"Securities" Podcast: The United States has never won a conflict with the hardware that it had going into it

Today we're talking about the future of American defense with the leadership of Anduril Industries, whose mission is to reboot the arsenal of democracy and become the most innovative defense prime in the United States.

Founder Palmer Luckey, co-founder and CEO Brian Schimpf and co-founder and Executive Chairman Trae Stephens joined Josh Wolfe and host Danny Crichton as we discussed the genesis of Anduril, how Luckey’s hardware experience at Oculus influenced the company’s approach to building new products, the urgency for new technology at the Pentagon, and what messages should be taken from the recent success of Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise.

I want to start out by painting the least rosy picture I can of the American defense industry over the last year and 2021. In Afghanistan, we saw a massive pull out of the American forces there. After more than two decades of war, we saw Russia invade Ukraine, in which Turkish drones some of the cheapest on offer in the market today have become the unlikely hero instead of American defense technologies. Meanwhile, America is not producing anywhere near the hardware, or even the software required to supply Ukraine with javelins and other core defense needs. On Capitol Hill, the defense budget process seems to get more chaotic and confusing every year. And we also found in the last year that China appears to be probably ahead of the United States, on hypersonic missiles. And so when I look at the defense industry today, it seems to me it's just negative after negative after negative news. - Danny Crichton

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