palantir Archives

Thursday

February 26, 2026

How Silicon Valley is calling the shots on the battlefields of Ukraine

Sometime in the late morning of February 4, somebody at SpaceX headquarters pressed a computer key. A command line was beamed to Starlink’s 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit. Their onboard processors, circling 550 kilometers above the Earth, instantly obeyed the command and fractionally changed their operational settings. Back down on the frozen ground, in the trenches, bunkers and ruined cities of Russian-occupied Ukraine, hundreds of Starlink terminals lost internet connectivity. As another freezing night set in, the Russian army’s drones and tactical comms went dark. “We are left without communication!” complained a frontline Russian military officer in a video posted on the Telegram channel “Voenkory Russian Spring.” “Virtually on

Friday

January 9, 2026

Kabir Singh Bawa

The Maduro raid was a triumph of American innovation

In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, Caracas went dark. Power failed across much of the city as strikes and cyber-attacks disabled critical systems. What followed was not a conventional invasion, but one of the most audacious special forces operations in modern history. Within hours, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, had been seized from the heart of Venezuela’s largest military complex. No tanks rolled through the streets. No territory was occupied. The operation succeeded not through brute force alone, but because of something far more decisive: overwhelming American dominance of intelligence, networks, surveillance and infrastructure. Power rests less on the capacity to destroy than on the capacity