Inside Palantir's work with British defense

Insights of the UK military + Foundry, beyond the contracts

Not even a week ago, a £75M - 3 year contract with the UK Ministry of Defence was announced in favor of Palantir. And lucky we, our community took it with the delight of the news but not the surprise for we knew back in August. @TheKameroon and I published quite a long list of codenames and acronyms a week before September, not only with the MoD but other British government organizations and departments.

During the months that bridged last summer to this very Christmas, more UK entities have appeared, and that includes Gov and commercial. But in this article I want to focus on the Defense industry in the United Kingdom, Palantir and some other actors involved.

Defence isn’t the only Ministry using Palantir software; we have the Home Office having access to Foundry, too. For those who don’t know, the Home Office is in charge of Immigration, Drugs Policy, Crime, Counter - Terrorism and Police… Kind of a big deal.

There is a NO10 codename inside Foundry, too. Of course that is 10 Downing Street, the office and home of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Head of the UK Government literally has access to Foundry. And by the way, the Cabinet Office, the department in charge of coordinating and supporting the PM and his cabinet, also has separate access to the software.

But perhaps the most exciting Palantir presence isn’t in the UK government agencies using the software (which are many more, like DEFRA, but this article isn’t about them) but in UK companies. There is a big one called Babcock.

Babcock is responsible for managing big infrastructure like aerospace, defense and nuclear. They also work with Network Rail, the manager of basically the entire rail system in the United Kingdom and a branch of the Department for Transport. How is this related to Palantir? Well, I have Babcock and Network Rail in DataBase as Foundry users. They have separate access to Foundry and, guess what… The Ministry of Defence is a Babcock client, too. They are all connected to each other, and the common thread seems to be Palantir.

Network Rail and the British Army are primary examples of work with Babcock and number 1 customers in their own field. So the fact that Palantir is providing their software to the biggest entities in defending the United Kingdom through Babcock’s infrastructure output, the MoD resolve and on British railways, connecting everything as if it were the cardiovascular system, is huge. And this is just an example using Foundry and 3 different entities.

Graph relating the entities in DataBase to Foundry and Gotham

I haven’t talked about Gotham yet. And the fact is it’s a very opaque world. I only can see codenames inside the Cloud system they use to access Gotham, and it’s mostly things like “Leather” and “Ceil”. But we already know Gotham is heavily used in the UK in defending Ukraine and other operations we will know of in the future. As Rumsfeld would say, the “known unknowns” (the things we know we don’t know), but that we know are happening as you read this.