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Last spring, U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey Kain had a revelation: Ammunition is a lot like ice cream.
Kain, who is chief of Army operations in Europe, was at home watching a video about new digital systems from Palantir Technologies that his unit had just started using to track operations and supply levels. The video featured a manager from one of Palantir's private customers, Wendy's, explaining how the same digital system helps the fast-food chain manage its inventory of Thin Mints-flavored Frosty mix across its restaurants.
"It blew my mind. I thought: That's what we're doing," Kain recalls thinking. "In our case it's 155 artillery rounds, but it's the same concept."
Palantir's involvement is just one of countless instances across U.S. history interweaving industry and national defense. Throughout human history, war routinely yielded profit for some, while also advancing business. The Crusades, for example, sped development of international finance and spurred creation of double-entry bookkeeping. But it was the U.S. that fused war and private business like never before, with each enabling and accelerating the other -- usually in unexpected ways.
"The relationship goes beyond collaboration to true partnership in pursuing U.S. national-security objectives," says retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Votel, who has worked extensively in and with the private sector to promote cooperation.
The relationship's endurance is notable, Votel says, as is "the subtle but steady shift from military to civilian-industry lead on things like research and development, emerging tech, new methods of manufacturing and opening new domains -- cyber and space in particular now."
America's war-business connection grew so deep over the centuries that President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- a retired Army general and war hero -- warned about the danger of what he called the military-industrial complex.
"The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," he said in his 1961 farewell speech, of the newly developed "permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
A Washington innovation
That infrastructure took almost two centuries to develop. The Springfield Armory -- a government factory established on Washington's orders in 1794 -- pioneered what later became pillars of private industry, including interchangeable parts, assembly-line manufacturing, hourly wages and full-time professional managers.
The Civil War was the world's first major conflict decided by industrial might. Factories in the industrializing North churned out munitions in volumes the agrarian South couldn't touch. The Springfield Armory, which made fewer than 10,000 rifles in 1860, disgorged more than 800,000 over the following four years. Northern cities' factories also attracted more immigrants than the South, bolstering Union Army ranks.
Union commanders amplified all those advantages by tapping private northern rail networks, created for commerce, which were far more extensive than the Confederacy's sparse connections.
During the ensuing half-century without a major war, the U.S. military waned and business exploded -- supercharged by Civil War industrial expansion. Entrepreneurialism of the Gilded Age proved critical to American victories of the 20th century.
Inventor Nikola Tesla in 1898 demonstrated a prototype radio-guided boat at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Like the Wright brothers' mastery of flight in 1903, it initially drew little interest from the military, but war soon changed that.
Gun designer John Moses Browning built a thriving business in the late 1800s by vastly improving firearms' internal mechanisms, culminating in terrifyingly deadly machine guns. His company's M2 .50-caliber model, developed after World War I, is still in production and widely used.
When the U.S. finally entered World War I in 1917, America's vast industrial resources helped Allies keep fighting before U.S. troops arrived, and then tipped the balance after forces landed.
World War II repeated that dynamic on a far larger scale. President Franklin D. Roosevelt recruited seasoned industrialists to lead a private-sector manufacturing surge that seemed fanciful just months earlier. Carmakers produced airplanes, and food canners made ammunition boxes. A headlong drive for efficiency cut the average time needed to assemble a "Liberty Ship" freighter from around eight months shortly after Pearl Harbor to barely one month by 1945. U.S. factories also kept allied Soviet forces provisioned.
Cold War competition
By the time Eisenhower issued his warning in 1961, the Soviet Union had become an industrial peer, and formidable enemy. Rather than compete to outproduce Moscow, Washington opted to offset Soviet scale with ingenuity. Starting with the Space Race, the U.S. military underwrote a decadeslong partnership with American business that also remade global commerce.
The Pentagon funded private companies to develop rockets, aircraft, computers and new materials for weapons and systems vital to national security. Digital computers were first created to model hydrogen-bomb explosions. The Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which democratized air travel in the 1970s, was only possible thanks to powerful jet engines developed in the 1960s for the massive C-5 military transport plane.
Around the same time, America was struggling to supply its expanding war in Vietnam. Malcom McLean, a New Jersey commercial shipper who championed the new idea of prepacking cargo into big metal boxes, hungered for a Pentagon contract. So, he invested his own money to build a container terminal in Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay.
His shipping containers solved the military's cargo woes -- and triggered a revolution in world trade. Returning to the U.S. empty, the containers stopped in industrializing Japan to collect inexpensive consumer goods that American shoppers snapped up.
McLean's business helped the Pentagon, but his idea wouldn't have succeeded without military brass forcing rival shippers to agree on common container designs. "The government told private industry, 'You guys need to agree on a standard or we'll set one for you,' " says Marc Levinson, author of "The Box," a history of the shipping container.
A new battlefield
The U.S. military didn't win in Vietnam, but capitalism won the Cold War. America embarked on the digital equivalent of turning swords into plowshares. The government granted public access to GPS, which had been created to guide troops and weapons. It privatized the internet, which began as a distributed communications network designed to withstand a nuclear war.
The ensuing dot-com boom embodied peaceful commerce, but soon expanded into security and war. PayPal in the late 1990s allowed peer-to-peer trade on an unprecedented scale but drew swindlers, so its founders developed a digital system to detect fraud. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, company leaders including Peter Thiel realized their technology could help the government sniff out terrorists. They created a company, Palantir, in 2003.
Fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon repeatedly turned to private companies for help addressing deadly challenges such as improvised explosive devices. Initial solutions included redesigned military vehicles but later ones grew more sophisticated.
A decade ago, top Pentagon officials realized they had fallen dangerously behind on digital tech and so dived into Silicon Valley, which the Pentagon had helped establish decades earlier. There, tech-savvy officials found the first battlefield AI applications, using algorithms to track stealthy attackers in Iraq.
Today, the Pentagon is grappling with America's atrophied industrial base while racing to adopt AI technologies that private companies have already woven into their systems -- like the frozen-dessert management system Kain stumbled on.
"Commercial tech is the best in the world, especially U.S. commercial tech," the Defense Department's chief digital and AI officer, Cameron Stanley, said recently. "So we are a commercial-first organization."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 29, 2026 11:23 ET (15:23 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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