Palmer Luckey says his defense startup Anduril has an internal strategy that guides everything it does: “China 27.”
“The idea is that anything we are working on, anything that we are investing in, needs to be built with the assumption that sometime in 2027, China is going to move on Taiwan,” Luckey said on a recent episode of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Luckey conceded that there’s a chance he might be wrong about China’s plans for Taiwan, a democratic island that the Chinese government considers a renegade province.
“And I might be wrong on this, right? It might be never. It might be a longer-term thing,” Luckey said.
“But, in general, like imagine how stupid I’ll feel if I spend hundreds of millions of dollars building some new weapon system that I know is not going to come into service until the 2030s, which is what most experts say is outside of the window of when this invasion would happen,” he said. “Wouldn’t I feel pretty stupid if there’s a gigantic fight and I’ve spent all my money on something that wasn’t ready in time?”
Luckey added that he thinks a full-scale invasion of Taiwan isn’t likely to be the route the Chinese want to take, and that it would opt for a blockade instead to choke off the island.
“And the thing is, even a blockade, the best way to deter that is for Taiwan to have the things that make them a very prickly porcupine, right?” Luckey said. “You want to have things like sea mining capabilities that make a blockade basically impossible to affect without destroying the entire fleet. You want things like missiles and counter-missile systems that make it impossible to lock in the country.”
Luckey told Rogan that he went to Taiwan just a few weeks ago to personally deliver “a bunch of missiles and weapon systems that are specifically to counter a Chinese invasion.”
He also added that, in his opinion, the US should avoid getting into a “shooting war” where US troops are being sent to “die for other countries.” Instead, the US should become “the world’s gun store,” he said.
“And, what do you need to do to be a good gun store, right?” Luckey said. “You got to keep stuff in stock. You got to keep things on the shelves. You need to be reasonably priced. You need to not arbitrarily cut off allies.”
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Representatives for Luckey at Anduril directed Business Insider to his comments on the podcast.
Under Luckey, Anduril has carved out a space for itself in a defense industry dominated by the prime weapons contractors. The US military, meanwhile, appears willing to move to a more startup-friendly procurement process.
“We are going to completely disrupt the system that held the Army back for decades and lined the primes’ pockets for so long,” US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said on October 13 at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army in Washington.
Meta in May announced that it would partner with Anduril to design and build next-generation extended reality gear for military use. Anduril said in a May 29 press release that the project is “funded through private capital, without taxpayer support, and is designed to save the US military billions of dollars.”
That collaboration’s already bearing fruit. Anduril revealed a suite of products called EagleEye on October 13.
The devices range from helmets to visors and glasses, and feature displays that Anduril says can display data like teammates’ locations on top of a soldier’s view of a live battlefield.
Anduril’s also giving defense heavyweights a run for their money on the drone front.
In March, it scored a 10-year, $642 million contract with the US Marine Corps for anti-drone defenses geared toward fighting smaller drones.
Anduril was publicly valued at $30.5 billion in June.
