this fits: see Forced Draft Software for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:16:20. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
Turning now to Palantier, a selection from Alex Karp's book, The Technological Republic, has gone viral recently, igniting a lot of debate, let's go ahead and put this up here on the screen from Palantier, they say the technological, brief, Tractological Republic, in brief. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. We must rebel against the tyranny of apps. Three, free email is not enough. Four, the limits of soft power of soaring rhetoric alone have been exposed.
Five, the question is not whether AI weapons will be built. It is who will build them and for what purpose? Sure. Six, national service should be a universal duty. Seven, if a U.
S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it, and the same goes for software. Eight, public servants need not be our priest. Let's continue, shall we? Nine, we should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life.
Disagree. We need less psychologicalization of modern politics is leading us astray. true. Our society has grown too eager to hasten and is often gleeful at the demise of its enemies. 12, the atomic age is ending.
13, no other country in history. The world has advanced progressive values more than this one. 14, American power has made possible an extraordinarily long piece. 15, the post war neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. 16.
We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. 17, Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. And then we have a few more. The ruthless exposure of private lives of public figures drives far too much challenge away from government service. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourages corrosive.
The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. Some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive. And 22, we must resist the shallow temptation of vacant and hollow pluralism. So each of these have their own, like, epigraph, I guess. You would say...
people on any one of them. All 22. Many are most, many are notable. I would say the single, the one that has gotten the most attention is number six. National service should be a universal duty.
We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all volunteer force, and only fight the next war if everyone fights in the shares of risk and at the cost. You know, what's funny is I made that exact point to you. However, I think that there's a little bit of a difference between a company which gets government contracts for more than a guy who's a YouTuber who's, I was trying to make a philosophical point, which is, if the nation should be at war, then everybody should be eligible for a draft. Everyone, no rich, no nobody should be able to buy their way out. And that means that when you go to war, the society has to be so bought in, that if they're not, people will literally riot.
Like, think about what you would do or I would do. If we were in a war, like the Iran War, what's the real inconvenience we've all been cost gas? Okay, it's bad. But if my life was on the line, or kids are on the line, I will literally do anything. And so will most people, to make sure that doesn't happen.
I think that that is an incentive. I think the all volunteer force actually enables people to do these ridiculous foreign adventures, like Iraq and Afghanistan, and basically bribe working class Americans, who may or may not know better, who get tricked, or whatever, into doing it, and then they go over, and they have no idea, even necessarily, what they've signed up for, or they're in too deep once it's already happened. So that's why I think that's it. Now, it's a real different story for me to say that than compared to a paletteer is saying. That's a little bit different.
That's the other thing is you look at all of this and you're like, oh, that's very convenient for your bottom line. I'm sure you would love for Germany and Japan to fully remilitarize and, you know, destroy the, you know, completely obliterate the end of World War 2 and understand. But one of the left is to have so much beef with that one. I agree with that totally. Restore, the non-nuclear Germany and Japan has turned them into U.
S. vassals. Like, Germany, especially Japan, Japan is way better off with nuclear weapons. And we don't need to have all these bases over there. They can defend themselves against North Korea.
Then we can just purely have a trading relationship. Obvious, I trust them. I think everybody else. I give them a nuclear weapon. Well, here's the thing.
Here's the thing, is the logic of the world that the U.S. has created argues in favor of basically every country. Of course. nuclear weapons.
Do I think that is a good fit? No, I think it's terrible that we're, you know, we are we are now in an era where increasing nuclear peripheration is inevitable because of the logic that we have created. There's no doubt about that. Do I think that's a good thing? No, I don't think that's a good thing.
And then to have it come, again, I mean, I feel like I said a little bit the way you feel about the draft, you know, which if there was a draft, for a military technology company whose bottom line is dependent on us being in forever war, and selling technology, also to Israel, and also to Germany, and also to Japan, all these other countries, you know, that they see as part of Western civilization or whatever, for their bottom line is dependent on that thing, and then, oh, conveniently, they have a manifesto that argues in favor of endless war, never being able to coexist with anyone. you know, increasing militarization of countries that have, as of to this point, you know, spent less on their military. Just look at that. That's very convenient for you, and you're gonna enlist our entire population to fight these endless wars, that you yourselves profit from, it's disgusting. But, I mean, regardless of how you think about all of these individual points, my biggest takeaway is just like, these people have to be checked.
Like, who are you, Palantier, to come out and tell us we should have a draft? Who are you to come out and say, oh, these are our guiding principle of philosophy? No, no, no, no, no. You are subordinate to the American people. You should be.
You should be subordinate to, you know, a government that has the interest of American people in mind. And instead, the people who are profiting off of these endless conflicts are the ones who are increasingly driving the train. And the piece about AI, obviously, is very scary and dystopian. They're like, Look, AI, weapons are inevitable, so just suck it up and, you know, relax and enjoy, palantier, basically deciding who gets to live or die. That's the view that comes from here, which, again, is like, terrifying.
And there is a level of inevitability to AI. They're right when they say, it matters who owns it and how it's deployed, which is exactly why, we need to trim the sales of these companies and get them under control, because right now, they are driving the train much more so, and their ideology is dominant, much more so than what the American people would want to see. You know what's funny? One that got a no attention, but which I disagreed with the most is the atomic age is ending. I could not disagree more.
Like I said, one age of deterrence, the atomic age is ending, and the new era of deterrence is built on AI. No, it's not. Iran doesn't have AI, and they don't need it. They have literally oil, and they have the straits of oil. Straight, yeah.
What does Russia have? They don't have a ton of AI. They have nuclear weapons, they have a shitload of oil. That's literally all you need. It's, again, completely self serving.
Yeah, Michael, what are you talking about? The atomic age has never been more relevant than ever before. North Korea doesn't have AI, and they don't need it. All they have is ICB. They literally murdered a, like, a huge chunk of their population via famine, just to achieve a nuclear weapon.
And they won. They don't need AI, to deter anything. They're fine. The Kim regime will survive, long after I am dead. I am firmly planting that flag, right here.
They will survive forever, and they don't need AI to do it. That's where this isn't very self serving, obviously, is about AI and the way that we need to build these new tools. Like, I've never disagreed more, like, with the idea. I think that, really, what's transparent from the Iran War is energy matters above all. Number two is weapons that are cheap and easily accessible, like our aircraft carrier systems, our, you know, we've become the Germans and the Japanese with their super high precision machines, which have to be serviced all the time when we were the nation of the B 17, which just rolls these fuckers off of the assembly line and can just pour them into the war.
It doesn't matter if somebody's breaking the sound barrier or not. Like, we're good to go, because we just have a ton of them. Like, I think we've inverted and become the highly inefficient system. And Palantier, these guys, like, Manifesto, it's like I said, like, I agree with some of it. I disagree with some of it, but it really should, I don't know.
I mean, they see themselves as this philosopher kings, who are building the tech and using and pushing this ideological agenda. I think that's, like, a privatization of this type of debate, which should happen, not only in a public sphere, but by people who are, have a vested interest in the, who don't have a vested interest monetarily in what they're talking about. So, let's give good examples of, like, the so called, like, you know, intellectual titans and all of them. I'll pick a leftist one, like Henry Wallace, right? Henry Wallace, who was FDR's, you know, vice president.
He was somebody who was much more of a pacifist, but he didn't have a financial stake, necessarily, or even some of the major hawks in the Second World War in the cabinet. They really believed this from an intellectual perspective. They didn't have a financial interest necessarily. In the war continuing, they just were statesmen, you know, a great statesman who had ideas about the world. You could say a lot of shit about Kissinger, but he was not rich before he got into, he became very rich afterwards.
But, you know, before he went into government, like, he was just a Harvard professor, who was had these ideas about nuclear weapons and about the U.S. and that caught Nixon's attention, like, these philosophers and these guys with ideas, Atchison, and others. They came up, the bureaucracy, and the government, they were not multibillionaires who had companies, which stood to potentially profit. And I think that's where the big disconnect has to come from more than anything.
Yeah, I mean, your point on the AI piece, that atomic age is over, now we're in the age of AI deterrence, again, why is it self serving for them to hold that view? Because what that argues is in favor of, look, you know, our adversaries are developing AI, so we have to, you may have some reluctance, a population may have some reluctance, but we have to charge for, no matter what. This is where you have to invest all of your money and all of your, you know, all of your time and your bandwidth and capacity needs to go. We need to strip away all the regulations, so we can do whatever we want whenever we want. That's what that argues for.
And it sets up this sort of, like, clash of civilizations conflict between the U.S. and most likely China. you know, and frames it as this inevitable outcome. And this was, we could put our Obertrand's responses, which typically, you know, as is typical for him, is very thoughtful.
But one of the things he talks about here, he says, they basically promote a clash of civilization worldview in which there exists, they, the supposed enemies of Western civilization, whose cultures, the document codes as inferior, and a we, who must stop indulging in decadent restraint, and invest massively in AI weapons and offense software, which conveniently makes Palinger's product catalog, the civilization, don't cure. Look at .4, for instance, they write that the limits of soft power, soaring rhetoric, alone, have been exposed, the ability of free in democratic societies prevail, require something more than moral appear. Peel, it requires hard power, and hard power in the century will be built on software. I believe we have another.
Terror sheet here we can put on. It all rests on a pretty massive assumption that coexistence is impossible. Why would free and democratic societies, by which they obviously mean Western style liberal democracies, need to, quote, prevail. Why can't they simply coexist with other civilizations or political systems that are out there? Nowhere in the document that do they defend this assumption?
It is simply asserted as the starting condition of the argument. And that really gets to the heart of they position themselves, the way he says it. Palantier is your, you know, ready made, handy dandy civilization cure. All you have to do is give us all the contracts, strip away all the regulations, you know, create a draft so that your people are ready to fight the wars that we want to get into, and we're off to the races. And that's really when I look at this from a, I guess, materialist perspective.
You can just see them pursuing their bottom line throughout this entire document. That's why it's not a trustworthy messenger. I even agree with some of the points. I mean, I agree, you know, I mean, look, I like Arnau. I think he's a little, you know, he's a little different.
He's got more your worldview than I do. Let's say, though, let's say, though, that we do agree, let's say that, you know, we should make it and invest massively. Would you invest in AI after this conflict? I'll tell you about a project I learned of recently, from a good friend of mine. It's called the North Slope proposed pipeline in Alaska.
It would cost 40 to 50 billion, which is why nobody wants to do it. Coincidentally, that's less than the entire Iran War has come now. The proposal is to bring all the oil from the Arctic Circle down to Anchorage, and then all of it would be bought. By Japan and South Korea. Sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn't it?
That's exactly what we should be doing, instead of this bullshit, like more AI data centers? No, if we just lived through the worst, we are living through the worst energy crisis of our lifetime. We destroyed Japan and South Korea. We could make Alaskans rich, even richer, because they all get dividends from it, and we can sell all this oil, or natural gas, I think, to Japan and to South Korea. Great idea.
Why don't we do it? Why does nobody even talk about this stuff? We haven't built an oil refinery in this country since 1973? We've been built a new nuclear power plant. One nuclear power plant in over 50 years.
Nobody even discusses this. Same with solar and renewables. I'm not saying it's bad. I'd be willing to throw a whole lot of money into it, but like, what are we doing? Even in terms of the grid, it's brittle.
There's so many problems. It's like, you know, you look at the way, you know, people get mad at me for glazing China, but, like, I'm sorry, I cannot help but look in despair. When I look at Xiaomi cars and BYD cars and trains that go 2 to 300 miles per hour, like, that's how you become a strong, and it's definitely, like, maybe AI will play a part, inefficiency, but for me, it's the hard stuff, with concrete. It's the oil, it's energy. It's making it so that life here is abundant and cheap and easy to live.
Like, that's not... Where things are right. Well, to your point, you know, on the AI versus atomic and the world we live in. I could not disagree with that more. Think of what has been revealed where we're headed with the Iran War.
I mean, it's the reassertion of like geography as a prime determiner. See, I wouldn't even say reassertion. It's always been there. America's greatest gift is this geography. Exactly.
That we're, you know, isolated over here. We got 2 oceans. Everybody that is a threat, you know, is far away, so it's hard to hit us. We don't deal with the, you know, when we destroy Syria. We are not the ones dealing with the refugee car, et cetera.
You're right. But it has really made itself known in terms of this conflict. Because Iran is like, we've got cheap drones. We have a mountainous terrain that will be very difficult for you to penetrate. And we have this position on the Strait of Hormuz.
And you know what? With those three things, checkmate. Exactly. That's it. agree.
Check me. Yes. Right? And other countries around the world, if, which looks very likely, Iran is able to maintain a new status quo that is profitable for them, where they control the straight of hormuz, I mean, that is the new reality. Other countries are going to do the same thing.
They're going to look at the same thing. So it's sort of a regression to the era of, like, you know, piracy, and before we had this, you know, ability as the U.S. to project our power all around the globe, et cetera. So not only is there things self serving, dystopian, they have far too much power, but also they're just, like, wrong about where we are.
I think it's totally different. I don't think that AI will determine our future. I think, you know, Peter Thiel famously coined that term, the worlds of bits and atoms. I don't think it's ever been more relevant today. Like, this globalized fantasy is fake.
China is stronger in this Iran conflict, because it has massive amounts of oil in its reserves. It has a global helium reserve. Guess who, guess which country gave up its peculium reserve in the 1990s. To pay off Newt Gingrich's obsession with debt. Oh, you guessed it.
the United States of America. Like, that's our problem, is we don't have nearly enough actual stuff. And instead, all of our wealth is tied up in, what, NVIDIA stock and all this other bullshit, like, which could literally pop at any moment. I mean, look at this right now. We're in the world's worst energy crisis.
What's the stock market? If the stock market is up today. I mean, technically, it is a reflection of its reality, but it's not a reflection of our reality. That's the problem with our society. So anyway, that's my take.
Build the North South Pipeline. Let's do it. All right, AMA. Let's get to it. Thank you, Alice, from our watch.
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Last Updated: 2026-09-27