Beneath the Surface: Subterranean domain is next war-fighting arena, says Anduril founder

“I'm trying to get people to believe that the next war-fighting domain is the crust of the earth, that we’re going to move people eventually but mostly material and weapons and effects through the crust of the Earth, just like we move them through the air or through the ocean today,” he said.

“The very, very big picture is that the US and the Soviets both believed in subterrenes (vehicles that travel underground) during the Cold War. They were both building prototypes of nuclear-powered subterrenes, manned ones.

“The Soviets lost their prototype in the crust of the Earth, which is like a failure, but also you have to get pretty far to be losing subterrenes in the crust of the Earth.”

Luckey has previously argued that the subterranean domain could become comparable to air, sea and space warfare domains while exceeding them in terms of survivability and stealth quality; with subterranean systems requiring exact physical access to defeat.

Luckey advocated for the change in approach because of advances made in autonomy and autonomous systems.

“The thing that has changed is autonomy, it means you don’t have to have a person aboard to do intelligent tasking and navigation. And so, the diameter of (the vehicle) you need can go down to instead of feet; inches or even millimetres.

VIEW ALL

“The ideal vehicle is probably hundreds of meters long, a bunch of train cars of explosives and effects and a variety of other things, and then a unique thing that I've made that is really, really good at getting rid of dirt and gasifying it that allows it to dig through the front.

“The cool thing about digging is that diameter is expensive and length is free. If I dig a one-foot long, one-inch diameter tunnel, every foot of stuff I pull through after that is basically energy-free. It takes no work.

“So diameter is the thing that kills you on these systems (unless) you can use autonomy to build useful systems that are little teeny, tiny snake trains.”

Robert Dougherty

Robert is a senior journalist who has previously worked for Seven West Media in Western Australia, as well as Fairfax Media and Australian Community Media in New South Wales. He has produced national headlines, photography and videography of emergency services, business, community, defence and government news across Australia. Robert graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, Majoring in Public Relations and Journalism at Curtin University, attended student exchange program with Fudan University and holds Tier 1 General Advice certification for Kaplan Professional. Reach out via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or via LinkedIn.