What’s your understanding of the constraints on what the Pentagon allows a drone or an autonomous weapon to do without a human deciding, “Kill this person, shoot this person”? The more important thing is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you’re not allowed to automate the kill chain. So you’re allowed to do that? You are not not allowed to do that. Right. Chris Brose, welcome to “Interesting Times.” Thank you. Great to be here. So it seems to me like the future of high-tech warfare has arrived, that we are living through a revolution in warfighting unlike any — at least in my own lifetime — in which drones and robots and autonomous weapons are remaking battlefields. And your professional work puts you at the center of this shift. You are the president and chief strategy officer of Anduril, which is a defense technology company that’s trying to be the hub — or a hub, at least — for autonomous warfare. But you’re also someone with a deeper background in national security and American government. You worked as a policy adviser to Condoleezza Rice, to John McCain, and you’re the author of a book about the high-tech military future. So I want to start by asking you to just describe where we are now, generally to someone, let’s say, who fell asleep at the end of the Iraq War and just woke up. In order to talk about the future, we also have to talk about that past and present. So if you look at I’d say, the assumptions that we have been operating under for the past 30, 40 years, I think that’s what’s driven the kind of military that we have. So we have assumed that if America is ever going to have to fight a war, we are going to enter the battlefield with technological superiority against any rival; that we have military primacy in the world and dominance over any potential competitor; and that if our military is called to fight, the war’s not going to last very long. We’re not going to shoot a lot of weapons. We’re not going to lose a lot of ships and planes and other types of big military platforms. So we have built and sized and shaped our military around exactly the kinds of systems that you would expect flow from that assumption: Very expensive, very exquisite, very hard-to- produce military systems and weapons. When you look at the future, I would argue that the assumptions that are now very evident to us in the present and certainly I think will be evident in the future, are almost the opposite of what we’ve built our military around. I don’t think that we have the kind of military dominance that many of us in the 1990s and early 2000s just took for granted. We have peer competitors and rivals in the world who are adapting to and really disrupting the American way of war. I think that we are going to find a much more contested battlefield, where we’re going to lose a lot of planes, ships, satellites other things. We’re going to shoot a lot of weapons, and we’re going to have to replace that as an act of production over a long period of time. I think that is not a future that we’re really ready for. All of this points in the direction of autonomous systems, lower-cost systems — things that are much more of consumer technology or commercial capabilities than they are legacy military capabilities. And this isn’t just the future you’re describing. This is the present of one major ongoing war right now, the Russia-Ukraine war. Present and recent past. I mean, I think this has been apparent going all the way back to, frankly, the Middle East in the past six or seven years. I think all of the technology that everybody is talking about, in terms of one-way attack drones and other things, were evident on the battlefields in Iraq, and Yemen and Syria, going back to the 2017, 2018, 2019. Then, obviously, the war in Ukraine puts this all in high relief. But it’s a way of saying that we tend to have this belief in the United States that the future of war is something that’s going to happen to us in 10 years, and we have a long time to get ready for it. I think it’s been unfolding for years and is very much right now a present problem. So let’s just use Ukraine as a template or a case study, because it’s the biggest conflict, and it’s the one I think that Americans have followed the most closely. The Ukraine War starts out with Russia trying to do basically a sprint to the capital, to Kyiv. Basically their equivalent, maybe, of the U.S. sprint to Baghdad. Yeah. “Shock and awe.” “Shock and awe.” And that doesn’t work. And very quickly, the war becomes a grinding stalemate. But how quickly do drones and autonomous weapons change the nature of that conflict? How would you describe the role that they play, for Ukraine itself especially? Yeah, I think that it is not something that happens immediately. In the early days, Russia gets bogged down, largely for reasons having to do with the character of their regime. There was an assumption that this was going to be a cakewalk, so they didn’t plan for having to operate for weeks and months and years. It was only, I think, once the battlefield lines hardened and you began to see both sides struggling to advance and gain ground. It basically becomes a hider/finder problem, and it became very difficult to hide on that battlefield. So things like tube artillery became increasingly risky bets to make. And that’s where I think you started to see attack drones really kind of taking the lion’s share of the burden in terms of the killing that they were doing and being critical to military operations, which they are today. For someone who hasn’t watched a video of an attack drone in action, which you can in fact watch on the internet. What is a one way attack drone do. Describe a typical mission for one. On the ukrainian-russian front Yeah, so I think there’s going to be different kinds for sure. I think these are small kind of hand carried drones that you can fly either autonomously or of human piloted. They have quite capable sensors on them in terms of being able to fly out, fly over an area, identify people or military systems that you want to strike. And then most of those systems have been weaponized. So they’re carrying small amounts of explosives that you can then literally just fly them into the target. So you see these horrible videos on YouTube of Russian or Ukrainian soldiers running away from these drones that are chasing them down and horror movie style. And then I think you see the larger, more complex operations that both sides have also innovated in conducting, where you have larger drones that are going to look more like missiles, where they’re going to have other drones that are flying out in advance of them and doing this kind of targeting, spotting of targets, feeding that information back. And then larger drones are operating more like precision strike weapons. So the ability to have these systems that are out there on their own looking for targets, identifying, systems or personnel and then being able to fly out and strike those targets with precision and do it all at a price that’s Affordable. I mean, that is how Ukraine has stayed in the fight for over four years. They would not have been able to do this otherwise. Is there a near future where infantry itself starts to be obsolete, and you literally just have drones and robots maneuvering against each other. Or is that still further out into the hypothetical. I think that’s further out. If it’s ever something that becomes feasible simply because so long as human beings continue to live on and inhabit the Earth, which I’m pretty sure we’re going to do for the indefinite future. I think it becomes very difficult for these types of robotic systems to entirely go in take and then hold ground, right. Because you know what. We’ve seen plenty in the war in Ukraine is that militaries can be at various different times in the battle, adept at taking ground. It’s the holding of it that becomes very difficult. The question then becomes, can those gains be solidified. Can those gains be held entirely through of non-human means. That’s not a bet that I would make at the moment. Let’s talk about Iran, because this is a war that the United States is directly involved in. Yes right. We’re not just funding and observing as we are in Ukraine. How much of the specifics of the Iranian stalemate are connected to technological change. I would argue that Iran is still in the fight, in large part because of the technological systems that we’re talking about. If you believe public reporting, we’ve done an enormous amount of military damage, right. I mean, the claims of sinking their Navy and destroying their Air Force and destroying their air defense systems. Going after their kind of military industrial capacity. I mean, a lot of that’s happened, but at the same time, the war is continuing because they’re still capable of building, Fielding and using one way attack drones, these kinds of robotic kind of drone boats that are quite effective in threatening the Strait of Hormuz and keeping that area of the world closed. These systems are largely the reason, I think, that they’re still able to project power. They’re still able to hazard the United States, our allies and partners in the region. This could all change in a week because of just the nature of how quickly these things change, but how good it just. I know you’re not inside government, but do you think that the Pentagon was prepared for the kind of responses that Iran has offered to us. Do you think that this has gone as the military expected. And it’s just maybe the political side that didn’t anticipate it or what’s your take. I have a hard time imagining that if the premise of this was we were going to very quickly decapitate the leadership strike and they were going to Sue for peace might happen. But I think the whole nature of a military is to plan for the worst case scenario. So I have to imagine that kind of planning was done. I mean, the reality is we still are in the fight. We are still striking targets. We are still conducting the military operations that the military has been focused on. But I think when you look very closely at the statements of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about munitions inventory, they’ll say, well, sir, we have sufficient munitions for what we’re tasked to do right now. That’s what I hear from the cocoms. What I will say is I will always want more. So I appreciate the effort of this committee and the Congress. We’re always going to want more munitions. The premise or assumption being that if somehow that the military objectives change, or if the conflict lengthens, that might be a different that might be a different situation. So I think that there were certain things that Iran has been doing that I think were pretty easy to forecast. Closing the Strait of Hormuz was something that the US military has been worried about for a very long time. The ability to project power through one way, attack drones, et cetera. I mean, this is something that they’ve been doing again for a very long time. I think you can take issue with how we’ve responded to that, which suggests, maybe we weren’t as ready as we needed to be. Maybe there are things that we needed to be doing, learning the lessons of Ukraine ourselves, and changing the way that we build our military to be ready for these kinds of disruptions. But it is clearly not creating the political outcome or the military outcome that, at least again through of public statements from the leadership of our country, was the intent going into this. Let’s talk about American military readiness then in general. There’s a lot talk about how the US is burning through its stockpile of missiles and munitions Yeah war with Iran is not a major great power war. No right. It’s not war with Russia. It’s not war with the People’s Republic of China. Looking at what’s played out in the Persian Gulf over the last month. And just looking at trends generally, is the US prepared for a major war. If you look at it narrowly in the question of munitions stockpiles, which is a pretty important indicator of military preparedness, I would say no. And I think this has been known to us for a very long time. And I think the deeper question is, why is that and how do we fix it. So I think opening days and weeks of operation epic fury in Iran. What I’ve read publicly is we fired something like eight years worth of tomahawk missile production. Now, that’s an exquisite weapon. It does remarkable things. The problem is that it takes a very long time to build. And once you shoot it, it takes some time to replace. And we don’t have an infinite supply of them. So I think if you look at the question of why are we not ready for this. It goes back to the comment I made at the beginning, which is the assumptions that we’ve made about warfare. Our assumptions are that we would not have to fight protracted conflicts. We have assumed that we would get into a war. We would enter the battlefield with dominance, with all of this exquisite military capability, and the war would be over very quickly. So the fact that we don’t have deep inventories of munitions, for example, is not something that we’d have to worry about. And again, this has been known for a long time. So I guess my sense had been and you can tell me why. I guess this is wrong had been that the goal of the US military was supposed to be to fight at least one protracted war. And there would be controversy back and forth about, well, are we capable of fighting more than one. Like, are we capable of fighting Russia and China simultaneously. But it seems the goal was one major theater, major regional or theater war. There was nothing said about the duration of that war. So when you look at national defense strategies going all the way back, decades or so how big do we have to build the military. What’s the shape of the military we have to build. It was all built around this idea that we had to be able to fight two major regional conflicts at once, and then that got downgraded to one. But the assumption was that those conflicts were going to be over very quickly. But back to your question on munitions. So over the past 10 years as a country, we’ve actually tripled the amount of spending that we’re putting into Patriot missile and tomahawk and these kinds of weapons that now have household names. The challenge is that even as that spending has gone up 200 300 percent production has not moved in a commensurate fashion. It’s gone 14 percent 23 percent up, and you can go critical munition, buy critical munition and see that we’re putting significant amount of resources in and we’re not getting significant or commensurate amounts of production out. So to me, the problem is they are remarkable pieces of technology. We need them. We need them to do what they are uniquely built to do. But they are effectively artisanal products. They are luxury goods. So I think over the past 30 or 40 years, we have had a predominantly high-end military, a very exquisite military, and it’s systems that we all are very familiar with. It’s all of these weapons that we talk about it’s f-35s, it’s aircraft carriers, submarines. And we need that. I’m not here, suggesting that we can just do away with all of that. And I don’t think that the war in Ukraine has rendered that stuff obsolete. Can we just pause because you’ve used the word exquisite now a number of times. And you don’t mean I think exquisitely beautiful a Ming vase. What is an exquisite weapon Yeah, the way I use exquisite and others may define it differently. It means it is something that is very scarce. It is very hard to produce. It is something that you’re never going to have. A lot of it is going to be very technologically sophisticated or difficult to make. The problem is we can’t do only that. And I think you’re now starting to see in the Pentagon the leadership recognizing that you need what’s referred to as a high-low mix. So you need all the high-end stuff, but you also need this lower end of capabilities that are going to be more producible, more Affordable, oftentimes more autonomous. I think the lesson of history and really the lesson of these recent and ongoing conflicts is as these technologies are going to change warfare constantly, and you’re now dealing with adversaries that are quite capable, quite sophisticated, quite high-tech in their own right, very disruptive, and that what we are going to field is inherently going to give us a fleeting advantage. That, I think, is the real lesson that we’re going to have to take out of this, not overindexing on a particular piece of technology or a particular way of fighting, an old system or a New system. It’s how do we consistently stay at the cutting edge learn and field. And that is, I think, what has made the Ukrainians so effective. And I think that is where the United States military, frankly, still has a lot to learn. And the US bureaucracy that supports that military definitely has a lot to learn. All right. So Anduril, it’s a Tolkien reference to what I know the answer, but some people might not. So the name is a conscious nerd detector. So we have identified you as such. The reference Anduril is aragorn’s sword in the Lord of the Rings. It is the flame of the West is, I think, the elven translation. There are narsil reforged. It’s a broken blade that’s been reforged. And there is an active debate about the proper pronunciation of Anduril or Anduril. How do you say it. A pretty conventional guy. You’re not a native of suburban Philadelphia, a native elvish speaking Anduril to me, I think others might insist that the proper elven pronunciation is Anduril. These are the fights we have. I’m glad. I’m glad we haven’t clarified that question. So having a military industrial company named for something in Lord of the Rings is something that you obviously have in common with Palantir Yeah, another cutting edge military technology company that one of whose representatives has been a guest on this very show. You’re both contractors doing work for the Pentagon. Sometimes you work on the same project. How are you different Yeah it’s a great question. And I think it’s very easy to think that we’re the same. I mean, putting aside just the name, we have common DNA in the company, common investors. We’re both fundamentally kind of software centric companies. We’re just not working with a lot of the customers that Palantir is working with we don’t work with the IRS or health and Human Services because what we do is just not relevant to them. I think the obvious difference is that Anduril is also building hardware. So we’re building sensors, drones, autonomous systems, weapons. We’re actually doing that manufacturing. And the software that we’re building is a software system that we call lattice. And what lattice is doing is actually very kind of tightly integrated and coupled with that hardware in the sense that it is fundamentally focused on the autonomous operation of machines and robotic systems. So how an individual drone, for example, is perceiving its environment, maneuvering through space, identifying objects of interest, moving information, collaborating with other robots, with all of that software having to run inside of that, inside of that robot. So if you get concrete about it. I mean, we do a lot of work in counter drone and air defense. And what lattice has to do as a software system, what we have to do as a company is actually be able to take the information that’s coming out of those sensors, radar feeds and imagery from cameras and signals intelligence from electronic warfare systems. And we actually the software has to be able to build an understanding of the world. It has to build objects of interest, transform data into objects and targets to differentiate, a bird from a drone or an airplane from a missile or a civilian airplane, from a military airplane. And then having done that, it needs to be able to communicate with those machines and tell them to keep custody of that target, to keep looking at it to be able to track it through space and time so that the system, the software system, can then task a weapon to go shoot it or defeat it, if that’s the intent of the human operator. So it’s just to say that this kind of system is like what the military would refer to as a fire control system, because you are literally controlling acts of violence through software. And this is why look at the OpenAI’s and the Google’s and others. I mean, we have natural relationships and partnerships with all of these companies. They’re incredibly eager to work with us because we have a treasure trove of unique military data that you’re not going to go find in a public setting. You’re not going to scrape it off the internet, but you’re also building the weapons themselves. Correct right. So you’re building the model through which soldiers and operators interface with drones and counter-drone technology. Yes, but you’re also building drones and drones. Building the hardware. So describe. Describe the hardware. Just give me a couple examples. Offensive and defensive of the hardware. And what a typical product looks like Yeah, one of the bigger systems that we’re building right now is an Air Force program that we competed on in one called the collaborative combat aircraft, which is a fancy way of saying basically a robotic fighter jet. So fully autonomous, launching entirely without human control, maneuvering through the battle space, conducting operations under the supervision of human beings, firing weapons, and again, doing all of this over very long ranges, carrying large amounts of payloads, sensors, weapons, other things. So that is the kind of system that we’re building that is both a very unique and differentiated piece of hardware. But what makes it special is everything that is smart and intelligent that’s going on inside of it, which is foundational. And that’s what the lattice software system is doing is that cheaper than the human like. Is that. Is that cheaper than the alternative. Is that an example of the kind of lower cost warfare that you were just talking about. Because that sounds very high-end. It is. It is high-end. But I think this is where even exquisite, I wouldn’t necessarily I mean, look, I would there are many things that we’re doing that I would say are exquisite. But that also doesn’t mean that they’re exorbitant in terms of their price or in terms of the time it takes to produce them or change them or modify them. This is an incredibly capable system, but it is a fraction of the cost of an f-35, for example. And the whole notion is that it is an unmanned or uncrewed or autonomous system, so that you can take risk with it, that you would never take risk with a $100 million airplane that has a human soul aboard. So the whole notion is that, again, this isn’t a robot that is going to necessarily replace human beings in exquisite military systems. It’s going to make those systems more capable and more survivable because you can collaborate with them. You can now not just send a single pilot in a single fighter jet out to conduct an operation. You can have that pilot flying with three or four or four or five of these robotic wingmen who are now capable of operating as almost of again, wingmen. Why do you need the pilot at all, though. I mean, it seems like we can get into the question of whether you need any humans in the system in a minute, but can’t if this works, aren’t you replacing, at the very least, Tom Cruise. I mean, maybe someday. I don’t think that’s where we are now. And I would argue it’s probably not going to be the case that we’re going to replace humans entirely down the future. But I think, why do you need humans now. Because the systems are not advanced enough that they can just operate completely without human supervision. You need a human being that is going to be in command of those robotic systems, in the way that a human in a fighter jet is going to be collaborating with those robotic, those robotic aircraft. But is there an advantage specifically to having the human be in the fighter jet with his or wingman, or could you have them in just in the Command Center piloting from afar. I think that there’s an advantage that comes from the human being in that same operational environment, being closer, in a world where we’re seeing jamming and denial of communications. The ability to have an aircraft that is physically in communications with those airplanes, even as they are operating in highly autonomous ways. I do think is a necessity in terms of how we are going to think about just the ethics of this or the ethical use of this technology. I think that’s important. I also think the military advantage is you look at this more. I look at this more as the augmentation of human beings with intelligent systems or robotic systems that ultimately, it’s not a question of is the human better or is the machine better. It is. Is the human machine team actually more effective than either the robot or the human by itself. And I think a lot of the analysis that we’ve run, a lot of analysis that we’ve seen from the government that is absolutely the case. What about on defense. What in terms of both drone and missile defense Yeah tell give me an example of work you’re doing. So we build so air defense is an inherently integrated problem, which is why it’s referred to as integrated air and missile defense. You are basically needing to do what I was describing a minute ago, which is you have to complete actual kill chains. So the ability to understand what’s happening in the environment, be able to identify and target the systems that you want to defeat, and then be able to task weapons or military effects, kinetic or non-kinetic, to defeat those threats and do all of that in a matter of seconds like to operate it at a speed that a human being is not going to be able to keep up with. One of the systems that has done remarkably well in protecting American bases and American aircraft in operation epic fury, is the electronic warfare system that we build called pulsar. We also have and what is that. So take that example that is you’re trying to defend, let’s say a US base in the Middle East, right. So that is trying to shoot down both missiles and drone attacks. So this is doing this in what the military would refer to as non kinetically. But how would you or I refer to it. It is preventing a weapon from being able to strike its target by using energy, using the electromagnetic spectrum to disrupt its operations at the most basic level, that is what it is. And to get more technical, it begins to sound like witchcraft because it mostly is. So you’re not firing interceptors. You’re not firing. We’re also doing that right. So basically this is a military interceptor that is going to launch from a base that is going to fly out in much the same way that an air defense weapon will. It is going to be able to identify a target. It’s going to be able to physically run into it and explode and knock it out of the knock it out of the air. Say a little more about the witchcraft though. So let’s say I’m running. I’m running a US military base in the Middle East. And I have a set of drones, Iranian drones heading towards me. So on the one hand, I have as weapons my as countermeasures my set of maybe ideally reusable rockets that will intercept and take them down. And so some subset of the incoming fire is taken out by that. And then some subset is disrupted through electromagnetic fields Yeah it’s basically it’s what the military would refer to as a layered defense, right. I think that traditionally we’ve thought of air and missile defense as very point specific. I’m trying to defend a very small piece of real estate, military base and the volume of threats that I have to defend it against is not very large. And I think what we’ve seen is that with the proliferation of these one way attack drones in Ukraine, in Iran, air defense is shifting into more area defense. You have to be able to protect very large areas of territory, whole cities, whole regions, and it just requires a much larger volume of sensors a far larger volume of weapons. And it basically requires you to integrate everything. So the first thing that you’re going to do is not once you see an air Defense Threat, once you see an inbound missile or a one way attack drone, the first thing hopefully is not shoot a Patriot missile at it. You’re going to deploy something like what I’m talking about in the pulsar system, which is an electronic warfare system. It’s reusable. It is essentially trying to defeat inbound threats with jamming with. So it’s not is it shooting something up No, it is a directed energy weapon. It’s creating fields around. It’s a force field. It’s a force No, it is effectively a force. That’s what I want you to say. There you go. So for the listeners, it is a force field. We have done it. The next up will be cloaking devices. But no, this is does it, but it functions like there is a zone of electromagnetic interference and missiles or drones. It’s more targeted at that. It’s not trying to basically just pump huge volumes of energy out into the environment and do broad spectrum jamming. And then so then the second layer would be things that come in and that didn’t work for some reason. Then you start shooting but this is what’s being used now. This is being used now. You across the world, is it used, for instance, Israel’s Iron Dome. Does Israel’s Iron Dome use the directed energy. We are not currently a part of their program, but I have to imagine that Israel has similar capabilities that they’re Fielding as part of Iron Dome and long run be speculative. Just this is obviously designed for base defense. In Israel’s case, you have missile defense geared around cities and regions. Do you imagine this long term as a version of or an upgrade of missile defense for the American Homeland. Like, is there a world where this ends up being a means of derailing a nuclear attack, or is that just in a completely different realm of threat. The nuclear realm is just a wholly different animal. But in terms of being able to protect military bases or critical infrastructure from drone attacks here in the United States, we’re doing a lot of that work as a company. The electronic warfare system that I mentioned is part of that work, but it is a much larger problem that again, gets back into how do we do this kind of air defense mission at scale. How hard is it to get this to actually work. And here I’m just going to throw at you and you can respond to any of them. Some examples of publicly reported and/or real failures. So there’s reporting that Ukraine used some of your drones and then stopped using them after a certain period of time because there were battlefield failures. There are specific case studies, one of your counter drone system tests in Oregon reportedly sparked a 22 acre wildfire. There was an engine related failure to one of your Autonomous fighter prototypes, fury. Those would be examples Yeah How well does this stuff work. And how hard is it to get it to actually work Yeah I mean, without relitigating the individual incidents because the engine fire just didn’t happen. And that was something that we corrected the misimpression that a reporter had because it had been fed wrong information. How about well, how about the bigger point is we fail every single day. I mean, that’s like the tip of the iceberg in terms of the failures that we experience as a company. But that’s I think, the whole point here. The answer to your question of how hard it is to make this stuff work is incredibly hard. It is far harder than people realize. And for that reason, we have invested as a company. This is our own money. This is not money that the taxpayer is funding us to do. At this point, I think we have about 330,000 acres of test sites and ranges across the United States that where are those undisclosed locations. O.K mostly in the West, in places where you can afford to have large amounts of space. Not in Connecticut. Just from my own. No, but if you want to open a test site in Connecticut, Ross, we should talk. It can be your side hustle. It’s to say that, we go out every single day and break these systems. We figure out what their capabilities and limitations are. We develop them to the point where they are going to be trusted by an operator that’s going to use them. But even then, the expectation cannot be that when a system shows up in Ukraine, it’s going to work immediately. And I think that is an experience that any company that has been operating in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, which we have, and the military systems that we’ve been Fielding are still in operations in Ukraine. No one has had an experience where they fielded something that has just been perfect and worked out of the box, and to the extent that it did, it didn’t work a week later or a month later or a couple of months after that. And I think, again, the whole lesson of this is not can we build a perfect piece of technology. It is, do we actually have the right institutional culture or organizational culture where we are learning, we are testing, we are training these systems. We are building trust in them. We are enabling operators to build trust in them. And then when those systems don’t work, because they won’t, because of things that New technology makes possible or responses that our adversaries engage in, we have to be able to modernize those systems and improve them and change them and rebuild them. And that’s what we do every single day. I mean, we’re integrating New sensors and New payloads onto these systems. We’re rebuilding entire systems all together at a hardware level entirely New versions of aircraft and other things. And actual war is an accelerant. Both the Ukraine war and the Iran war are accelerants of this technology’s development. Yes at least it. At a technical level, it’s an accelerant. Because you are in a non-fatal environment where you have to perform and you have to get better. And it’s all mission critical. And that kind of incentive is exactly the kind of pressure that we want to be under. Because at the end of the day, we are building autonomous systems. And autonomous systems are by nature very finicky. I mean, take them into one environment and they perceive the world differently. You take them into a different environment and you have to do a certain amount of retraining. All of this ultimately comes down to the trust that human beings are going to place in them. So if those systems are not predictable and reliable, if they don’t do things in a repeated and high trust way, operators are just not going to use them. There’s no points for being autonomous. There’s points for being effective and for being useful. Autonomy is a means to that end in our mind. What about the capacity to build the kind of things you’re building at scale. You’re one company. You said earlier basically that under current conditions, we can spend a lot of money and the existing legacy weapon systems we just don’t get that large a number of missiles and so on. Does the US have the existing industrial capacity to build out autonomous weapons, drones and other things on the scale that we need in an environment where you’ve just said that we aren’t maybe well positioned to win a major war Yeah, I think the answer is yes and no. I think the yes answer is we absolutely have the ability to stand up industrial infrastructure, bring the workforce in. I mean, these are not problems that we’re concerned about. We just closed another fundraising round, so we’re taking in $5 billion of private capital. And this is something, by the way, you mentioned earlier the venture capital role here. This is a different model from the traditional defense contractor. Yes right where you are effectively raising money, building weapons and presenting them to the Pentagon before a contract is signed. In part, that there are plenty of instances where we have conviction in a solution that needs to be built to solve a military or national security problem, and we go out and do exactly that. We put our own money at risk. We spin up a team, we build a system, and we take that system to the government and say probably wouldn’t have come up with this on your own. But we think that it is an answer to your problem. As we’ve become a larger company, we’ve also had to change the business model and engage in different bets, which I would argue makes it start to look much more the commercial economy that we’re all familiar with which is if you give me a contract to build weapons, the traditional way of doing it is the government is going to pay the provider of that traditional weapon all of the costs to build their facilities, to hire their people, to cover the overruns. When the program goes over budget and off schedule, the taxpayers on the hook for all of that. And the industry partner really isn’t bearing a lot of that risk. I think what is changing now, and I think Anduril has done a lot to change it, but I also give a lot of credit to the leadership of the current leadership of the Pentagon that’s trying to change this business model as well. Let’s try to make this more like a commercial transaction where I sell weapons and you want weapons. I’m going to. If you give me a contract to build a lot of weapons, I’m going to go off and build those weapons. If I am off schedule or if I underperform or if I’m behind, that’s all on me. And I’m the one that has to eat the cost of that failure in order to meet the obligations of my contract. But it’s like, so the same way that you would put a roof on your house or go buy a piece of well, except electronics technology, except that unless you start selling to other countries, it’s a market with only one buyer. It is. Which means that you are as a company in a position where you are at the mercy of political changes, political decisions. I want to ask about this because yeah, Palantir again, has a higher profile than you do and has a specific political profile. There’s lots of people who hate and fear Palantir, who associated with general fears about the surveillance state, but also specific fears or concerns about its alignment with Republican politics, the Trump administration and so on. I think this is less of an issue for Anduril. But you see, I did the Tolkien pronunciation there. But your prominent founder, Palmer Luckey, is a prominent Republican. Obviously there is overlap with Palantir. You yourself have mentioned it. You have one of the funds investing in you is connected to Donald Trump jr. Like, is there a world where your business model just goes away in a Democratic administration because it’s like Anduril those were the Trump guys or the Pete Hegseth guys, right. Like how vulnerable are you to politics. No, I personally don’t think that vulnerable. I think that from day one, we’ve recognized that Anduril is a defense company. And defense is a long game. And you have to be able to play that long game not knowing what the future politics of the country are going to hold. This is for us. Politics is something that individuals can engage in. And, Palmer certainly has his political profile. Our CEO is a very public and avowed Democrat. I have no idea what I am anymore. But it’s to say that it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, what we’re focused on as a company, we are actually engaged in a bipartisan way across both houses of Congress, both parties, to provide an enduring capacity in this country to build the kinds of defense technologies and capabilities that I think on both sides of the aisle, people want. So let’s say that vision is right, and you become an enduring part of the defense industrial base, and the next president is a Democrat. Doesn’t matter. You’re doing the work you want to do. And we get into the early 2030s and we get a war with China over Taiwan. Just give me a brief vision of what Anduril’s success looks like in that environment. Like what actually happens Yeah it is first and foremost. Let’s say the actual success that we measure ourselves by as a company is whether we prevent that war from ever happening. And that’s I know you get it. Table stakes. But it needs to be said because look, we are a defense company. We do build military technology, but we’re not excited for it to be. Then put it this way. Describe the scenario that China would fear that would induce them not to go to war. So some specific things because I think the specifics are what is interesting. Ultimately, we want to contribute to America’s ability to defeat their strategy and what their strategy is. I think not reading their kind of internal emails or what have you, is they want to prevent us from being able to project power. They want to prevent us from being able to come to the aid of our allies and partners in the region, whether it’s Taiwan, Japan or someone else, and they want to be able to endure through what could be a protracted conflict by keeping us out of it. And again, that means and that means concretely, they want to initially, they want to destroy our bases and drive our aircraft carriers out of the region. They say it very clearly. They say it is winning without fighting. They want to prevent us from being able to fight. And that is the deep disruption that has been happening to the United States Military for the past 30 to 35 years. China went to school on us in terms of how we fight and with what we fight, and they have been building up and modernizing a military to hold all of that at risk. So specifically, what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to break that advantage. We want to make the bases and ships and aircraft carriers that are going to be under threat in that region defensible, having larger numbers of robotic systems that are purpose built for the indo-pacific region. So I think a lot of people look at the war in Ukraine and say, on the one hand, we just need to buy everything that the Ukrainians are building quadcopters and others, or on the other hand, or have the Taiwanese buy them or well, I’ll get to the Taiwan question and the Allied question in a second. But the criticism of people who overindex on the war in Ukraine is, oh, none of this stuff is relevant in the indo-pacific region. The distances are too vast. The geography is so large. The threat in from the Chinese is so much greater. And there’s a degree to which that’s true. I think the point is that what we actually need to be doing is I think what we’re doing as a company, which is not just carbon copying what the Ukrainians are doing, but learning the lessons of that battlefield and the attributes of those technologies and building different kinds of military systems that are purpose built for the United States and its allies, for different geographies, and for a far higher bar of threat that we would be facing from the Chinese Communist Party. And then I think specifically to your question about Taiwan, because these are the places where have the flashpoints of conflict, where a conflict might emerge. I think that we have to do our best to support the Taiwanese government and making themselves more defensible, making themselves into the kind of adversary that is so distasteful that the Chinese military, the Chinese political leadership, just doesn’t want to take that on. So looking at that means drone swarms when you have an attempted amphibious landing Yeah making them more defensible from the types of inbound missiles, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, one way attack drones that they’re going to be faced with giving them the ability to defend against and endure that entourage or onslaught, the ability to project power in a way that keeps them in the fight. And that is some that is work that Andrea is doing. I mean, we’re providing that capability, obviously, with the US government’s blessing directly to the Taiwanese, Taiwanese armed forces. And it’s something that we intend to do a lot more, provided that they have the will and the means, and the US government continues to back us in doing that. All right. Let’s end with the ethics of this strange New world Yeah, right. You talked earlier about emphasizing the idea of keeping humans in the loop, keeping humans involved. What are your actual core principles as a company when it comes to what is allowed to happen autonomously in a conflict area. My general frustration with the ethical debate right now is that it feels very kind of unsophisticated and stale. I think on the one side, you have folks who basically are looking at the reality of the security dilemma that we face, which is our adversaries are going to do all of this. They’re going to build these autonomous systems, they’re going to take human beings out of the loop, and they’re going to gain a military advantage. And if we don’t do that, we’ll be on our back foot. And there’s a degree to which that’s real. But is it, by the way, just in the case of Ukraine, right now you have drones killing people without a human in the loop. Already again, I don’t know everything that’s going on there. I actually think a lot of what you’ve seen more recently is you don’t have that. You have drones that are being piloted by very capable drone pilots that are the ones flying them into their targets, whether those targets are people, soldiers, or military systems. I don’t think that you are seeing a large amount of automation yet on the battlefield, but I think that too could change. That if the Ukrainians start building up more of an internal capacity to shoot deep to shoot longer range one way attack drones in volume deeper into Russia, you’re probably going to have to automate more of the operations of those systems, and you’re just sending your. Then you would be just sending them out and saying, go until you see something to kill and kill it. That is a version of it Yeah I think that and again, I think to go back to your question about the ethics Yeah, I think on the other side is folks who look at this and say, this technology is so New, it’s so unprecedented that we just have to ban it outright. We just have to never go there. And I think that that’s also not a sophisticated position. And I think that what to answer your question directly, what I think we try to stay focused on as a company is the reality that over the past decades, and I would argue, centuries Western civilization, the United States in particular, has built up a body of laws and policies, and doctrine that enables us to bring brand New technology into military use, to weaponize it and to use it in a way that is still ethically constrained and thought about in a serious and ethical way. What we need to be doing a better job of as a country is not throwing out this remarkable body of ethical thinking and action and doctrine that we’ve built up, but actually applying it to govern how these technologies are being built and introduced to military operations because I think that there’s nothing to me that is so New and so unique and so unprecedented about these technologies, that the ethical frameworks that we have brought to bear to solve past problems can’t enable us to solve these future problems. That’s O.K. That’s very general, though. I want you to make this concrete. What are the current existing constraints on what. The Pentagon. What’s your understanding of the constraints on what the Pentagon allows a drone or an autonomous weapon to do without a human deciding. Kill this person. Shoot this person. So if you look at the actual policy, it’s a very serious document, but it’s also quite broad and it would account for a lot of things. And I actually think that’s right. And well and good. I think that people also need to realize, wait, wait, wait. But what does it say. I know it’s very broad, but is there a specific the more important thing is what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you’re not allowed to automate the kill chain. It doesn’t say that you’re not allowed to build a military system that is capable of basically being a lethal, autonomous weapon. So you’re allowed to do that. You are not allowed to do that. I think what the point is that people also have to appreciate that bureaucracies by nature and military bureaucracies in particular, are inherently conservative. And I think that it’s a fundamental misunderstanding. And I’m not saying that you’re guilty of this, but I think that many are. It is a misunderstanding. I could be guilty of it. That’s O.K. It’s a misunderstanding of our defense institution that they’re just going to take a bunch of unproven technology and then Willy nilly kind of throw it onto the battlefield and see what happens, because at the end of the day, what they are accountable for and the consequences of their work is life and death, not just life and death. With respect to enemy combatants, civilians but also for our own personnel. You don’t want a weapon system that malfunctions. You don’t want a drone or an autonomous system that hallucinates. So there is a process that all New technology has to go through. And I think that it is going to be no different in the case of these kinds more highly intelligent, highly autonomous robotic systems, where you are going to rigorously train them to do very specific things, you’re going to test them to determine that they actually perform those tasks the right way effectively, repeatedly, predictably. And in the process of that training and testing, you’re going to build trust that those systems are safe to use and effective to use and more. And where in that process do you determine where the moral line is for letting robots kill people. So to take a specific point of differentiation, how I would answer your question would be very different in a defensive application of this technology than an offensive application. If I’m going to take a highly intelligent machine and send it downrange to go hunt targets and basically make its own decisions about what to do, what to shoot, et cetera, there’s going to be a far higher bar applied to letting that system go off and do those things, than a similar system would be if it were employed in a defensive setting an air defense application. We talked about where the risk of not doing that is that the human beings that are under threat from those inbound missiles will be too slow and too incapable of being able to defend themselves. So you’re going to be far more willing to put that kind of advanced technology into a defensive use case, because you are literally protecting human life, as opposed to an offensive case where you’re sending that system out to take human life. Is there a world where the military for offensive warfare has a policy that human beings have to be in the loop, but in effect, this technology is so fast and you’re caught up in the operations of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons that the human being ends up being just a rubber stamp. I mean, because that seems like a possible future to that. You technically maintain humans in the kill chain, but in practice never want to be the mid-level soldier who says no to what the AI is telling you to do. I think here, too, I mean, it’s also highly contextual. Like, I absolutely can imagine a world where we build lethal autonomous weapons and we use them exactly as you were describing. Again, back to this ethical framework. When the United States military goes to war, we will declare what are called areas of active hostilities. And what you’re saying to the world this is a war zone. Do not go there. If you’re a commercial fisherman or you, commercial Mariner. Do not take your ship through there. Do not fly your aircraft through there because this is going to be an area where we are lowering the bar for how we are going to use violence, or we are going to delegate more of our military operations to intelligent machines in order to gain that advantage or not lose that advantage. But you are doing so in a context that you’ve created that gives you much higher assurance that you’re not going to be making mistakes, killing civilians, killing your own people. And again, I think this is where I apologize for continuing to come back to the context and the specifics, but I think that’s where all the devil’s lie in these kinds of ethical discussions of these New technologies. So then two last questions on that just from your perspective as someone who is making weapons for the military, but you do not work for the military, does the private company that does this work with the military just have to accept as the basis for doing business that you are trusting the military in these specific circumstances. And because this is obviously something that’s come up a lot with the big AI companies, which are not defense contractors, but now kind of are defense contractors and famously, Anthropic, maybe had problems with how the Pentagon might use its AI. And this led to conflict between the Pentagon and Anthropic Yeah what’s your view of the place, the place of the company, the private company doing this work in thinking about how the weapons are actually used Yeah I think working with or working for the government is kind of an all or nothing venture. And I think that’s how it should be. I don’t think that we ever want the builders of technology in America to basically enact a veto over how our government is using that technology. I think that is a decision that needs to remain in the hands of the American people and their elected representatives. And I think that for companies that want to work with the government, that’s what you’re signing up for. You are signing up for the belief that working for our government is inherently good. It is something that is necessary and right, and that you are believing that the government is going to be following the laws of the land. It’s going to be constrained by the checks and balances of the Constitution and our other institutions of government, but that you can’t show up and try to veto individual use cases as a builder of weapons in the United States, I can’t show up to the Pentagon and say can buy my weapons, but you can’t give them to Israel, you can’t shoot them in Yemen, you can’t provide them to the American military and operation epic fury or share them to the Taiwanese or the Europeans. You basically have to say, look, I am here to provide a capability or you’re a service and I am trusting that the government is they’re going to make policy, they’re going to follow the law. They’re going to be checked and balanced and constrained by the other institutions of our government. And that’s I think, what you’re signing up for. If a private actor, a company or a person doesn’t believe that they can support their government in that way, providing them that technology or service, the right thing to do is just to walk away not to do that work. And there are plenty of companies in America that choose not to engage in defense or choose not to provide capability to the government. And that is, I think, an absolutely ethical, ethically supportable decision. And I think it’s a good thing that in America we have that choice. We have that luxury, I think Yeah, we’re Anthropic went wrong. And there’s plenty of blame to go around. But I think it is I don’t believe we want these kinds of technology companies to include us at Anduril showing up and trying to dictate to our elected representatives, our leaders, Senate confirmed officials and ultimately the American people, what they can and can’t do with the technologies that we’re building, stipulating that that’s true and that that’s just inevitably going to be the necessary approach that you take. I’m just curious as a last question, whether there’s anything concrete that you fear with this technology. And I’ll just say as context, the pattern in Major wars in most of human history, especially where technology is involved, is you get in a major war, it goes on a long time, and you escalate the use of New technology to a threshold of moral danger. And this could be poison gas in World War one. It could be the strategic bombing of cities and the use of nuclear weapons in World War two. There are other examples. But it seems very imaginable to me that you get in a major war with autonomous weapons and a system of moral constraint that works right now starts to go out the window. And I’m just curious to end are you ever afraid of where the things you’re building could be taken. I think you have to be. And it would be irresponsible if you weren’t, for me or for anybody who is working in this area of technology to fear the future use cases that these systems could be put to or the ways in which they would develop. But I think to your question about those future scenarios, at the end of the day, the only thing we can focus on is building the best technology that we’re capable of building to support the United States, our government, our allies and partners, recognizing that the future use cases, the context, all of these things are going to change and be different. And it’s hard to answer your question in the abstract because a few years prior to World War two, if anyone could even contemplate, an atomic bomb, it would be hard to imagine that someone would support that as an ethical use. The point being is that these things remain highly contextual. And what you are willing to condone and what you’re willing to do is going to change based on the circumstances that you find yourselves in. And I think the only thing that you can do as a builder of technology is, again, provide the best capability that you can keep. The United States and our allies and partners on the cutting edge of technology to try to ensure that those wars never happen. But in the event that God forbid, we find ourselves in them, recognize that those are going to be the decisions that the elected representatives of the American people are going to have to make under very difficult circumstances. And we pray they get them. Chris Brose, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Great to be here.