iscover
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has urged Western governments to focus on deployable defence capability over creating exquisite and expensive individual systems.
Luckey made the comments during a recent lecture with US Brigadier General Shane Reeves at the United States Military Academy at Westpoint last month.
Luckey advances an emerging school of thought that Western alliances will not prevail through advanced, expensive weaponry but rather through weapons that are good enough, autonomous, affordable, rapidly upgradeable and manufacturable at massive scale.
“Some of these critical missiles, we are literally shooting them thousands of times faster than they can be manufactured. (Instead) I think the most important thing is to build weapons that we can actually manufacture,” Luckey said during the lecture.
“That means designing weapons, force structures and concepts of employment that we can actually build and sustain for the long run.
“When you look at World War II. There’s a bit of a misnomer about what actually happened on the industrial side. The classic story, and you’ve probably all heard it, is that we turned all of our car factories into tank factories and we turned all our tractor factories into bomber factories.
“That is partially true. What we actually did was design weapon systems that could be manufactured in a car factory. They remained car factories; they just started making tanks.
“It was things like the level of heat treatment you could do to steel, the thickness of things, how we fastened them, the radius that you could press with a single stage bench into a piece of steel. These were part of the inherent design process of these.
“The bombers that we started cranking out were not the ones that we designed before we decided to reindustrialise our war machine. We didn’t take all our car factories and start building a bunch of post-World War I aircraft. We had to design new airplanes that could actually be mass-manufacturable, mass-producible. And there’s a huge difference.
“Look at planes that we started building right after Pearl Harbor versus before. Before, you had a lot of handcrafting, hand-gluing, laminating, stretching, fitting (whereas) everything after that were heavier planes, less performance, but it was just bam-bam-bam, rivet-rivet-rivet, crappy glue, weld over the whole thing.
“Have you ever seen the welds on a World War II tank? I highly encourage you to look at the museum. Go look at those tanks and they are worse than the worst welds you’ve ever seen, but it’s because they were doing them like this (quickly and mass produced).”
Are we headed down the wrong path already?
In a lot of ways, the ideas that are put forward under the mass production theory are in clear contrast to the post-Cold War model used by Western allies like Australia and the US.
Our militaries are prioritised on their exquisite individual platforms such as fifth-generation fighters, advanced destroyers and long-development missile programs.
Instead, Luckey argued that we should prioritise manufacturability itself as a military capability in its own right.
“The point is that the United States needs to think the same way (as WWII) … We need to build weapons that could be made by our existing automotive factories, our existing agricultural implement factories. We need to build things where we could actually build a thousand a day rather than a thousand a decade,” Luckey said.
“I would love if I could wave my magic wand, I would love someone to say, ‘Look, any weapon that is part of our large-scale deterrent capability (against) China … You literally have to demonstrate it being made in a Ford or General Motors or John Deere or Caterpillar factory.
“You literally need to show that your work instructions, your components, your training, you can go to a Caterpillar factory, train them how to make it in one week, and missiles start coming off the line.’
“And I would love to see that just evenly applied across more and more things.
“If I could do one thing (I’d make sure that) every weapon that is important can be mass-produced at a scale that actually matters by the industry in America or as a consolation prize, our close allies … If it could only be made by a bunch of Japanese automotive workers, that would make me sad, but a lot less sad than not being able to make it at all.”
Final thoughts
In a comical finale, Luckey publicly outed Anduril’s own “Don’t build the Batmobile” business theory.
He encouraged Anduril’s own engineers to build something customers will buy, governments can procure, militaries can deploy into service, compared to technology that is “cool and impressive, but commercially irrelevant”.
“In the consumer market, you move as fast as you want. You run a new marketing campaign, you add a new feature, your sales have just gone up double overnight because everyone recognised ‘This is so good, this is so awesome. I’m going to buy this thing’,” Luckey said.
“And then you go to government and you say, ‘Look, I’ve just doubled the performance.’ They say, ‘Wonderful, but there’s no re-procurement of this capability for 10 years.’
“Internally, we call it not building the Batmobile. It means not building the cool thing that you think would be super sweet and awesome but actually makes no sense because there’s no customer for it.
“(For example) something they never examined in the comics or in the Batman movies is the fact that Bruce Wayne is nuts for building the Batmobile and he does it every single time.
“He’s like, ‘I’m in this dark city and there’s no parking. It’s basically Manhattan. I need a 40-foot long jet-powered car. That’s what I need to fight crime.’ It’s actually the most insane part of his persona.
“So, I tell my employees we cannot build the Batmobile. We need to focus on things that are actually in cycle, can actually get funded and actually get deployed or we’re just wasting our own time stroking our egos.”
Robert Dougherty
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