Palmer Luckey, inventor of Oculus who was later fired by Facebook for opposing The Current Thing, spoke last week about Anduril and the importance of reinvigorating America’s military dynamism:
“The situation we’re in is pretty weird. This is gonna sound hyperbolic, but bear with me. [Imagine] if in the build up to World War II, General Electric had said, ‘You know what, we really like the United States, but we’re actually really bullish on Imperial Japan. We think it’s going to be a huge growth opportunity for us. And our metrics just aren’t going to look the same if we wipe those off our roadmap.’
Imagine if in the build up to the Cold War, you had had Westinghouse and other major U.S. technology companies say, ‘Ah, we love manufacturing in the United States, but we actually think Communist manufacturing is a really interesting experiment that we need to see through and we’re not sure we really want to take a side on this.’
The situation that we’re in today is as dire or worse. The only reason it seems ridiculous, the only reason it seems hyperbolic, is because conflict hasn’t broken out yet. If a conflict does break out, we are going to look at the current situation where we are hugely strategically and economically dependent at the highest levels of our technology industry and government on an adversary that is literally committing genocide and enslaving millions of people—we are going to look back on ourselves and feel really stupid.
The good news is that, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, defense is now The Current Thing.”
That’s where Anduril comes in.