This photograph shows the Anduril logo on display during the 55th edition of the International Paris Air Show (Salon international de l’aeronautique et de l’espace – SIAE) at the ParisLe Bourget Airport, in Le Bourget, north of Paris on June 19, 2025. (Photo by Thibaud MORITZ / AFP) (Photo by THIBAUD MORITZ/AFP via Getty Images)
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For the first time since the merger boom of the 1990s, there is a possibility of injecting genuine competition into the arms industry. Military tech firms like Palantir, Space-X, and Anduril are giving old guard corporate behemoths like Lockheed Martin and RTX ( formerly known as Raytheon) a run for their money, applying new technology and new business models to weapons development.
The rise of the tech sector has been fast and furious over the past decade, with contracts for communications, targeting, surveillance, information processing and pilotless vehicles going to emerging tech firms rather than the usual suspects.
Anduril has characterized this shift in weapons development and procurement in an essay entitled “rebooting the arsenal of democracy.” The piece offers a fairly accurate portrayal of the problems with the traditional defense firms, which are portrayed as pillars of Cold War defense that are ill-suited to current challenges and current defense needs because they lack the business models, the expertise, and the speed and affordability offered by the new generation of military tech firms. Palmer Luckey of Anduril told an interviewer that if the Pentagon stopped buying the wrong things, a $500 billion Pentagon budget — half of the current level and one third of the administration’s $1.5 trillion proposal for next year.
The essay on rebooting the arsenal of democracy suggests that America is at an historic turning point in how it provides for its defense:
“Since World War II, America and its allies lead in military technology has been the pivotal factor in preventing World War III.
Today, that technological lead is in jeopardy.
The incumbent defense companies are unable to build the technology we need to reaffirm our technological lead.
We need a new breed of defense technology companies to reboot the arsenal of democracy.”
The implication is that Anduril is a central player in this new breed of companies, along with Palantir, Space-X, and dozens of others. But the manifesto provides a decidedly partial view of what is needed to provide a defense system that is up to the challenges of a new era in warfare and global politics.
As Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have shown, technology alone is not enough to win wars. Strategy, morale, realistic objectives, knowledge of one’s adversary, and an exit strategy are as or more important as superior communications and targeting or precision guided munitions. As the Costs of War Project at Brown University has documented, America’s post-9/11 wars have incurred obligations of $8 trillion, resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths on all sides, and caused physical and psychological injuries to hundreds of thousands of service men and women without achieving the stated objectives. This occurred despite the fact that America’s technological edge over the Taliban and the non-state military opponents in Iraq could not have been greater. So technology is a factor in modern warfare, but not necessarily the decisive one.
In addition to having different capabilities and business models, the leaders of the military tech revolution, in Silicon Valley and beyond, have strong opinions about what America’s foreign and security policies should be. Alex Karp of Palantir held the company’s board meeting in Israel at the height of the Gaza war, and Palantir’s technology helped Israeli Defense Forces(the IDF) accelerate its military strikes during the conflict. And in his coauthored book, The Technological Republic, he suggests that America’s unifying national mission going project should be a new Manhattan Project for military applications of AI akin to the crash program that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. He further suggests that America can develop a permanent edge in military AI over China – an unlikely development given China’s technological capabilities. An AI arms race is a more likely outcome, which is why dialogue and efforts to create rules of the road for how emerging technologies are developed and used should accompany the development of these systems.
Anduril’s Palmer Luckey has suggested that the emerging tech sector can solve America’s “munitions shortage,” which, in fact, has been caused more by poor choices – uncritically arming Israel’s war in Gaza and launching an unjustified war against Iran. Luckey said the following in an interview with CBS 60 Minutes:
“The war games say we’re gonna run out of munitions in eight days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran, China, and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed.”
The likelihood that America would ever fight wars against China, Russia and Iran at the same time is slim. In any case, preventing such an outcome has less to do with the size of America’s munitions stockpile than with coming up with a realistic strategy that skillfully mixes diplomacy, economic statecraft, strong alliances, and a capable military focused on defense rather than global interventionism.
There are also indications that the new technologies aren’t all they are portrayed to be. Ukraine abandoned U.S.-supplied drones as being too expensive and too brittle, and started a do-it-yourself program that attached cameras and bombs to Chinese-origin commercial drones.
Emerging tech firms can play a role in the future of American defense, but that role should be as vendors, supplying technology that is carefully vetted and aligned with a new, more realistic and restrained defense strategy. Technology alone will not save us, and the leaders of the industry tech revolution are not necessarily the best sources of ideas for defense strategy. That responsibility lies with the U.S. government, with broad input from Congress and the American public. The tech sector should be part of that discussion, but it should not be allowed to dominate it.
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