Transcription
When America went to war with Iran last month, the US military faced an enemy using mass-produced drones to deadly effect. The same weapons have been used for years in Ukraine, some of them supplied by Iran to Russia. Unmanned and remotely controlled drones have transformed the Ukrainian battlefield. They're estimated to inflict around 80% of combat casualties on both sides. The technology is nothing short of revolutionary, and it's evolving rapidly. As we discovered, to adapt to the new era, the US military is learning lessons from Ukraine. Forget everything you think you know about warfare. The traditional front line in Ukraine has expanded to a roughly 10m wide strip called the kill zone. Anyone who sets foot there can be spotted by a drone operator and hunted down.
This was a narrow escape for some Ukrainian soldiers. They call these Frankenstein tanks, retrofitted with cages and mesh to deflect drone strikes. Netting covers roads close to the front, designed to catch them before they hit their target. To evade interference from electronic jammers, both militaries launch drones attached to miles-long spools of fiber optic wire, leaving behind a digital spiderweb. But the drones are not just in the air.
Continuously innovating. Yes, for sure. Beside a frozen lake, Ukraine's security service took us to see one of their most treasured weapons. I mean, it looks a bit like a fishing boat. Scout. That's an outboard motor. Yeah. Yeah. It's a sea drone developed in Ukraine called Sea Baby. We're protecting this operator's identity because he's a target for Russian assassination. What's the payload on this? It can really take 2,000 kg. 2,000 kilos of explosives. Is that enough to take out a Russian warship? Yes.
Produced for around $300,000, Ukrainian sea drones have destroyed warships that cost tens of millions. Ukraine says it's used them to sink or disable 11 Russian vessels. Which one is more useful? A warship or a sea drone like the Sea Baby? Sea drone. I think it's really hard to destroy these drones because they are smaller. That's why to have like 10 ships like this is much better than kind of one big one. Wow. To be clear, you're saying you'd rather have 10 sea drones than a warship. Yeah. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Alexander Commission started out the war as the CEO of Ukraine's railways. He was so good at his job helping millions of Ukrainians to evacuate that President Vladimir Zelensky recruited him to become the architect of Ukraine's drone program. Cheap, fast, efficient. Commission told us he helped boost Ukraine's production from 2,000 drones a year to 4 million. For the outnumbered Ukrainians, the inexpensive new technology has allowed them to level the battlefield. It's a data-driven war. We speak numbers. It's a numbers game. What do you mean by a numbers game? We have to count everything. We have to count the number of drones we use, the efficiency of each of them, the cost to kill for every Russian. And what is the cost of killing every Russian? You would be surprised, but the cost of killing every Russian is less than $1,000. Now, that's why they send so many people to die on the front line. They don't count them. They don't value them. Would you want to be in Vladimir Putin's shoes right now? No. Strategically, he lost. He wanted us to become weaker; he became much stronger.
Ten retired US generals told us they agree that Russia isn't winning the war despite its territorial gains. Some caution that Ukraine isn't winning either. But with the help of drones, has managed to draw Russia into a stalemate. This is like a kind of obstacle course for drones. Ukraine's military has set up drone training academies to teach the new technology. Patience and practice. Yes. I mean, practice makes perfect. Am I right? And the rapid shifts in tactics that come with it. This ground drone mounted with a 50-caliber machine gun recently held off a Russian attack singlehandedly for 45 days straight. In January, three Russian soldiers surrendered to a similar robotic drone. Our main idea, we can send the robot and to not risk a human life. So, there, a human life is the most important.
Ukraine says it makes more than 95% of its own military drones, harnessing talent from some unusual places. Roman Teachenko is a former brewery engineer who founded a company called Tenor and developed these remote-controlled armored evacuation drones to transport wounded soldiers. They gave us a demonstration at a military training ground and claimed the drones have saved hundreds of lives. How do you figure out what your next design needs to be? We are working with the end users. End users, that means the soldiers who are on the front line. Yeah. The soldiers said, "We need a drone to do evacuations," and you built it. Yep. That's how it works in Ukraine, and we are designing for soldiers. The same drone base can be adapted to mount a 40mm grenade launcher controlled from a bunker, which could be hundreds of miles away. When it comes to drones, how quickly is the technology changing? Innovation cycle is roughly one week. It means from the point you send a drone to the front line, get the feedback, change something, and get the new version, it could be as short as one week. Are the Russians also innovating? Yes, definitely. We have to admit it. Who has the edge at this point? I would say it's equilibrium. Equilibrium in a drone arms race, and both sides will take any help they can get.
Air Logix makes aerial surveillance drones for the Ukrainian military. Their production is spread across more than 20 sites to minimize risk because they've already been bombed twice by Russia. It's a dangerous business, but the company recently secured over a million dollars from an American investment fund that specializes in Ukrainian drone technology. It's run by two former US Marines, William McNalty, who has a background in humanitarian work, and Lenor Karafa, who built a career in finance after leaving the military. They told us their investors are wealthy individuals who support Ukraine. I worked at one or two jobs after the military that were more about the money than anything else. That is not my main motivation. You didn't join the Marines for the money. What's your main motivation? Service, patriotism, democracy, mission. And Ukraine ticks all of those boxes. It ticks all of those boxes. I fell in love with the Ukrainians when I arrived. How can not, and how can you not just come to help the people that are literally fighting for what NATO was created for, to stop Russian aggression.
At a NATO training exercise in Estonia last year, the alliance tested its vulnerability against drones. Around a thousand NATO personnel were defeated in the drill by a group of drone operators, some of them Ukrainian. Is this a revolution in warfare? It is. No question in your mind. No question. You know, in every war, like there is innovation from going from horses to tanks to to machine guns, and then tactics evolve in response to that. And that is why it's just incredibly important for the US, for our European allies, to learn these lessons from Ukraine. There's a real risk that the US would lose its military supremacy if it doesn't adapt to modern conditions on the battlefield. We're going to be going up against these same unmanned systems that Russia is using against Ukraine. The US military told us it intends to hang on to its supremacy, not by buying, stockpiling, or replicating Ukraine's drones, but by tapping into the same passion for innovation the Ukrainians have at the Whispan garrison in Germany. Cable channels you run through keep everything nice and flush. The Forge is one of dozens of drone innovation labs set up by the US military around the world. Offs are good. Any service member with an idea or just an interest can request to spend time in one of the labs. The legs slide out, and you just add a spacer. It's adding a culture of innovation, and that's new. That's not something that we've really seen in the last 20 years. Is it possible that a soldier will walk into one of those innovation labs with an idea that could be a breakthrough in drone technology? It's entirely possible. The thing with drones and innovation is what I would describe as unlimited innovation potential. If you can think of it, you can make a drone do it.
Expedited basic training. Captain Ronan Septton was first deployed to Germany with the army's second cavalry regiment, not long after Russia launched its invasion in 2022. His job was to give basic training to over 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers. But he told us almost immediately the Americans began learning from the Ukrainians. The first really poignant lesson for us was there needs to be more drones. They need to be everywhere, involved in the training to add to the realism. So the Ukrainian soldiers were giving that to you as feedback. Absolutely. Did you then talk to your commanding officers about it? We went to every senior commander we could. The thing that we wanted to communicate was this is important. It's changing warfare, and here's how we can actually implement it now. We're already doing it. We should scale this. The message got through, and now Septton's joined the Army's Ukraine lessons learned task force. It has the job of translating experience from Ukraine's scrappy fighting force to America's sprawling military. He told us the new technology does not make the US military's traditional firepower obsolete, but it needs to adapt urgently, countering the drones developed by America's adversaries. You still need howitzers. You still need Abrams, but you have to figure out how to get the drones to work with the howitzers and Abrams. Exactly. And that's the challenge, but also the goal to become ready for the next conflict. We see it with the armed forces of Ukraine. They have learned these lessons through blood. There will, of course, be additional lessons that we will learn, perhaps through blood, but it will only make us better at what we already are.
The day after that interview, the United States went to war, and the Iranian drones began flying. The first Americans killed in the conflict were targeted with a drone. The US military is now learning its lessons in blood, just as Ukraine did. They call it asymmetric warfare. Our highly sophisticated interceptor missiles, Patriots, THAADS, against Iran's low-tech drones made of materials you can largely get at your corner hobby store. While attacks by Iranian drones were down this past week, the amount of damage they have done has come as a jolt. An Iranian drone attack caused the first American casualties of the war when it killed six soldiers in Kuwait. Iranian drones are a drain on the US weapon stockpiles and a threat to the Strait of Hormuz. We have found that in the race for a counter-weapon, there are contenders that look like science fiction: lasers that focus on zapping drones out of the sky. This is Iranian propaganda footage of its arsenal of drones that have been menacing the Gulf States, blasting apartment buildings, airports, oh my god, oil refineries. These Shahed drones are getting faster, stronger. They can move in swarms, and there are tons of them. Perhaps their greatest advantage: how cheap they are. Often made of flimsy plastics, one cost as low as $20,000. To shoot them down, the US is using anti-missile interceptors that cost millions. A possible solution: lasers. It changes the economics on how we can actually defeat and defend against these targets that are now being deployed and produced by tens of thousands. Wahed Nawabi is CEO of American defense contractor Aervironment AV that makes lasers that he says solve the money disparity. So let me give you an example, a real example. A Patriot missile battery cost about a billion dollars to procure one system. Each missile cost about $4 million a shot. Compare that to a laser. And the cost per shot goes from $4 million a shot to less than $5 a shot. In most cases, about $3 a shot. That's shocking. The price difference of firing a missile or a laser is like buying a mansion versus a cup of coffee.
We visited AV in Albuquerque, where their laser system called Locust is built. The top part that looks like Wall-E is the beam director. The deadly ray blasts out of one of the eyes. The base contains batteries as the power source and a cooling system. Each unit costs roughly $8 million and can be stationary or installed in the back of a truck. Has it ever been deployed in battle? Absolutely. Yes. Multiple battles in different theaters around the world, including against Shahids. Are you telling us that it has been deployed in the Middle East? Yes. He said he's not allowed to tell us exactly where, but it is not being used in the current war. That drones have become so pervasive in the war brings up the question: why didn't the US have a cost-effective solution ready? They went into this war prepared for certain threats like missiles. They did not go into this war prepared for other threats like drones hitting soft targets. Mara Carlin worked at the Pentagon in both Democratic and Republican administrations. Her last job was assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans, and capabilities. Is Iran doing anything that surprises you? Not really. If anyone were to war game this out, you knew there were a couple things the Iranian regime would do. They would always look at how to use cheap, tough-to-counter capabilities like drones in as many spots as possible. Is there anything within our arsenal to confront the drones? So, I can't tell you that there is one magic solution that will do it. And frankly, that's kind of the history of warfare. You find multiple ways to counter different challenges, and then your enemy either catches up or they then get a counter to that counter.
While AV is not a household name, it's a leader in developing drones as well as lasers. But their lasers face stiff competition from some of the giants, including Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Countries are in the hunt as well. Israel has Iron Beam, part of the Iron Dome. Ukraine has a system. And China just revealed its lasers in a large military parade. But you're going to start tracking us. John Gity, who's in charge of the Locust program, showed us how it works. First, Locust's radars find the enemy drone up to 7 miles away as it moves toward the target. Then an operator, in this case me, locks in on the drone by clicking an ordinary Xbox controller. I'm gonna have you tap that bumper one more time. From that point on, the laser tracks the drone as it approaches using AI. I don't have to touch anything. It's going to follow the drone wherever it goes. Correct. Yes. Exactly. Yep. And that's the beauty of a laser weapon system, that ability to track and take that overhead burden off of the operator. Now, as it gets two to three miles from the system, the final step: destruction. Tell us about the kill. So imagine if you will, you're taking a beam of light or a flashlight and pushing that out several miles away, and that creates enough heat to melt through the plastics or what the the material is that these drones are made of. For a closer look, he had a drone placed in a hangar. The door was bolted, and we observed on monitors outside. John showed me what an operator would do. All right, Leslie. What I'm going to ask you to do right now is go ahead and pull the trigger. Watch closely because the invisible beam travels at the speed of light. Here's the replay. The beam went right through the drone, and you can see there instantaneously flames. Look at the flames coming out of there. That is out of the sky. It is no longer a threat. This is what the drone looked like afterward. And so let's go ahead and fire again. We were able to see the beam through cameras sensitive to infrared light. Look at, look at that. Isn't that cool? And so what you're seeing there is effectively clear light that's traveling across the sky and uh hitting the target that you intend. So the benefit of a laser system is you can just keep on lasing at that target until it goes down. Can this shoot down a hundred drones at the same time? Because you're only taking one second or less to kill some of these drones depending on the range to quickly go through and complete your mission. Right now today, is it strong enough to shoot down the Shahed drones that Iran is sending in? So, we've had a lot of great success with those types of drones. And our new Locust system is directly intended to get after that Shahed fight.
As drone technology keeps evolving, lasers have to keep up. Laser technology overall is still relatively young and experimental. Ongoing military tests have raised concerns about performance, accuracy, how heavy the battery is, how much energy is required, and how effective the beam is in certain weather conditions. I'm told that there's a lot of trouble with these systems if it rains, if it's humid, if it's sandy like in the desert, if there's fog, if there's dust. Now, when you're talking about, uh, does the system operate in rain? Well, traditionally drones aren't flying in rain. What about sand and fog and dust? You know, I, I won't get into our deployments, but I can tell you that our systems have been actively deployed and placed at their battle stations and never had to come inside during any weather events. We asked Mara Carlin, the former Pentagon official, how laser technology should fit in the US arsenal. That would be an element, and has clearly been an effort that has gotten some investment, though surely not enough. But even for the lasers, you've got to be able to figure out where the target is coming from. So, do you have sufficient intelligence along those lines? Are you able to make the physics work in terms of what you're actually aiming towards? So, you don't think lasers are a magic bullet. So, at this moment in time, they are very valuable. When we are sitting here six months from now, I don't know that will be the case. But as the war enters its third week, there's an alignment of moments with laser weapons maturing exactly when less powerful, less expensive military hardware is needed. Is the US military right now procuring Locust? Yes, Leslie. Just this fall, the United States Army requested from us to deliver about a hundred million dollars worth of Locust laser directed energy systems. Turns out the lasers have been in use since last month, not in the war in Iran, but in the war on drugs at home. We have learned that the army is routinely shooting down drones operated by cartels along the Mexican border. Drug smugglers are sending the drugs in by drone, not just one direction. It's a lot easier to fly cash via drone than to dig a tunnel and then transport it underground. So, it's the army that is conducting these operations using Locust on the border area. I believe the United States Army is working in cooperation with Customs and Border Patrol. But after Locust was used near West Texas, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, shut down the airspace near the border twice, causing flight cancellations and cargo diversions. Do you know why the FAA shut down the airspace over El Paso? Because there were some concerns that these systems can interfere and hurt commercial airplanes. Can, which is not true. It's not true. It is not true. Well, how do you know it's not true? The FAA just this past weekend conducted a series of tests to ensure and demonstrate that the type of system that we've developed cannot and will not defeat or harm a commercial airliner. So if you aim this beam at a Delta flight, it won't burn through it and disable it and crash it. The system is designed to not make mistakes like that. Oh my god. In order for the lasers to be sold to the Gulf States, the Pentagon and the State Department would have to approve the sale because of the national security aspect of the technology. And then there's another issue. Let's say Bahrain wants 500 of these to protect their hotels and all the other targets. Could you send them 500 tomorrow? Not tomorrow. Remember, there's a chicken and egg thing in here. So far, we've only been authorized and allowed to provide this to the US military. So, I cannot go at risk and build a billion dollars worth of this stuff when I don't have a contract in place that allows me to have a security or guarantee that somebody's going to buy it. The reality is that even if the government gave the go-ahead for a sale to the Gulf States tomorrow, it would take months for AV to scale up its laser production.
This past week, Ukraine's president Zelensky reasserted he doesn't want to surrender any territory in exchange for peace with Russia. A declaration that followed earlier warnings from Russian President Vladimir Putin that if Europe engaged in a wider war, it would be defeated. Nearly four years in, the conflict continues to send shock waves through the Western Alliance. European nations are beefing up their defenses. Nowhere is the impact more profound than in Germany. Scarred by their country's Nazi past, Germans embraced pacifism after the Cold War. Defense spending collapsed to the point some soldiers were buying their own gear. But Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, combined with persistent pressure from President Donald Trump for Europe to shoulder more of its own defense, transformed the landscape. Today, Germany is racing to rearm.
This past month, we were invited by the Bundeswehr, the German military, to observe basic training at the Münster Army base in northwest Germany. A squad of recruits ran punishing drills, honing the skills they would need to defend their position against an enemy assault. The major in charge has been training troops since 2018. The Bundeswehr won't reveal his name to shield his identity from hostile actors. So, have you seen a difference in the recruits of today versus years past? Yes. Um, I, I think there's a huge difference. They know what they're here for, and it's getting more clear to them that everything we're training here for could be one day real. We don't hope that. Um, but we're preparing exactly for that. Because of the war in Ukraine? Yes, of course. Yeah. The war in Ukraine has shaken Germany's sense of security. But the country is also shaking off the shadows of its brutal military past. This Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a stark reminder of that history, stands close by the Reichstag, where the national parliament is moving to restore Germany's military as Europe's most powerful force. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has overseen a 23% uptick in enlistments over last year. How is the war in Ukraine changing Germany's view of its own security? I grew up in the Cold War, and since February 2022, we all experience in Germany and in Europe that the war is back. We never expected that, and we were so hopeful that it would never happen again. But it does, and we have to do everything to be able to deter and defend. Pistorius was appointed defense minister in 2023, almost a year after Russia's large-scale assault on Ukraine. When conservative Friedrich Merz became chancellor this past May, he kept Pistorius, the blunt-talking Social Democrat, in his post. I mean, you have to be clear what you want, what you are standing for. We met him at the Bendlerblock, the Berlin building complex once housed the Nazis' army high command. Today, it's Germany's equivalent of the Pentagon. When we spoke with Pistorius this past month, he didn't pull any punches on Russian President Vladimir Putin's ambitions. There's not only the war against Ukraine. This is a war against the root-based international order, and at the same time, he does not stop stressing what he's really uh longing for, like a renaissance of the Soviet empire. He wants to be the dominant power in Europe, and he wants to be the third uh of three world powers like China and the US. This is what he is what he is heading for. Pistorius warns Putin is rapidly rebuilding Russia's military, and he told us Russia could be in position to attack the West by the end of the decade. When does Germany need to be ready for war? We should do everything to be that in 2029. This is our objective. This is still a way to go.
Three days after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, then Chancellor Olaf Scholz told the Bundestag, Germany's parliament, the incursion marked a Zeitenwende, a turning point for Europe. He announced a special 100 billion euro fund to kickstart Germany's military buildup. Three years later, in the run-up to his election as chancellor, Friedrich Merz said he was troubled as well by President Trump's threats to pull back from NATO. My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that step by step we can really achieve independence from the USA. You're gambling with World War III. After this contentious Oval Office meeting with President Zelensky this past February, Friedrich Merz posted, "We must never confuse aggressor and victim in this terrible war." And he pushed Parliament to exempt defense spending from Germany's debt brake, the constitutionally mandated spending cap. The money started flowing. The defense budget is projected to rise almost 80% by 2029. How big should the German military be? Germany is the third biggest uh economy in the world and the biggest one in Europe, of course. So everybody in Europe expects us to be the strongest ally in NATO in Europe. With the surge of federal funding, the long more abundant German defense industry is springing back to life. The drones are the future of warfare. We met Sven Kru in Berlin. He is co-CEO of drone manufacturer Quantum Systems. The company, with factories in Germany and Ukraine, just landed a €25 million euro contract with the Bundeswehr to produce up to 750 intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones, ISR for short. We have now more than 1,500 at the battlefront day by day in use. 1,500 drones. Drones in use in Ukraine. Day by day, night by night. Drones, including Quantum's, have helped reshape the battlefield. A few months after the 2022 invasion, Russian forces tried to cross the Donets River in eastern Ukraine. Explosions and smoke obscured their movements. A Quantum drone equipped with a thermal camera helped Ukraine see, target, and stop the advance. And this actually was our moment where everybody has seen Quantum Systems and especially ISR drones can make a difference. Krue told us Germany isn't investing enough in cutting-edge technologies. But we saw evidence the defense ministry is thinking outside the box. Way outside the box. It's funding tests to see if these giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches can be repurposed from repulsive pests to miniature battlefield assets. This is a left turn, and this is a right turn. Stefan Vilhelm's year-old startup Swarm Biotactics in central Germany is working with the Bundeswehr to develop technology that can steer the creepy critters autonomously and send them on reconnaissance missions. He let me take control. Wow. They're super resilient, and as you can see, I mean, they can crawl through tiny spaces, can go up the wall, uh, into pipes, like underground and rubble. You know, this is really bizarre. Is it? Swarm's insect neuroscientists attach electrodes to the roach's antenna. They insist this doesn't hurt, stimulating their natural ability to navigate. The electrodes are hidden in these bug-sized backpacks along with a battery and microchips. They're working to shrink the technology to soon look like this. Swarm's AI-generated video shows how they might be deployed, carrying cameras, microphones, and Doppler radar into war zones. Right now, we're hearing that Russia is rearming itself. They got more tanks, more armaments. How does this compete? We have to be smarter. We have to use intelligence. We have to use autonomy, uh, because we wouldn't have enough personnel or enough equipment if you look at what Russia produces right now. So, I think this is a shift we see in in the German uh startups.
Still, Germany is placing a big bet on its biggest defense contractor, Rheinmetall, a major arm supplier to German troops in both world wars. Rheinmetall and its subsidiaries have won a commanding share of recent government contracts. We are the fastest growing defense company in Europe at the moment. Armen Paper has been CEO since 2013. Pragmatic, forceful, strategic. He built Rheinmetall into a pillar of NATO rearmament. Rheinmetall was an ammunition company, is going from ammunitions to vehicle platforms, but now we go to digitization. We go to satellite business. We go to naval business. His company's success and support of Ukraine made him the target of a Russian assassination plot. But that didn't slow him or the company down. Rheinmetall is building and expanding 13 arms factories across Europe. We educated two generations. If something happens in the world, we call Washington, and Washington will help us. That changed. President Trump said it very clear: America has her own problems. The Europeans have to help themselves. And now, with the Ukrainian-Russian war, it's very clear about that, that we have to do more. In 2024, Germany began sending its 45th Armored Brigade, 5,000 troops, to Lithuania, once brutally occupied by the Nazis. Lithuania now welcomes German troops, bolstering NATO's eastern flank. Germany's first permanent deployment of a combat-ready brigade abroad since World War II. Despite the uptick in enlistments, the Bundeswehr faces a manpower challenge. It wants to add about 75,000 active duty troops to its all-volunteer force by 2035. History weighs on recruitment. The issue still sparks protests. A recent poll found an overwhelming majority of 15 to 25-year-olds would not take up arms. If volunteer numbers fall short, the government may reintroduce the draft. Soldiers we met in basic training told us they find the reluctance of their generation to volunteer troubling. I think a lot of it must have to do with the history of World War II. Yes, of course. Private Lassa told us he's proud to serve. Nobody wants to go to war, but if it happens, you have to be there to defend your country. The week before we spoke to Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, he presided over a public swearing-in of new recruits in Berlin. Deutschland, they shouted. The world hasn't heard Germany assert itself like this since World War II, but times have changed. When you talk about rebuilding the German military, there are many people who recoil at that thought. I try to explain them: if you want to live in peace, in freedom, security, um, with a right to go on the street and to demonstrate against or for whatever you want, to love however you want, and you to believe in any god you want, then you need to be willing to defend it because otherwise there might be people like Vladimir Putin who will take that kind of living away from us.
Over the last decade, a new breed of tech billionaires has positioned themselves not merely as entrepreneurs, but as visionary saviors who believe technology can transform the world. Tonight, we will introduce you to one of them. His name is Palmer Luckey, and he's the founder of Anduril, a California defense products company. Luckey says for too long the US military has relied on overpriced and outdated technology. He argues a Tesla has better AI than any US aircraft, and a Roomba vacuum has better autonomy than most of the Pentagon's weapon systems. So Anduril is making a line of autonomous weapons that operate using artificial intelligence. No human required. Some international groups have called those types of weapons killer robots. But as Sharon Alonsy first reported earlier this year, Palmer Luckey says it is the future of warfare. I've always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. Do we want to be the world's gun store? I think so. I think we have to, says the guy who sells weapons. See, I, I agree. It sounds self-fulfilling, but you have to remember, I also got into this industry because I believe that Palmer Luckey isn't your typical defense industry executive. His daily uniform, flip-flops and Hawaiian shirt, is more suited for Margaritaville than the military. But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Anduril, whose line of American-made autonomous weapons looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, and whose slick marketing videos wouldn't be out of place in one. There's the Roadrunner, a twin-turbo jet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify, and strike. If it doesn't find a target, it can land and try again. Anduril also makes headsets which allow soldiers to see 360 degrees in combat. And there's this: it's an electromagnetic warfare system that can be programmed to jam enemy systems, knocking out drone swarms. It's not some futuristic fantasy. And systems are already being used by the US military and in the war in Ukraine. We shouldn't be sending our people to stand in other countries, putting our men and women, our sons and daughters at risk for the sovereignty of other nations. So you'd rather have an American-made product in their hands than our soldiers over there? Absolutely. Every time. And I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now, there's so many weapon systems that require manning. You know, if I can have one guy commanding and controlling a hundred aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one. And it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk.
To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote-controlled. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select, and engage targets. No operator needed. It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapon system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground to making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons. Luckey showed us how those so-called smart weapons can be synchronized on Anduril's AI platform. It's called Lattice. Lattice collects data from various sensors and sources, including satellites, drones, radar, and cameras, allowing, he says, the AI to analyze, move assets, and execute missions faster than a human. If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, "Hey, do this, if that, then this," it would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. If it's the AI on board all these weapons that makes it possible to make it so easy. There are lots of people who go, "Oh, AI, I don't know. I don't trust it. It's going to go rogue." I would say that it is something to be aware of, but in the grand scheme of things, things to be afraid of, there's things that I'm much more terrified of, and I'm a lot more worried about evil people with mediocre advances in technology than AI deciding that it's going to wipe us all out. Luckey says all Anduril's weapons have a kill switch that allows a human operator to intervene if needed. But the Secretary-General of the United Nations has called lethal autonomous weapons "politically unacceptable and morally repugnant." When people say to you, "Look, it's evil." How do you respond to that? I usually don't bother because if I am going to argue with them, I, I usually poke it. I'm like, "Okay, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or or slingshots?" How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if if NATO just, they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin begging him to not invade Ukraine? Our entire society exists because of a credible backstop of violence threatened by the United States and our allies all over the world. And thank goodness for it. It might sound flip, but part of Palmer Luckey's philosophy is that autonomous weapons ultimately promote peace by scaring adversaries away. My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on, nobody wants to to bite them. In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrents, or do they have to be deployed and used? They have to believe that you can use them.
By the end of this year, Anduril says it will have secured more than six billion dollars in government contracts worldwide. When you first came into this space, and you're a tech guy in a Hawaiian shirt, and you're walking into the Pentagon, maybe in flip-flops, I don't know. Were you welcomed with open arms? There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms, and everyone else thought that I was nuts. Nuts because there hasn't been a new company in the defense industry in a significant way since the end of the Cold War. For decades, five defense contractors called the primes have dominated the industry. Typically, the primes present an idea to the Pentagon. If the Pentagon buys it, the government pays for the company to develop it, even if it's late or goes over budget. Luckey started Anduril to flip that procurement structure on its head. The idea behind Anduril was to build not a defense contractor, but a defense product company. What's the difference? Contractors in general are paid to do work whether or not it succeeds. A product company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money. You're putting in your own time. My vision was to build a company that would show up not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out, that will work for enough things that you can save our country hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It may not surprise you that Palmer Luckey's father was a car salesman. His mother took on the role of homeschooling him and his three sisters. Luckey says he was fascinated by electronics and spent a lot of time tinkering in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. By age 19, his tinkering turned into Oculus, the virtual reality company. And at 21, Palmer Luckey fulfilled every young founder's dream when he sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The wonder kid graced the covers of magazines, but two years later, he was fired from Facebook. Why did you get fired? Well, you know, everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. To be a Trump supporter in 2016. You know, this was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so, I think that a lot of people thought back then that you could, you could just fire a Trump supporter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Luckey was fired for his political views. What do you think now when you see those tech leaders Mark Zuckerberg lined up behind President Trump now at his inauguration? I am inclined to let every single one of them get away with it. Look, what do you mean get away with it? Coming around to a point of view that is more aligned with the American people broadly, I think is good for the country. I think it is not good for you to have techno-corporate elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are. In 2017, Luckey says he left Silicon Valley with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and a chip on his shoulder. I was fired at the height of my career. You know, my gears were ground, and I really wanted to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder, and that I still had it in me to do big things. He says he thought about starting companies to combat obesity or fix the prison system, but ultimately decided to break into the defense industry. Have you run into any people who don't take you seriously because you were never in the military? I, I don't think so. I think I owe that to the James Bond franchise. Everyone in the military has seen James Bond movies, and they all like Q, right? I'm the wacky gadget man. I'm the guy who types on the computer and pushes up my glasses and then gives them a strange thing to help them accomplish their mission. And this is his laboratory. Anduril's 640,000 sq ft headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. It's a mix of high-tech carpentry and robotic engineering. A sign on the floor pokes fun at the boss's shoe choice. But Luckey wanted to show us something off-campus. We hopped in his 1985 Humvee. The billionaire told us he also owns a decommissioned Blackhawk helicopter, a 48-crew submarine, and a Navy speedboat. You guys in Dana Point, we took a ride 15 minutes off the coast to see the largest weapon in Anduril's arsenal, this submarine. It's called the Dive XL. It's about the size of a school bus and works autonomously. It's not remote-controlled by this computer. It's doing it on the brain on the submarine itself. So, if I told you to go off and perform some mission, it's months long. Like, go to this target, listen for this particular signature, and if you see this signature, run. If you see this one, hide. If you see this one, follow it. It can do that all on its own without being detected, without communicating with it. Anduril says the Dive XL can travel a thousand miles fully submerged. Australia has already invested $58 million in the subs to help defend its seas from China. But Anduril's most anticipated weapon was closely guarded until May. Hidden inside this hangar, Anduril's unmanned fighter jet called Fury. There is no cockpit or stick or rudder because there's no pilot. The idea is that you're building a robotic fighter jet that is, you know, flying with manned fighters and is doing what you ask it to do, recommending things that be done, uh, taking risks that you don't want human pilots to take. Fury represents a big turning point for the company. Anduril was viewed by some inside the defense industry as a tech bro startup until it beat out several of the prime defense contractors to make an unmanned fighter jet for the Air Force. Fury is scheduled to take its first test flight this summer. If selected by the Pentagon, it, like all products, will be produced in the US. The war games say we're going to run out of munitions in eight days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran and China and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed. If we go to war, right, your version of what Anduril's place is in a conflict, how do you view it? I think what we're going to be doing is first connecting a lot of these systems that otherwise would not have been talking to one another. We're going to be making large numbers of cruise missiles, large numbers of fighter jets, large numbers of surface and subsurface systems. I guess I would hope that Anduril is making most of the stuff that's being used on day 9, day 10, day 11, day 100. I think a lot of that is going to be coming out of our factories every after everything else is run dry.