Mobilize: A Review

America’s most underrated strategic asset is that we empower lunatic innovators, pivot without warning, and become genuinely unpredictable

Let me confess the conflict of interest upfront: I work for Palantir Technologies, whose CTO Shyam Sankar co-authored this book. I also know Madeline Hart as a highly talented colleague. So, take everything that follows with however much salt you prefer, though I note anyone who reads Mobilize will quickly conclude it needs no defenders. Shyam and Madeline’s writing stands on its own.

There is a grim poetry that the book arrived in bookstores in March of this year, roughly three weeks into the Iran war. Within days of hostilities beginning, the United States had burned through years’ worth of Tomahawk cruise missiles, and the headlines practically wrote the book’s marketing copy. It was as if Sankar and Hart had diagnosed a patient, and the patient obligingly collapsed in the waiting room, almost on cue.

The thesis is deceptively simple: the United States no longer has an American industrial base; it has a defense industrial base — a narrow, calcified, innovation-starved monoculture of five prime contractors whose economic incentives actively discourage the bold, commercially integrated manufacturing that once made this country genuinely formidable. Before the Berlin Wall fell, 86% of major weapons systems spending went to companies with both commercial and defense businesses. Today that number is 6%. Chrysler used to build cars and missiles. General Mills — yes, the same people who gave us Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Lucky Charms — once produced inertial guidance systems. That America feels almost mythological now, and Sankar and Hart are right to mourn it, even as they insist it can be rebuilt.

What elevates Mobilize above the policy white paper it could easily have been is its cast of characters. As a storyteller, I also admit this is what I most appreciated. The authors have a gift for biography, and they deploy it in service of what they call the “heretical hero” — the difficult, visionary, institutionally inconvenient figure who actually moves history.

Andrew Higgins, the Louisiana boat-builder who supplied 90% of Allied landing craft in World War II, gets his due. (When President Eisenhower was asked who had done the most to win World War II, he responded simply, “Higgins.”) So does Admiral Rickover, the nuclear Navy patriarch and famously impossible human being. General Bernard Schriever, building ICBMs while his rockets were still exploding in ways they weren’t supposed to, makes for a quietly thrilling portrait of American improvisation under pressure. Time Magazine put him on the cover in between failed tests, which is either journalistic malpractice or one of the most American things a media outlet has ever done.

The contemporary hero of Mobilize is Colonel Drew Cukor, a Marine intelligence officer who built Maven — now the AI operating system of the Department of War — from a Pentagon basement. He did so with no budget, no staff, and no official mandate. Cukor brought in reservists to get around staffing rules, learned the budget process well enough to find money where none had been allocated, and delivered results so significant that Maven has since been publicly linked to operations in Venezuela and Iran. For this, he was subjected to a harassment campaign of Inspector General reports accusing him of, among other things, hiding scientists in his basement. NCIS showed up at his modest Virginia home, while his daughters were in the house. (The de facto Deep State does not care about your domestic tranquility.) Perhaps inevitably, Cukor was eventually pushed out. To add insult to injury, his antagonists even tried, however unsuccessfully, to strip his rank.

Cukor’s story alone is worth the price of admission, and Sankar and Hart are right to present it as a kind of mirror held up to the institution: here is what the system does to exactly the people it most needs. It is also an implicit warning to future heretics – stand and deliver and get ready to get beat up for it.

The book’s prescription is as clear as its diagnosis. Restore competition among the combatant commands. Tolerate — no, celebrate — parallel technological approaches, the way we once ran four simultaneous ICBM programs (Atlas, Minuteman, Polaris, and Titan) and emerged with the Minuteman and Polaris. Bring commercial supply chains back into the defense equation. Stop treating profit as a dirty word and start caring about value delivered. Ukraine, which destroyed much of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet using what amounts to very sophisticated explosive motorboats, offers a useful case study in what decentralized, commercially integrated procurement can accomplish under the worst possible conditions. If Kyiv could overhaul its Soviet-era acquisition system while actively being bombed, the Pentagon might manage it in peacetime.

If I have one critique of Mobilize, the book is better at diagnosing villains than at reckoning with the structural gravity that creates them. The “Last Supper” of 1993, where Secretary of Defense Les Aspin and Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Perry essentially told their industry to consolidate or die, is treated as original sin. But the incentive structures that followed — cost-plus contracting, government-funded R&D, a monopsony buyer with no commercial competitor — receive less sustained analytical attention than the colorful personalities who navigated them. The heretics are vivid. The bureaucratic machinery that grinds them down is sometimes gestured at rather than fully anatomized. A follow-on volume, probably less fun to read but no less necessary, could be called Institutionalize.

But this is a minor complaint about a major book. Mobilize ends with a declaration that America’s most underrated strategic asset is that we are, in the authors’ precise formulation, “crazy” — that we empower lunatic innovators, pivot without warning, and become genuinely unpredictable “if you punch us in the face.” This assertion is correct.

It should be as reassuring to Americans as it is disturbing to our enemies.

Bill Rivers is a fellow at the Bull Moose Project. He works in corporate affairs at Palantir Technologies.