War Sec praises AI autonomous weapons as the future of warfare, American manufacturing, and jobs

The future of American war power is autonomous and AI weapons. At Anduril, in Costa Mesa, California, Palmer Lucky and his team are building the hardware and software that will keep American military members out of direct combat while maintaining their lethality. Anduril, Tolkien's "Flame of the West," is attempting to uphold that lore, and War Secretary Pete Hegseth is on board.

In a whistle stop speech to Anduril employees, Hegseth praised them for being focused on lethality, saying, "Lethality is something you're focused on delivering every day, but we also need to inject, alongside the warrior ethos, urgency, real urgency, not Washington, DC, old Defense Department, Pentagon, bureaucracy, urgency— which is we're going to deliver this in two years after we coordinate it across 19 different agencies no one ever heard of, and we create 14 prototypes that sit on a dusty shelf until they get approved by some regulator—that's not the kind of urgency we're going to deliver."

He said the DoW is interested in helping Anduril "go faster," and in terms of earning defense contracts, he said, "I want the absolute best. And so we're going to have those competitions, to the winners go the spoils, and if that growth means certain companies like Anduril are successful, fantastic. And as long as you guys are better than somebody else, you're going to win."

"You are helping us build the Arsenal of Freedom," Hegseth said of the autonomous and AI-powered weapons. He went on to say that the United States needs "companies like this."

"We need patriots like you doing what you do every day," Hegseth continued. "So thank you so much to your incredible leadership. Thank you for starting this company on a vision, saying we need patriotic companies that can build here technologies of the future. And I hope you go out there and compete and build like hell, because we need you to do it every single day. We're relying on you to do it, and other great companies in America to do it on behalf of the American war fighter."

Lucky, who looks surprisingly similar to villain Syndrome in the first Pixar Incredibles movie and had similar energy, gave a PR tour of the machines on display in the lobby while Secretary of War Pete Hegseth was whisked off to demonstrations of new munitions. Sentry towers that guard the US southern border were flanked by drones and systems that deploy and identify targets with minimal to no human input.

Lucky is creating and pushing weapons that are so autonomous that they can pull the "trigger" without any human input, drones that can go radio silent while on mission and take out AI-identified targets. "A bunch" of units from his Pulsar "flexible electronic warfare system" have been shipped to Ukraine to destroy "hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian hardware, including deep inside of electronic warfare bubbles."

They've got a munitions factory in California and are opening another in Ohio. The idea, said Lucky, is to design weapons that can be built in existing factories and with existing workers. Some of those workers, he said, "are new graduates, new college graduates. We're also drawing a lot from the existing aerospace industry. There's a lot of people who already know exactly how to do this type of stuff. But also drawing from a lot of automotive as well."

The systems being built at Anduril are designed to "be manufactured by the types of machines and the types of human skill sets that you would see in the automotive industry, and we've been very careful to not build things that can only be built by very, very small numbers of extremely exquisite machines or people in the United States." For the Fury landing gear, for example, Anduril sacrificed a lighter weight in landing gear for ease of production.

Lucky said he was aware that the Biden administration attempted to create retraining programs, under the Inflation Reduction Act, to bring workers from outdated fields into new ones, but that these workers were not on his radar.

"I'm aware of the program you're talking about, but it's never been part of any planning that I've done. So I suspect that it probably did not have enough impact," Lucky said. The new Ohio facility, Arsenal One, will employ 6,000 people. In his view, a retraining program should give workers "as small of a leap as possible."

"You want to design weapon systems to really meet your country where it is, not where you wish it was," Lucky said. "We never would have scaled up in World War II if we needed to re-skill and retrain everybody to a totally different type of level of skill and knowledge." American automotive factories were not remade to create weapons, weapons were designed to make use of those factories.

These AI-powered drones being created by Anduril "take risks that that you don't want a man to take, engaging in maneuvers that a person cannot withstand or sustain, and really just pushing a lot more risk onto robots versus people." These aircraft fly along with manned aircraft, as well, and use the same systems, again streamlining a new process to function alongside the old.

Anduril is new to the weapons space, a space that has traditionally been the purview of a select few American companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. Their mission, per Lucky, is to ramp up production of these war machines, sell them to government entities—notably the United States and Australia— and to be part of an American manufacturing renaissance.

The Department of War encourages this resurgence of American manufacturing and they're doing it in the one area where they have influence, weapons manufacturing. In whistle stop speeches at both Anduril and Hadrian, a parts subcontractor with a similar "American worker first" ethos, Hegseth praised the companies for hiring American and building manufacturing in the US with existing workers. Hegseth did not take questions from the press at either stop.