The Next Era of Warfare is Here

August 2, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In June 2017, the defense industry was a graveyard for Silicon Valley ambition. The big legacy contractors—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing—had a lock on Pentagon business, and most tech founders wanted nothing to do with weapons. Brian Schimpf and his co-founders, including Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, saw it differently. They believed the Pentagon was starved for modern software and AI, and that the Valley’s refusal to touch defense was itself a competitive advantage. The company they built, Anduril, is now a $2.2 billion revenue business, its systems deployed on battlefields in Ukraine and the Middle East. In this conversation, Schimpf explains how the company thinks about deterrence, autonomous weapons, and the moral weight of building the next generation of military technology.

The Silicon Valley Ethos Meets Hardware Reality

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What you'll learn

1 (01:58) **Origin Story & Founding Motivation** - Brian Schimpf explains why he and Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, when no one in Silicon Valley would touch defense.
2 (05:59) **Silicon Valley Ethos vs. Defense Reality** - Schimpf addresses the tension between “move fast and break things” culture and the need for rigor in weapons development.
3 (09:06) **Product Evolution: From Surveillance to Autonomous Aircraft** - A timeline of Anduril’s technology, starting with border security and expanding to drones, submarines, and fighter jets.
4 (12:10) **The Software Layer: Lattice and the Distributed Battlefield** - How Anduril’s software platform fuses data from thousands of systems to enable smarter, faster decision-making.
5 (13:44) **The Business of Instability** - Schimpf confronts the uncomfortable dynamic where Anduril’s revenue grows as the world becomes more dangerous.
6 (17:21) **Why the World Became Unstable** - Schimpf diagnoses the root causes of the current period of global danger, which he compares to the pre-WWI era.
7 (20:28) **The New Frontier: Long-Range Strike & Economic Warfare** - How drone technology and long-range missiles are changing the fundamental strategy of conflict.

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Show Notes

Ed Elson sits down with Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril, to discuss how AI is transforming the defense industry and where it should, and shouldn't, be deployed. They also explore the growing threat posed by China, why we’re in such an unstable time right now, and what people get wrong about the defense industry.

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