A Palantir software system that helps Wendy’s manage its Thin Mints Frosty inventory is also being used by the U.S. Army to track 155-millimeter artillery rounds, illustrating how civilian technology has taken the lead in a long-running partnership between the U.S. military and private industry.
The anecdote, recounted by Army Col. Jeffrey Kain, chief of Army operations in Europe, appears in a Wall Street Journal historical report published Monday as part of the newspaper’s “USA250” series. Kain said he had a revelation while watching a video about the Palantir digital systems his unit had just begun using. The video featured a manager from Wendy’s explaining how the same system helps the fast-food chain manage its inventory of Thin Mints-flavored Frosty mix. “It blew my mind. I thought: That’s what we’re doing,” Kain told the Journal. “In our case it’s 155 artillery rounds, but it’s the same concept.”
Retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, who has worked extensively in and with the private sector, told the Journal the relationship “goes beyond collaboration to true partnership in pursuing U.S. national-security objectives.” He noted “the subtle but steady shift from military to civilian-industry lead on things like research and development, emerging tech, new methods of manufacturing and opening new domains—cyber and space in particular.”
The Journal report traces the partnership’s origins to the Springfield Armory, a government factory established on President George Washington’s orders in 1794. The armory pioneered industrial techniques that later became private-sector pillars: interchangeable parts, assembly-line manufacturing, hourly wages, and full-time professional managers.
The Civil War, the report says, was the world’s first major conflict decided by industrial might. The Springfield Armory, which made fewer than 10,000 rifles in 1860, produced more than 800,000 over the following four years. Northern cities’ factories attracted more immigrants than the South, bolstering Union Army ranks, and Union commanders used private northern rail networks built for commerce to amplify those advantages.
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited seasoned industrialists to lead a private-sector manufacturing surge. Carmakers produced airplanes, food canners made ammunition boxes, and the average time needed to assemble a “Liberty Ship” freighter fell from around eight months shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor to barely one month by 1945. U.S. factories also kept allied Soviet forces provisioned.
After the war, the Pentagon funded private companies to develop rockets, aircraft, computers, and new materials for weapons systems. Digital computers were first created to model hydrogen-bomb explosions. The Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which democratized air travel in the 1970s, was made possible by powerful jet engines developed for the massive C-5 military transport plane in the 1960s.
The government also played a direct role in commercial infrastructure. Malcom McLean, a commercial shipper, invested his own money to build a container terminal in Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay to win a Pentagon contract. His shipping containers solved the military’s cargo problems and triggered a revolution in world trade; returning to the U.S. empty, the containers stopped in industrializing Japan to collect inexpensive consumer goods. The report notes the government forced rival shippers to agree on common container designs before the system could work.
Following the Cold War, the government granted public access to GPS, originally created to guide troops and weapons, and privatized the internet, which began as a distributed communications network designed to withstand a nuclear war.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired Army general, warned in his 1961 farewell address about “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” in what he called the military-industrial complex.