The latest “defense innovation” is just a used car salesman’s pitch for stupidly cutting corners on systems that keep us alive.
Imagine getting rich from gluing your iPad to your face. Anduril Industries wants you to believe they’re revolutionizing defense with some of the dumbest ideas in history.
Slick marketing, venture capital backing, and promises of “21st-century solutions” make them claim to be an Apple of defense. But let’s take a deep look into what’s really happening when shady unaccountable snake-oil tactics find their way into warfare: imagine the used car lot of defense, where lemons are sold to buyers actively being convinced that failure just means they need to come back for more.
Bait and Switch
Traditional defense contractors, for all their flaws, have maintained a simple premise: the government pays for development costs and owns the technology. Companies made huge profits, yet weapons systems weren’t profit centers to be optimized.
Quality came first because that’s what a successful defense strategy actually required.
Anduril flipped this model entirely to eliminate quality. Now they develop products with private investment, retain ownership of the intellectual property, and sell falsely labeled “finished” systems that prioritize profit over government-level quality standards. Is a cover-up innovative?
Wrong.
It’s the oldest trick in the book: shift the incentive structure so that maximizing profit becomes more important than maximizing performance, allowing catastrophe to be institutionalized where troops bear the ultimate sacrifice for some uncaring “whiz” sitting on a beach sipping his Mai-tai. Every dollar spent on redundancy, over-engineering, or extensive testing is a dollar that doesn’t go to a fancy Hawaiian shirt collection. Every corner that can be cut invisibly becomes a margin opportunity to pay for designer flip-flops.
The guy prancing about like a bad 1980s sitcom in flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts making life-or-death decisions about military equipment is in fact damning evidence.
He’s literally living like he’s on permanent vacation while soldiers depend on him to stay alive. Imagine if Magnum PI was cutting corners on helicopter maintenance to pay for daily washing of his Ferrari.
Teenage Fever Dream of Easy Money
There is no disruption other than regression to Silicon Valley’s most toxic impulses. The “move fast and break things” mentality is a false history, which doesn’t even work for building a social media app. When things break, suicide explodes and genocide unfolds while Facebook executives wash all that blood off their hands in luxurious mountainside pools. But when defense systems break, national security evaporates and foundations of democracy crumble.
Anduril’s model treats warfare like a flimsy and simple consumer product market. It’s exactly like Tesla claiming they could solve autonomous driving with cheap cameras instead of expensive sensors.
Wrong.
Need missile defense? Here’s a flash bang of premium features! Don’t like the performance? Wait a year! Still don’t like it? Wait a year! Not yet? Wait a year! Tesla announced in 2016 it had solved driverless such that everyone would stop needing to touch a steering wheel by 2017.
Wrong.
It’s the kind of approach a teenager might dream up with a car salesman father, while playing too many video games, binging on super hero material and watching too many get rich quick pitch decks.
The efficiency argument is particularly idiotic and insidious.
Military effectiveness has never been about efficiency. NEVER. Any basic grasp of history should have prevented Anduril from even getting off the ground. Success in battle is defined by overwhelming capability when you need it most. You want systems to be over-engineered, over-tested, and over-built because “good enough” is what gets people killed. Military-grade literally has meant inefficient to the degree that it can be trusted far beyond consumer performance.
But “good enough” is exactly what Anduril is fixated on, to maximize profit and minimize their exposure.
This is Eisenhower’s Nightmare
President Eisenhower clearly warned us about the military-industrial complex not because he opposed defense spending, but because he understood the danger of aligning private elitists with warfare. He knew that once companies are centered on using war to grow their business, they stop being suppliers and become stakeholders in creating death and destruction for profit.
Anduril represents the apotheosis of Eisenhower’s warning. They’re not just profiting from defense contracts, as they’re creating a business model meant to feed on continuous military tension to supply their investments and generate demand for their products. Their success literally depends on the world becoming worse and worse, a plan to lower quality of life by making it more dangerous with the intent to extract huge value from fear. Profits are pinned to massive harm and suffering.
Traditional contractors were cost centers that served national defense as a necessary, albeit controversial, balance. Anduril removes all morality from the equation to hook body counts into growth targets.
Used Cruise Missile Salesman
Like any good con, Anduril’s pitch contains just enough truth to be believable. Yes, traditional defense procurement is slow and expensive. Yes, some legacy contractors have become complacent. But the solution proposed isn’t fixing any problems, it’s flipping the problems to private where they are far less visible and more dangerous.
Instead of transparent cost overruns, you get hidden reliability compromises. Instead of lengthy development cycles, you get rushed testing regimens (e.g. Boeing 737 and 787 catastrophes). Instead of government ownership ensuring long-term support, you get vendor lock-in and subscription pricing for critical updates.
The car salesman tells you the old system was a ripoff while selling you something far, far worse. The difference is that when your used car breaks down, you’re stranded on the highway. When cruise missiles fail, thousands of soldiers don’t come home.
Nixon’s “salesman” approach to American national defense infamously extended the Vietnam War for purposes of getting himself elected President, very intentionally scuttling peace talks. Tens of thousands of American soldiers died as a result. He was thrown out of office, yet how would Anduril be stopped from killing far more?
There’s no Defense Lemon Law
The sinister reality of Anduril’s approach is that the true cost of their corner-cutting won’t be visible until it’s far too late.
Procurement officials will be drawn into faster development times and decreased upfront costs, unable to predict what’s coming. Military planners will be lured into impressive demos and polished presentations, unaware of what they will be looking at later. The reliability issues, the vendor dependency, the profit-driven feature limitations—all of that emerges after the honeymoon, often in the absolute worst possible circumstances with tragedy that can’t be unseen or undone.
By then, Anduril has victims locked in. An entire defense infrastructure will depend on faulty systems. Training will be hooked to bad interfaces. Logistics chains will be optimized for faulty components. So when problems emerge, the “solution” is doubling and tripling down on newer versions that fail again, additional modules that don’t help, premium support packages that can’t deliver.
It’s the predatory subscription model applied to national security, designed to make victims pay forever while delivering the minimum viable product, or even below minimum.
What Real Innovation Would Look Like
True defense innovation would align private incentives with public safety. It would reward reliability over efficiency, proven performance over flashy features, and long-term capability over short-term profits.
Instead, we’re getting the opposite: a business model that treats human lives as acceptable losses in the pursuit of market efficiency. Silicon Valley’s “acceptable failure rate” mindset applied to systems where failure means massive failure and death.
The clear history lesson is that Anduril is financializing defense into failure. They’re not solving complex problems they’re expanding them into a hedge that traps entire countries into becoming victims of wealthy elites. And they’re doing it all while convincing buyers that dependence on profit-maximizing corporations is better than accountability and public safety that come from measures of real quality.
Take the goggles off and look around.
The revolution isn’t coming from venture capital and never has. Silicon Valley was founded on WWII investments by the federal government recognizing that when lives are on the line, efficiency is the enemy of effectiveness. Overwhelming, inefficient, expensive projects define the real Silicon Valley success stories.
Effectiveness, not profit margins, should determine how we defend ourselves.
The used car salesman’s first rule: make the customer think they need what you’re selling. Anduril has convinced the Pentagon it needs to give up control to a guy who doesn’t even understand what control is for.
The Oculus was fundamentally flawed from day one. Motion sickness, clunky hardware, terrible user experience. Facebook bought it for $2 billion and then had to completely rebuild it multiple times. Even now, VR is still a niche market that never delivered on any of the transformative promises.
Meta bet their entire company on the “metaverse” based partly on Luckey’s VR foundation, burned through $13+ billion, and now Zuckerberg barely mentions it. The whole thing was vaporware dressed up as innovation.
So now this same guy who glued an iPad to his face and called it the future wants to build missile defense systems? The pattern is classic con-man: overpromise, underdeliver, but get rich on the hype cycle before anyone notices none of the products actually work.
The truth is simple: when failure isn’t an option, profit shouldn’t be the motive.
Anduril isn’t just theoretically dangerous because of misaligned incentives – it’s concretely dangerous because it’s run by someone whose signature “innovation” was a headset that makes people nauseous.
Launched in 2018, Oculus Go was the biggest product failure [Meta’s former Head of VR Hugo Barra has] ever been associated with for the simple reason that it had extremely low retention…. Most users who bought Oculus Go completely abandoned the headset after a few weeks.
The Pentagon is literally betting national security on a guy whose greatest achievement was selling Facebook a lemon for $2 billion.
That’s not just concerning, it’s insane. Anduril’s lemons flogged onto defense probably should be illegal.
