Monday 1 February 2021
Palantir may be one of the most controversial companies in the world today. The software company has made a name for itself by taking incredibly complex data sets and making them usable for companies and governments around the world. Famously, Palantir has been embedded with the US Military in operations across both Iraq and Afghanistan and worked for years with the CIA to help make sense of complex data coming from intelligence reports and soldiers in the field.
In 2009, the US Department of Defence were warning that the army would find themselves drowning in data. In one single year, the Air Force captured enough video footage in Iraq that it would take someone watching 24/7 24 years to watch it all. Palantir entered the DoD’s fold offering to solve this problem. To help the DoD make sense of all this data that was being collected.
This article takes a look at Palantir’s ‘God View’ of Afghanistan and the insight it gives military operators. With Palantir now looking to roll out its software to more departments, including the US Department of Health and Human Services during the pandemic, these insights will be available to more and more government agencies and companies in the coming years.