Why subterranean warfare is the next battleground | Palmer Luckey | The Axios Show Clip

00:00- You went a bit viral the other week or month for talking about subterranean capabilities. Vehicles that can maneuver through the crust of the Earth the same way that submarines move through the water are going to be a huge deal. I think they're going to define at least the second half of this century, What are you guys planning? What are up to? - Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects. I've been talking about it louder and louder and louder, because, first, when I started talking about it before we had built anything years ago, everyone thought that I was crazy. And to be clear, the thing people thought was crazy

00:33is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, before it's the moon, is the subterranean domain." - Is it subterranean, then the moon? - Yeah, subterranean, then the moon. The moon's just gonna take longer to become an actual war-fighting domain. And I'd say it's not a domain when it's like a special weirdo little place where a few people might live. Like it needs to be larger than that. Look, the United States and the Soviet Union both believed during the Cold War that the crust of the earth would turn into a battle space, and that you would move people and machines and effects through fire and logistics chains using the crust of the earth

01:05the same way that a submarine moves through the ocean. And I think that the thing that killed that dream isn't that we decided that it was impossible, it was that we won the Cold War and we turned the spigot off on a lot of very, very interesting things. The difference now is that with the power of autonomy, you can now build these things much more cheaply, much, much, much lower risk. I've been talking louder and louder about this, because when I talk about these things, it acts as a lighthouse that attracts all of the people. They say, "Wait, what's that over there? There's a guy who's doing this." And so I'm talking about it loudly to attract all the right people, the people who wanna work on these problems,

01:40the people in government who need to solve these problems. And it's moving along slower than I would like, because it seems so crazy. It isn't. - What's the most badass thing Anduril has built? - I'm supposed to love all my children equally. - Everyone has a favorite child. - Everyone, everyone. It's true. The science bears it out. I think the coolest thing, you know, there's a bit of recency bias here, but I think that the coolest thing that we've built in my mind right now is Fury. It's an autonomous fighter jet for the United States Air Force. You know, we were competing with a lot of the big guys. And to go toe to toe with them and then get selected by the Air Force to deliver these prototypes to them

02:25was just the coolest thing ever. Only about half of our products are public, which is another thing that makes this difficult. But Fury was one where we went toe-to-toe with the big guys for their bread and butter, not like a side thing that they're not interested in, and we won. And that, to me, was very gratifying, for me, for the team working on the product, for all the other teams building mission systems and support stuff that went on the product, the people building the buildings that are being used to build the product. I think that that is one that everyone's still riding a bit of an emotional high on. - What won't you build? What's your red line? - What wouldn't I build? That's an interesting one.

03:03- Nuclear weapons. - I would definitely build nuclear weapons. I would build fission weapons. I would build fusion weapons. I think that nuclear weapons have been one of the most stabilizing forces in history ever. It's never been like that in history where total war is off the table. So fission weapons, fusion weapons, absolutely I would build them. I would probably not build, I would not build biological weapons. - Chemical weapons? - Chemical weapons I would build, but in a very specific vertical. And this is a very controversial thing, and please don't clip, "Yes, I would build chemical weapons," and put it on the Axios- - So I wanna be very, very specific about this. And so if you guys post it, you know,

03:37please include this as well. I'll give you an example. Pepper spray is illegal for most non-military police units to use in the military. So like certain MPs can use pepper spray. We are not able to use pepper spray, tear gas as part of our conventional offensive military tactics. I think that's a huge mistake. It falls under a lot of these chemical weapon prohibitions. And I understand the worries about fear of escalation or a slippery slope. I think we understand chemical weapons enough to know there's no real slippery slope from literally hot pepper juice to, you know, nerve, nerve agents that are going to kill you. - On Arsenal-1, y'all said the production lines could go hot as soon as this July, a few months from now.

04:16- Actually, they're going live in a matter of weeks. We're ahead of schedule. So I just came back from Ohio, we were doing our final site survey. We have our first main building. We have our first main building done, about a million square feet, and we have the exterior work done on the second building. So that first line is actually gonna be coming online in a matter of weeks. - What's rolling off that line? - We are making a variety of aircraft and missiles and other stuff. - So like Barracuda and Fury? - Barracuda is there, Fury is there. There's another aircraft that we're making there as well for a different. Look, this facility is making things for SOCOM, for the Army, for the Marine Corps,

04:58for the Air Force, and one other customer. I mean, like we already have the space all allocated to make all of these things. You know, it's more slanted towards one customer than another in terms of square footage right now. But yeah, that's coming online in a matter of weeks. And we should be at full scale with that by,

05:21it'll probably be Q2 next year.