The Old Guard Learns New Tricks
While Palantir is grabbing the headlines, don’t for a second think the established titans are sitting this one out. I’m talking about the likes of Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. These aren’t just metal-bashers building planes and tanks anymore. They are, for all intents and purposes, technology firms that happen to have governments as their primary clients. Northrop has been pouring money into autonomous systems and AI, the sort of clever computing that can tell a threat from a tractor in a satellite image. General Dynamics, meanwhile, is building the secure digital plumbing, the cloud infrastructure and communications networks, that all this data needs to flow through. To me, this signals a fundamental shift. These companies are developing tech with military-grade resilience that could, down the line, find its way into all sorts of commercial uses.