Peacetime doesn’t necessarily mean not being competitive. Uber is at a stage where it doesn’t need to bend the rules anymore. Read up on how Dara handled the Brazil legislation for example. Rather than fighting any regulation as TK may have, he effectively worked with the government to legalize and legitimize Uber. I expect him to do the same in London.

Bend the rules? Are you for real?

Uber not only deliberately and flagrantly breaks the law, but it developed systems to prevent police and regulators from doing their jobs.

Uber is like someone who wants to rob banks until he gets rich, and then use the money to stay out of jail and transition into legitimate business.

Michael Corleone?

Your definition of peacetime/wartime does not conform to industry norms.

Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.

In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources including competition, dramatic macro economic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth. The great wartime CEO Andy Grove marvelously describes the forces that can take a company from peacetime to wartime in his book Only The Paranoid Survive.

https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo-2/

Actually I agree with them here, it's much more peaceful now than before. When we were trying to break into China and facing against Didi that really seemed like we were at war. Like we would start a growth campaign and merely hours after we launch, Didi would launch the exact same campaign. Even after the merger I'm not sure if this is true but we found 16 employees who were on both Ubers and Didi's payroll.

S/he was probably referring to the concept of "wartime consigliere" popularized by The Godfather.