Sovereignty Is Engineered, Not Procured

Sovereignty Is Engineered, Not Procured Europe often asks whether it can build a company like Palantir: a software champion capable of serving intelligence, defence, law enforcement, crisis response, cyber defence, and public-sector decision-making at scale. The usual answer is that Europe lacks data, capital, talent, or legal room. I do not think this is the full story. The capacity is there. The data is there. The technical talent is there. The public-sector problems are real, urgent, and interesting. What is often missing is the will to tackle complex programmes seriously, over time, with teams that are allowed to build, fail, iterate, and take responsibility. Europe does not need a Palantir clone. It needs the capacity to build strategic software for intelligence and security missions without outsourcing the core of its thinking. The problem is not only procurement European intelligence and security organisations often buy American intelligence products, American analytics…