This devastating report sounds a lot like Palantir.
A drone start-up backed by the US tech billionaire Peter Thiel has conducted two trials with British and German armed forces that were branded a “disaster”, raising questions about its bold public claims and its hopes of winning government contracts.
Attack drones produced by Berlin-based Stark failed to hit a single target during four attempts at two separate exercises this month with the British army in Kenya and the German army near the town of Munster, in Lower Saxony, according to four people familiar with the trials.
If history is any guide, this means the Peter Thiel-backed company with drones that fail every test will become highly valued and maybe even a darling of Wall Street. Perfect example of stock price puffery is this Stark PR piece:
We only build products that solve the critical needs of our military operators. To do this, we constantly seek feedback directly from operators in the field—we use this to steer our product development and ensure continuous improvement. That means our technology is always optimised for performance, robustness and the realities of modern conflict.
As a long-time Silicon Valley insider I know that language well. It says “help us, we have no idea what we are doing, please help, we can’t engineer”. Optimized? These are signals of tech con artists, aiming to be totally amorphous, unreliable and unaccountable.
A simple metaphor is when they have no idea how to make a toaster, they define their success as burning toast that operators have to scrape faster.
Is there a problem with all their product failure, your toast being burned? That will be billed as the fault of anyone trying to actually eat, since scrape faster is a tactic designed to hide ignorance.
The U.S. Army warned in 2012 that Palantir didn’t work at all—and they were right. Yet look at the wild success that followed failure, proving the actual customer doesn’t matter, experts be damned.
The ACTS 17 “Christian” gospel work of Thiel suggests disinformation is an intentional success strategy: cultivating high-level adherents and billionaire investors regardless of product performance or reality.
It has elements of apartheid, and overt reference to fascism, but really ACTS 17 appears to be about the rapidity of rupture for… Nazism.
Thiel companies succeed despite devastating product failure through cultivating certain high-powered believers. So the real question is who in Britain and Germany is being targeted by Thiel—which military leaders are in scope to be taken in and burned by this new ACTS 17 “Christian” (political extremist) operation?
Give’em hell Davi!
This is exactly the Palantir playbook to spew scary buzzwords and features that impress non-technical deep pocket decision-makers, because the Thiel crew can’t solve any actual problems. They can only hit the targets they manufactured for themselves.
They’re pitching crap VTOL to customers who don’t need it, can’t make it work, with intention to blame operators stuck in it when basic real world tests fail.
A loitering munition marketed with VTOL is like selling a VBIED on the merits of its airbags. The stupid…
Dead Weight: Extra motors, rotors, batteries, and control systems that serve NO PURPOSE after the initial 30-second vertical launch? Yeah, who paid for that research?
Reduced Range/Payload: VTOL hardware reduces either warhead size or flight distance or both. Abort.
Failure Point Expansion: VTOL means carefully manage energy between “phases” to avoid depleting batteries in a “next” mission, with battery life further affected by payload and wind conditions over time.
It’s just so laughable that the test environments in Kenya and Germany had zero VTOL needs.