Palantir is Moving to Take Control of America's Military Drone Army: The United States National Drone Association and DOGE
A Firebrand Investigation
Firebrands and new readers alike,
I have spent a great deal of time tracking the development and use of drones in the Ukraine war; they are undoubtedly the future of warfare.
The notion itself is a terrifying one, a world where your skill and tactical acumen no longer dictate war.
We are seeing a world where the winner is the one who can fill the skies with the buzzing that preludes death, that sound that makes soldiers all over Ukraine dive for cover. In my effort to understand this, I have watched hours of combat footage, and the common denominator?
Silence, open fields, and then someone shouts FPV, a screaming buzz, and then death.
Drones are cheap, disposable, and proven to be able to leverage unimaginable costs on those they are used against. Recent reporting from military analysts and organizations such as Centre for Eastern Studies and US Army War College, has FPV drones accounting for 70-80% of all frontline casualties in Ukraine.
As Ukraine leads the world in Drone innovation and development, and Russia is not far behind. Western Nations have seen mighty Russia brought to its knees by Ukraine, and the writing is on the wall.
It is no surprise that the Department of Defense has had an ongoing program looking into unmanned systems for use in the armed forces. In 2017, the Pentagon announced several drone programs.
Perdix Drone Swarm (Announced Jan 2017): The Pentagon announced it had successfully tested the largest-ever autonomous drone swarm, launching 103 “Perdix” micro-drones from F/A-18 Super Hornets. This was a major step in autonomous swarming technology, a key concept behind Replicator.
UAS Integration Pilot Program (Oct 2017): This was a Presidential Memorandum that established a program to integrate civilian and commercial drones into the national airspace. While not a military program, it was a significant federal drone initiative from that year.
Counter-Terrorism Drone Strikes: 2017 also marked the beginning of the Trump administration, which inherited and, in some cases, expanded the use of drone strikes for counter-terrorism operations that had been a hallmark of the previous administration.
These programs sought to give the United States an edge; however, as the situation in Ukraine displayed a severe lack in US drone technology, the Replicator Program was launched in 2023. This program was a DoD initiative, and was an entirely Pentagon-owned and led initiative.
The goal was to eliminate thousands of low-cost drones, enabling the United States to remain competitive in modern conflict.
The deadline for this program has passed, and the Pentagon missed the August 2025 deadline to unveil the project's results.
Even so, I am certain a great deal was accomplished over these two years of research. The Pentagon has a history of failing audits and missing deadlines, so this is no surprise.
But why does this matter?
DOGE, the brainchild of Peter Thiel, was originally piloted by Elon Musk to steal the Social Security data of millions of Americans and centralize federal databases, providing the information to private companies like Palantir to serve as the data foundation for a mass surveillance system.
Then DOGE went quiet, its goal accomplished, and Elon ousted from the White House, it seemed that DOGE had outlived its usefulness.
So when I saw DOGE was spearheading an initiative to overhaul the U.S. military drone program, including streamlining procurement, expanding homegrown production, and acquiring tens of thousands of cheap drones in the coming months.
I knew that something was amiss, DOGE was the vehicle for siphoning data too, and privatizing government contracts and programs for the broligarchy.
As the future begins to appear more and more murky, the private interests behind the democratic backsliding in the United States fear that their plan may fail. An initiative to control drone production and development would give a minority unparalleled control over an entirely undeveloped branch of the United States military.
In essence, they could shape and influence unmanned systems that would answer only to them.
That is… only if they could gain control. I immediately suspected Peter Thiel and began to search for connections. The man himself is always several degrees removed, his cowardice evident in every action and manipulation he orchestrates.
However, he is absolutely always there; it would have been in his best interest to ensure that Palantir and allied corporations gain control over US military drone manufacturing and development. This would close the loop on an entirely privatized branch of the US military. Suddenly, the swearing in of several former tech executives into the Army makes more sense.
So I began to dig, and here is what I found.
The first thing to note here is how the web was created; like all things we have come to know about how Thiel organizes his influence structures, they resemble a closed feedback loop. Once implemented with individuals in place, he can funnel money and power back until he holds the li’s share of influence over public entities without ever having to emerge from the Shadows himself.
The loop looks like this.
Policy Generation—> Advocacy and Validation —> Implementation and Execution—> Commercial Benefit—> Reinforcement through Policy Generation
With this in mind, we need to examine how he will accomplish each of these steps, through which proxies he will utilize to achieve this, and who the beneficiaries will be.
We can make several assumptions here because we are familiar with Thiel's identity and the ultimate end goal.
Influence, Control, Enrichment, and Insulation.
We know that the end goal is to have pseudo-control over the future of warfighting, giving Thiel and technocrat loyalists significant influence over the implementation, supply, and software behind this technology, while also funneling Billions into predetermined allies and Thiel loyalists.
Wall Street investors and a closed group of former warfighters, with significant presence and influence over the SOCOM (Special Operations Command) bodies within the Pentagon, drive this effort.
What that says about our special forces leadership alone is very disappointing at the least and utterly sickening at the worst.
This system is centered on three pillars: a government enabler, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE); a private industry association acting as a quasi-governmental pipeline, the U.S. National Drone Association (USNDA) ; and a favored corporate ecosystem financially and ideologically aligned with financier Peter Thiel.
This network functions as a self-reinforcing ecosystem capable of shaping multi-billion-dollar procurement decisions from inception to execution. It appears to be privatizing core functions of the defense acquisition process—from policy formation and requirements generation to technology validation and contract fulfillment.
The Architects and the Blueprint
The intellectual foundation for the network’s agenda was publicly articulated in “Glimmers of a Drone Solution,” a March 2025 article that functions as a policy manifesto. The article was co-authored by the network’s key government and industry players:
Owen West: A former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) who is now the drone procurement lead at the DoD’s DOGE initiative.
Nathan Ecelbarger: A Marine Corps veteran and the President and Board Chairman of the U.S. National Drone Association (USNDA).
The article frames the Pentagon’s acquisition bureaucracy as a “sclerotic” failure and proposes a new paradigm: bypassing this system to rapidly acquire domestically produced, low-cost drones. This blueprint, authored by the future government implementer (West) and the primary industry advocate (Ecelbarger), serves to pre-legitimize the very actions the network would subsequently undertake.
As we implied earlier, it would be DOGE that served as the means to implement policy, as well as acquire information that would allow the beneficiaries of this program to dominate the drone industry.
One of the key factors here is that DOGE was asking for information sensitive to the Replicator program. That data, owned by the government and pertaining to design, load capacity, application, and more, can then be provided to private companies for exploitation. In essence, stealing research that belongs to the people for profit through DOGE, much like what was done with our data.
The Mechanism: A Privatized Acquisition Pipeline
The network operationalizes this blueprint not through traditional lobbying, but by creating a parallel, privatized acquisition pipeline managed by the USNDA and empowered by DOGE.
1. The Government Enabler: DOGE
The DOGE initiative, established by Executive Order 14158 and heavily influenced by Peter Thiel and his associates, provides the institutional power. With a broad mandate to “streamline procurement” and cut “red tape”, DOGE’s drone unit, led by Owen West, has the authority to execute the “Glimmers” blueprint.
This plan was outlined in the July 2025 Secretary of Defense memo, “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance.” This memo, which names West as the point of contact, directly implements the blueprint’s agenda by:
Delegating authority “from the bureaucracy to our warfighters,” allowing O-6 commanders to approve drone procurement and operation.
Mandating rapid fielding to ensure “every squad will have low-cost, expendable drones” by 2026.
Redefining small drones as “consumable commodities” to bypass traditional, slow acquisition regulations.
2. The Industry Fulcrum: The USNDA
The USNDA serves as the system’s central pivot point. It is not a typical trade association but a concentration of the elite end-user community it claims to serve. Its advisory board is dominated by a “SOCOM Brain Trust” of high-ranking Marine Corps and Special Operations veterans, including:
Dr. Jon “Blade” Hackett: The active Program Manager for Robotics at Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC).
Nicholas Vandre: Former Director of Innovation at U.S. Army Special Operations Command (USASOC) and technologist for the 75th Ranger Regiment.
Marcus Rossi: A 23-year Marine officer who directed a $134M technology portfolio at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory.
This “brain trust” provides the USNDA with intimate, trusted access to warfighters, enabling it to create a two-stage, privatized pipeline that supplants formal government processes.
Stage 1: Privatized Requirements (DroneWERX): Nicknamed “The Warfighter’s Reddit,” this program “crowdsources problem sets” directly from active-duty operators, bypassing the multi-year formal requirements (JCIDS) process. The USNDA then uses its own grants to incubate solutions, effectively picking winners before they enter any formal competition.
Stage 2: Privatized Validation (Drone Crucible): These are “closed events” where elite units, such as the 75th Ranger Regiment, test technologies from the DroneWERX pipeline. A system that performs well receives a “Crucible-Proven” designation, which serves as a powerful “DoD Demand Signal.”
This “demand signal,” generated and validated entirely within the private network, is then fed directly to Owen West’s DOGE initiative for action.
Influence and control have been accomplished.
Through DOGE, highly influential leaders from the United States Military Special Operations circles, we have established that the first two goals have been successfully implemented.
Now we must consider the next goal, “enrichment”: has it been accomplished?
The Beneficiaries: The “Thiel-Sphere” End-to-End Solution
This newly created, streamlined market is tailored to benefit a specific ecosystem of “defense disruptor” companies connected by the capital and ideology of Peter Thiel. This consortium is positioned to offer a complete, vertically integrated “operating system” for AI-driven warfare.
The AI Backbone (Palantir & Anduril): The core of the ecosystem is the formal partnership between Thiel’s Palantir and the Founders Fund-incubated Anduril Industries. Anduril’s “Lattice” platform captures data at the tactical “edge” (e.g., from drones), while Palantir’s “AI Platform (AIP)” processes it at the enterprise “cloud” level. Together, they offer a proprietary, end-to-end solution, creating significant “platform lock-in” that would exclude competitors.
The Niche Consortium: This backbone is supported by other Thiel-aligned companies that create a self-sufficient industrial base :
BRINC Drones: Founded by Thiel Fellow Blake Resnick, BRINC builds tactical drones for the special operations community. Its VP of Strategy is Andrew Coté, the same man advising the USNDA.
Scale AI: A Founders Fund company that provides the “data foundry” to label the data Anduril collects so Palantir’s AIP can process it.
Hadrian: A Founders Fund company building automated factories to manufacture the complex parts for companies like Anduril.
Here it becomes clear that Thiel is deeply involved in this initiative, and our suspicions are realized. Multiple companies from the Thiel Founders Fund, including Thiel Fellows, have confirmed that the cat is out of the bag. Here, we see exactly how they intend to consolidate control over the market among multiple Thiel-endowed companies and their allies, as DOGE will certainly award contracts to these entities.
With heavy influence from the USNDA.
In this case, the goal itself has not been realized, because as of right now. These contracts have not been handed out. However, the timeline established by DOGE, which suggests that this will be done within the next couple of months, clarifies that they plan to move quickly.
Enrichment is not yet realized; however, it is ready to begin as soon as the loop is initiated.
Lastly, how do they achieve the last goal— Insulation? They have to ensure that they lock competitors out and maintain control over the system.
This part is pretty straightforward.
Locking out the Competition: The system is engineered to circumvent the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which mandates “full and open competition”. The USNDA’s privatized pipeline functions as an exclusive “insider track,” allowing the network to define the requirements, validate its own solutions, and generate a “demand signal” that DOGE simply ratifies.
Unified Interest: The network is rife with conflicts, most notably Andrew Coté’s dual roles as a corporate executive (BRINC) and an industry association advisor (USNDA), which involve lobbying his former government peers.
Strategic Monopoly: This mode replaces one military-industrial complex with a new, more ideologically concentrated “military-industrial-technology complex”. The “platform lock-in” strategy of the Palantir-Anduril partnership, combined with the “ideological capture” of procurement by a single network, could stifle broader innovation, reduce accountability, and create long-term vendor dependency.
Through these three strategies, we see the final goal realized. Insulation has been achieved, contingent on the success of the new DOGE initiative headed by Owen West.
So now we see the plan. Let’s further unpack this system by understanding it. We can identify similar systems within other industries, as people tend to repeat successful actions.
I want to clarify how this particular system has been constructed.
This Revolving Door concept is built upon five axes. In this particular circle, it is structured in this manner.
1. The Policy-Lobbying Axis: West and Ecelbarger
This axis is the foundational link between the government implementer, Owen West (DOGE), and the industry advocate, Nathan Ecelbarger (USNDA). Their co-authorship of the “Glimmers of a Drone Solution” article created the policy blueprint and established a public record of their shared vision before West was in a position to implement it.
2. The Industry-Advocacy Axis: Ecelbarger and Coté
This axis connects the advocacy group (USNDA) directly to a specific corporate interest (BRINC Drones) through Andrew Coté. Coté holds dual roles as the Vice President of Strategy at BRINC Drones and a strategic advisor to Ecelbarger’s USNDA. This allows a corporate executive to help guide the association’s lobbying for policies that directly benefit his own company.
3. The Professional Peerage Axis: Coté and West
This axis is a bond of shared professional experience between Andrew Coté (BRINC/USNDA) and Owen West (DOGE). Both are Marine Corps veterans who served in senior civilian roles within the exact same Pentagon office: the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low-Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC). This shared background creates a trusted, informal channel between the key industry player and the key government buyer.
4. The Private Sector Axis: Coté and Thiel
This axis links the network’s corporate component (BRINC Drones) to its financial and ideological patron, Peter Thiel. Andrew Coté is a senior executive at BRINC Drones. BRINC’s founder, Blake Resnick, is a Thiel Fellow, a form of patronage from Thiel that Resnick credits for enabling him to build the company. The company’s investors also include prominent figures from Thiel’s network, such as Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar.
5. The Organizational Axis: West and Thiel
This final, overarching axis provides the institutional power for the entire network. Owen West’s drone procurement unit operates inside the DOGE initiative. DOGE, in turn, is reportedly heavily influenced by Peter Thiel and staffed with his associates and alumni from his companies, including Palantir. This places West organizationally within a structure where his colleagues and superiors are drawn from the network of the system’s ultimate patron, ensuring top-down support.
Conclusion
After examining this strategy, it has become clear that we are facing an exceptionally perilous situation.
By controlling every aspect of American drone production and being able to heavily influence their use by loyalists with strong ties to the most respected warriors in the United States military, this not only demonstrates serious concerns about the loyalty of our military. As well as who will actually be directing the use of these assets and their purpose.
I would not be surprised to see ICE placing massive contracts with these companies in the coming months, as drones would be the ideal way for a small set of wealthy individuals to assert control over the masses.
They would not require compliance from service members, as a small set of individuals could give them direction. Oversight would be minimal, and directives would be primarily driven by AI, as evidenced by Palantir’s involvement as well as Scale AI.
This is a wildly dystopian and very concerning issue, something that everyone should be discussing. All the pieces are in place to execute a loop that would grant Thiel and his allies unprecedented power over the United States government and the military as a whole.
Scary stuff. Make sure to share this article. Everyone needs to have visibility into this plot. Once this ball starts rolling, it will continue to move forward.
We may only have days or weeks before DOGE successfully allocates contracts and starts the cycle. We cannot allow this loop to close.
Burn Bright, and I will be with you every step of the way.
The Firebrand Project is not about providing the news; it is a rebellion of thought! It is about burning away the status quo and igniting an entirely new national dialogue.
For $6 a month, you can help me bring more Firebrands to our cause. It is because of each of you that this is possible.
A last note… Even if you can’t become a paid subscriber, you can help fan the flames of resistance. By restacking, commenting, liking, and sharing every post on other media platforms, you can accelerate the ignition of our movement.
I appreciate each one of you.
Burn Bright.
Shane
Thanks for posting it on Dean’s. I’m not catching all the news I should! Stuff like this helps Shane— thank you!!!💪🏿💪🏼❤️🔥
Brilliant article! Thanks for sharing your findings - very thorough. I'll need to go back and re-read to fully digest it!
So... the US is basically looking down the barrel of mass surveillance and enforcement via AI? With a fully formed data loop between drones, Flock cameras, social media, mobile devices, web browsers, and the centralized federal consumer data pool. Probably many other sources I'm not thinking of.
The use cases are unsettling to say the least. Feels like I should be wearing a tin foil hat...