My understanding is Palantir used the term, and calling teams of them "Delta Force" to make a consultative-and-service-heavy software adoption cycle make sense to US Military clients.
They used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.
This is useful context, but given that you're saying "delta" was in use over a decade ago and that you don't have any firsthand knowledge in the time since, it seems at least a little presumptuous to confidently asset that people didn't start colloquially saying "force" afterwards.
Yeah, my bad. I might have hallucinated the 'force' part.
But I'm reading Karp's authorized biography, The Philosopher in the Valley, and it does say names were chosen to be legible to military. Or something like that.
They used the phonetic alphabet to categorize a number of different specialties on the BD team, including alpha bravo delta and echo. I never heard the phrase "Delta Force" used in 8 years there 2008-2016.