iscover
Winning the next world war will be decided by America’s ability to rapidly transform civilian car manufacturing into mass weapons production, according to recent comments from American entrepreneur Palmer Luckey.
The virtual reality developer and founder of military contractor Anduril Industries made the comments during a recent in-depth interview with popular American podcaster and former television host Joe Rogan on 17 October.
During the published meeting, Luckey outlined his ideas to revive American defence industry production and prepare for future conflict.
“If you let them (US car manufacturers) freely compete, like if you let them go toe to toe, China would be thrilled if they could subsidise their way into destroying the American automotive apparatus, partly for economic reasons. But there’s another reason,” he said during the podcast.
“How did the United States win World War II … Manufacturing – some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories.
“We took all of our farm implement factories, like John Deere and Caterpillar. They were building tanks and guns. We took all our automotive factories. We had them building aircraft, we had them building weapons, we had them building missiles.
“In fact, we even designed those weapons so they could be manufactured by those plants … We won because we had all of this automotive and other industrial capacity.
“China would love to wipe out the American automotive industry, partly for economic reasons, because it also means we will never be able to fight a war against them. Imagine in America with like, we’ve lost a lot of manufacturing … If China could wipe out our industrial capacity entirely, they never need to worry about fighting a war with the US again because they know that we wouldn’t be able to get back in the game fast enough to matter.
“There’s the economic war and the kinetic war that they could win with one move, which is outcompeting our automotive industry.”
This theory raises several questions regarding Australia and it’s non-existent vehicle manufacturing if Palmer is right in his assertion that domestic vehicle manufacturing will be crucial for war-time emergency manufacturing.
Dual-use technology and China
Luckey also speculated on the benefits of dual-use military and commercial technology in the People’s Republic of China.
“China has 300 times more naval shipbuilding capacity than the United States. The time that it takes us to build one aircraft carrier, they could build 300,” he said on the podcast.
“Now, they’re not building a bunch of aircraft carriers. They’re mostly focusing on other things that are more relevant to what they want to do, which is invade Taiwan. So amphibious landing craft primarily.
“But another thing China does is they actually require many of their commercial vessels that have nothing to do with the military to build to military standards for two reasons.
“One, because it means that all the shipyards are being built to handle military standards. Two, they plan on, basically, they’re going to press all of these civilian vessels into service.
“You have to build it to deck plate pressures that allow us to roll a bunch of tanks onto it so that we can then use it to deliver tanks to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. And they are just requiring people to do that.
“So even their civilian shipping fleet is actually this kind of military ghost fleet, just sitting in the open, pretending to be civilian. But the moment the shit hits the fan, it becomes part of the war machine and so they’ve done a great job integrating in a way the United States has not.”
Gadgets and the China27 policy
In other surprises during the podcast, Luckey revealed specialised military glasses designed to be used with Anduril’s EagleEye helmet and capable of shielding US personnel from blinding Chinese directed energy weapons.
He also detailed a rear plate armour insert combined from a battery, onboard computer and traditional armour plate. The insert allowing power use to a soldier’s other body worn equipment as well as protection against kinetic weapons.
In addition, Luckey elaborated on an alleged internal company policy at Anduril called China27. Under the initiative, he said Anduril projects are aimed at building military equipment with the assumption that China will invade Taiwan sometime in 2027. This deadline of 2027 for a possible PRC invasion of Taiwan is in keeping with same timeline given by officials, such as US Army experts and US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.
“The idea is that anything we are working on, anything that we are investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan,” he said.
“I think that it is very likely that China moves on Taiwan for a variety of political reasons … Xi Jinping has this window politically where he can show that he’s reunified China. He’s got a lot of demographic problems that are going to go out of control as he waits and people age.
“He’s got a lot of economic problems where they’re propping up their economy with a lot of kind of fake GDP (gross domestic product), fake growth, fake demand and fake construction.
“And he’s doing that to help build up his war machine, but it’s not sustainable in the long run. So I think there’s a window where they can do this.”
America first, but not on the ground
“My opinion is that the United States, we don’t want to get into a shooting war ourselves. Right? Like we want to avoid that. The United States needs to stop being the world police, stop sending our people overseas to die for other countries, and instead we need to become the world’s gun store,” Luckey said during the podcast.
“We need to say, ‘No, no, no, we’re going to give everything you need to fight for your own freedom’.
“Look, ‘You’re our friend, you’re our ally. We’ll give you everything you need. We’ll give you support, we’ll give you intelligence, but we’re not going to fight your wars for you.’ Because I don’t think the American people have it in us to go do another two decades of adventures in the Middle East or adventures in Europe or adventures in Asia. We don’t have it in us.”
