When Palmer Luckey co-founder of the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years later the sale of his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebookthe idea of a twenty-something tech industry guy challenging the giant contractors building fighter jets, tanks and warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years later, Luckey shows that Anduril can not only compete with these contractors, but win.
Last month, Anduril was one of two companies, along with established defense contractor General Atomics, chosen to prototype a new kind of autonomous fighter jet, the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, for the U.S. Air Force and navy. Anduril was chosen ahead of a group of what Beltway jargon calls “defense firsts”: Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grummond.
“Anduril proves that a seven-year-old company with the right team and business model can compete with players who are already 70 years old or older,” Luckey said. wrote on social media platform X shortly after the contract was announced. The company declined to make anyone available for this article.
Through that business model, Anduril has focused on demonstrating that it can quickly deliver drones, submarines and other hardware, equipped with advanced software, at relatively low costs. It also reflects a shift in U.S. war prospects toward faster development of lower-cost systems with more software and autonomy.
Investors seem to think it works. Anduril has raised a total of $2.3 billion in funding, according to Pitchbook, which tracks startup investments and, according to The Informationis seeking another $1.5 billion.
Courtesy of the US Department of Defense
Anduril's prototype CCA airplane, mentioned Fury, is still in an early stage of development. Another test aircraft will be developed by General Atomics, a 68-year-old defense company with a history of making remotely operated systems, including the MQ-9 Mowerwhich played a key role in the US expansion of drone warfare in the 2000s.
The US Air Force wants the new CCA drones to be more capable and independent than existing unmanned craft, which still rely heavily on ground crews. They are intended to carry out a wide range of missions including reconnaissance, air strikes and electronic warfare – alone or in conjunction with human-piloted or autonomous aircraft. A core part of the program is developing new ones artificial intelligence software to control the aircraft that can operate autonomously in a wider range of situations than existing military systems, which are typically only autonomous in limited circumstances.
“This is a big shift,” says Pettyjohn Station, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank in Washington, DC. She says that until now the US military has mainly used AI for target recognition and planning, rather than for controlling systems. The CCA project is “a huge step forward for unmanned systems and for the Air Force and Navy,” she says.