Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, spoke with Joe Rogan a while back and it should be required listening at the Pentagon. America won that war because it designed weapons around what its factories could already build. War planners knew what grades of steel and aluminum General Motors and Ford could process, so they built tanks and trucks around that steel and aluminum. They knew what John Deere’s plants could turn out, so John Deere made weapons components. The automakers, the tractor makers, and the rest of the country’s industrial base converted to war production in a matter of months.
We now do the opposite. We design weapons so complex they nearly defy physics and then discover only a handful of specialized shops in the country can build them.
General Motors just recently re-engaged the defense supply chain. GM signed a deal with Lockheed Martin on August 6th to make housing components for Patriot missiles and delivered the first batch 22 days later. Lockheed says those parts traditionally take months or years to produce. The Raytheon and Lockheed Martin joint venture that builds the Javelin has nearly doubled its output over the last 2 years. That is good news, but not good enough.
Just consider drone manufacturing. Ukraine, whose factories are bombed on a regular basis, will produce roughly 5 million drones for its military this year. The United States will produce fewer than 100,000.
The gap exists because we insist that every drone do everything. The Pentagon wants a drone that is stealthy, kills the enemy, doubles as an aerial cell tower, and probably dispenses toilet paper on the way to the target. Contractors will gladly build that drone. It will take 5 years and cost a fortune. The Ukrainians do not need their drones to do 50,000 things. They need them to blow up Russians, and they can build millions of them while their factories are on fire.
Anduril works from the Ukrainian premise. Its weapons are built to kill the enemy on a budget rather than to be all things to all people. Its Roadrunner launches, hunts for a target, and flies home to be used again if it finds nothing to hit. The legacy contractors tried to push Anduril out of the market, and the company has kept winning contracts anyway because its products work.
The procurement system is a bipartisan creation, and Republicans, including this administration, own a fair share of it. The big contractors operate as an oligopoly, and members of Congress from both parties protect them because the plants and the jobs sit in their districts. President Trump’s tariffs have made the problem worse. Domestic steel and aluminum producers have raised their prices because the tariffs shield them from cheaper imports. A non-defense company told me it is now cheaper to import a fully assembled product from Asia than to assemble it here, because every imported part gets tariffed. Those costs land on the price of every missile we build.
Our adversaries have learned the lesson we forgot. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Houthis in Yemen are trying to build their own version of Iran’s Kheibar Shekan missile with parts shipped from China, which would put all of Saudi Arabia and Israel within range. Russia is using Chinese components to mass produce cheap weapons faster than either Ukraine or the United States. Meanwhile, whatever the Pentagon says, we do not have enough missiles to deal with Iran and the Houthis at the same time.
God forbid we find ourselves in a real war and those few specialized plants get destroyed. Almost no one else in the country would know how to replace what they make. In 1942, the answer to that problem was GM, Ford, Chrysler, and John Deere.
We should not stop building advanced systems. However, the first question in weapons design should be what America’s existing factories can build, not what engineers could build with an unlimited budget. General Motors needed 22 days to deliver Patriot parts that the defense industry usually takes months or years to make. The country that built bombers on Ford’s assembly lines should build cheap drones that kill the enemy efficiently.
