The Return of the American Model

In talking about Operation Warp Speed I repeatedly placed it in the context of what I call the American Model of emergency response. The American model is the fusion of federal spending power with the speed, ingenuity, and innovation of the private sector. It aligns the visible hand of government with the invisible hand of the market. Operation Warp Speed was the most recent example, but the most important demonstration of the American Model was the shift to a wartime economy during World War II.

As Arthur Herman recounts in the excellent Freedom’s Forge, it wasn’t centralized command or sweeping nationalization that turned the United States into the “arsenal of democracy.” It was a partnership between government and business—figures like William Knudsen and Henry Kaiser mobilized private firms to outproduce the Axis through decentralized execution and rapid innovation funded by federal investment and aided by deregulation and the ending of New Deal attacks on markets and entrepreneurs. William Knudsen, the penniless Danish immigrant who worked his way to key positions in Ford and General Motors, being commissioned as a lieutenant general in the United States Army epitomizes the American Model.

In an incredible piece, Shyam Sankar the CTO of Palantir explains why he has accepted a commission as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve’s newly formed Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps.

I decided to join the military for reasons both patriotic but also intensely personal.

My father grew up in a mud hut in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state in India. He was the youngest of nine children and the first in his family to attend college—an education made possible only by his eight siblings pooling their wages. After graduation, he moved to Lagos, Nigeria, to build and run a pharmaceutical plant. Through ingenuity and an enterprising spirit, he became successful at a remarkably young age.

When I was 2, our life in Lagos ended violently. Five armed men broke into our home, killed our dog, pistol-whipped my father, and threatened my mother as they demanded money from the company safe. We fled Lagos with nothing, and started over in America.

My father took a job at a company that supplied souvenirs to theme parks in Orlando, Florida. My childhood memories are punctuated by Space Shuttle launches seen from my school courtyard, and by the bone-rattling double sonic booms of the Shuttles’ reentry. Lessons about the power of American technology were literally falling from the sky around me.

My father never again saw the material success of his youth, and he faced setback after setback in America. But he always reminded me of the counterfactual: “But for the grace of this nation, you would be dead in a ditch in Lagos.” America gave him life, liberty, and possibility.

Many lessons here about immigration, markets, universities, elites and more. Read the whole thing.