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Anduril, founded by Palmer Luckey, develops AI-powered drones for the military.
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Anduril says Trump’s promise to cut red tape could make defense contracts easier.
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Others in the defense industry are less optimistic.
Tech billionaire Palmer Luckey’s bet on the defense industry is paying off with Anduril, the drone manufacturer he founded. Now the company says President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to cut government bureaucracy will open the doors even further.
Anduril CEO Brian Schrimf told Yahoo News this week that Trump’s promise to streamline government bureaucracy is one of the first steps toward improving efficiency in the defense process.
“There are just so many roles, so many things that make it difficult to do what we really need to do as a country: go out, take risks and actually just build the military that we need,” Schrimpf told Medium.
Analysts told Business Insider that overhauling the defense contracting process would be difficult, however.
“It’s not like the secretary of defense can say, ‘Cut out all the red tape and issue a contract in 30 days,’ and everyone says, ‘Absolutely, we’ll do everything in 30 days,'” said Scott Sacknoff, president of the Aerospace and defense investment firm Spade Index, BI said.
Sacknoff said that procurement reform in the defense industry is not a new concept and that the Defense Department is constantly restructuring its contracting process.
“I’m sure there are efficiencies that they’ve been working on for years,” Sacknoff said.
Richard Aboulafia, managing director of consultancy AeroDynamic Advisory, said defense industry reform will take time.
“A friend of mine likes to joke; we are big advocates of procurement reform; here is a headline about it from 1865,” Abaulafia told BI.
Anduril has been making waves in the defense industry since Luckey, who made his first fortune as the founder of virtual reality company Oculus, founded it in 2017. Last month, the company introduced the new AI-powered Bolt-M drone, which is small enough to fit in a backpack.
According to DefenseScoop, a military news blog, Anduril developed the drones under $249 million in contracts awarded to Anduril, AeroVironment and Teledyne FLIR to provide the Defense Department with drones that explode on impact.
Schrimpf said the key steps to improving the defense contracting process are cutting government bureaucracy and moving toward building cheaper autonomous systems. He said it was critical for the United States to tap “all of these commercial suppliers” in the country to compete in the global defense economy.
“Our approach to this was, ‘Okay, how do we think about unmanned autonomous systems that can be made in a different way?’ …how can we really leverage what’s actually possible with the things that companies like Tesla have learned? Build at scale, build these complex things quickly and cheaply,” Schrimpf told Yahoo.
Defense technology industry leaders such as Luckey and Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who later founded AI drone startup White Stork, said AI-powered autonomous machines are the future of warfare.
At a technology event in Saudi Arabia last month, Schmidt said that “the cost of autonomy has fallen so quickly that drone warfare, which is the future of the conflict, will eventually get rid of tanks, artillery and mortars.”
Sacknoff told BI that autonomous drones are “definitely a trend.”
“Every 20 years, the defense sector goes through a cycle, so to speak, where new technologies will have a greater impact on defense and the military,” he said.
Sacknoff said the military defense industry is always looking for a “counterpart” to the latest technology and that the growth of autonomous drones will likely bring further innovation to stop them.
“In the next phase, someone will work – and they are already doing so – on developing the technology to counter drones,” he said.
Anduril did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Read the original article on Business Insider
