The Coming Revolution in Military Tech

 

“Americans cheered earlier this summer when Israel began its campaign against Iran by taking out air defenses with drones. New technology is changing the geometry of the battlefield, which can give a leg up for lesser powers -- which could also pose threats to the U.S.

 

Is America prepared for the new way of war? "At every level, I think, our conception of military power, and the industrial base that we've been optimizing to build it, is just systemically wrong," says Christian Brose, president and chief strategy officer of Anduril Industries, the defense tech company founded by entrepreneur Palmer Luckey.

 

That's the bad news. The worse news is a global tinderbox, including multiple hot wars. China is undertaking the world's most significant military buildup since World War II, principally seeking the ability to defeat U.S. forces. American defense spending is stuck at a historic low of 3% of gross domestic product -- proof that free societies struggle to prepare for threats that aren't immediate.

 

The view from the front lines of the American defense-tech revolution deserves more attention. Private capital is flowing into solving a U.S. soldier's pressing battlefield problems. Anduril's inexpensive cruise missiles, unmanned wingmen for fighter jets, and other technology could be crucial to U.S. victory in a future conflict. Mr. Brose recently stopped by the Journal's offices, and he suggests that U.S. military vulnerability is both sobering and solvable.

 

"Basically since the end of the Cold War, we've assumed . . . we were going to have superiority over any adversary," Mr. Brose, 45, says. "If we found ourselves in a conflict, it wasn't going to be very long." The U.S. banked on being able to "move, shoot, communicate as we wished, and as a result of all of this, we weren't going to have to build a lot of things." Thirty-five years later, "we find ourselves on the business end of that problem -- with an industrial base that cannot produce much, cannot produce quickly."

 

America needs military power that is "mass-producible, that is adaptable, that is scalable and that is fundamentally replaceable when, God forbid, the war doesn't end in the first 100 hours or the first month, but drags on for months and years," Mr. Brose says.

 

Consider the fighter jet. Each new generation of planes is more expensive than the last, and "we have fewer of them," Mr. Brose says. He cracks an old joke that in the future "we will have precisely one airplane, and all the military services will take turns using it." The U.S. still needs bombers and fighter jets. "But, boy, do we need to augment that with this additional set of capabilities."

 

Anduril is one of two companies that last year won a contract for "combat collaborative aircraft," Air Force jargon for unmanned vehicles that work alongside fighter jets. Exercises conducted by the Mitchell Institute, a think tank, suggest such loyal wingmen could help U.S. forces devastate Chinese air defenses in a fight for Taiwan. Such drones reduce U.S. combat casualties and get the most out of a U.S. fighter fleet that has shrunk by half since the Cold War. Mr. Brose describes the vehicles as roughly half the size of a fighter jet -- a "big, real airplane with a business jet engine in the back" -- much larger than what comes to mind when most of us hear the word "drone."

 

He lays out an "emerging taxonomy" of systems. On one end of a spectrum are traditional fighter jets such as the recently announced F-47: "You're going to use it for decades." On the other end are "expendable stuff -- once you launch it, you're not expecting to get it back. You're going to fly it into the target, you're going to ditch it in place, whatever."

 

Then there's "the interesting space" where Anduril is spending most of its time. These systems are "increasingly defined as attritable -- in the sense of, I am willing to lose it. . . . I launch an autonomous fighter jet. I'd really love to recover it, send it out for another operation. But under certain circumstances, if I have to lose it, I'm prepared to. And I can afford to, because they don't cost that much per copy."

 

This class of technology, Mr. Brose says, is "the sweet spot, because you get to larger classes of vehicles that can be more relevant in regions like the Indo-Pacific, which is geographically very challenging. It's very large distances. The competitor you're looking at is obviously very capable." The U.S. can't "fight that fight with quadcopters that fly 20 miles."

 

Mr. Brose thinks such innovations can "open up this incredibly cool market that has never really existed for additional low-cost systems -- low-cost sensors, low-cost weapons" that need "low-cost platforms to put them on."

 

Another instructive example is the U.S. Navy's Battle of the Red Sea. American destroyers spent months using million-dollar missiles to swat down cheap drones from Houthi terrorists. It was the world's most expensive game of whack-a-mole, with the U.S. "on the wrong side of the cost-exchange ratio." A potential help: an Anduril system called Roadrunner. It's a counter-drone interceptor that takes off vertically, and it's recoverable. "If I don't actually fly it out and destroy the drone that I'm targeting, I can recall it," Mr. Brose says. A Navy admiral told reporters the system would deploy this year on some destroyers.

 

Building systems en masse is at least half the battle. Wars in the Middle East have exposed a brittle U.S. defense industrial base that has struggled to produce everything from missiles to the artillery. Part of Anduril's strategy is exploiting more commercial supply chains and designing systems to allow "access to a much broader workforce," Mr. Brose says.

 

"We don't need master welders with 15 years of experience" -- a shortage that has bedeviled efforts to build high-end assets such as submarines. Anduril is "hiring people out of commercial automotive and commercial aerospace and defense. And putting together our systems is a lot closer to assembling Ikea furniture" than it is to building, say, an F-35.

 

What Anduril needs, however, is a consistent "demand signal from the buyer of military power, which is the United States government, that they want to buy different kinds of military systems."

 

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act includes $150 billion for defense, and invests in systems like the ones Anduril is making. But the Trump administration also proposed a cut in real Pentagon spending for 2026 and relies on the budget bill's boost to fill its own holes. Mr. Brose visited the Journal before the GOP bill passed, and Congress will put its mark on the next budget. "We'll have to see how this all pans out. But I think it would be a tragedy if what had been designed as a real kind of surge of defense spending and production really just turned into a kind of normal everyday defense budget that dare not speak its name."

 

Alternatively, "our defense budget is basically almost $1 trillion right now," notes Mr. Brose, once an aide to the late Sen. John McCain. "I could build you a military with a trillion-dollar budget that's still going to lose." What matters more is how the dollars are spent, he argues, and the reconciliation bill is a boost for nascent tech at a fraction of the overall budget.

 

Mr. Brose suggests he "could come up with 25 programs" across the force "that can and should exist today, that are not limited because of money, that are not limited because of technology," and that don't require a new Pentagon procurement process. "It's fundamentally imagination and will."

 

When politicians hear that argument, they too often think America can win wars on the cheap with the latest gizmos, no hard fiscal choices required, even as the U.S. spends less on the military than it did when Jimmy Carter was president in 1979 (4.6% of GDP). Even the world's current high-tech conflicts suggest that underlying military mass -- aircraft, naval power -- still matter in a protracted fight.

 

What should the U.S. military stop building? Mr. Brose offers an answer far more compelling than the usual Washington pablum about "legacy systems," Pentagon slang to malign any weapon out of vogue. "There are things that we can probably do away with," such as shorter-range aircraft. The more interesting question is: "How could we use old things in new ways that would allow us to leverage investments we've already made?"

 

There's an argument whether "the Marine Corps is just overinvested in big amphibious ships, as if we're going to go relaunch the Inchon invasion," the famed 1950 U.S. landing during the Korean War. "OK, well, let's look at it a different way: I have a large ship with a flight deck, with a well deck. I could fill that with robotic systems. I could fill it with containerized weapons. I could turn that into a very different kind of combat platform. It might not be sending as many Marines ashore, the traditional way that we've envisioned it. But that doesn't mean we should just mothball the whole thing."

 

Mr. Brose doesn't equivocate about the threat from China. "It's no secret, the rocket-ship journey that they are on, in terms of building up their own organic industrial base." The "notion of 'Ah, they're good because they stole our stuff and they basically copycat American companies' -- was true at a point."

 

Now they're doing genuine technology development, "and they're getting quite good."

 

China is building ships and munitions at a ferocious pace, and it boasts far more shipbuilding capacity than the U.S. Beijing's civil-military fusion strategy allows it to exploit new tech quickly.

 

But in all the reasonable worry about those problems, I ask Mr. Brose if America's advantages are underrated.

 

"I hear a lot of people who think that China has an advantage over us because of the nature of their system and how controlling it is, writing direct outcomes in a way that a democratic society would never do or condone," he says. "There's a degree to which they might find some advantage around the margin in their ability to do those authoritarian things."

 

In the U.S., "we not only tolerate but actually reward all of these disruptive tendencies in our society and in our economy that I'm not sure the Chinese Communist Party is capable of dealing with, and it's not clear to me that the Chinese society is capable of generating." The real U.S. defense challenge is injecting into the defense base "more of the American capitalist system at its best -- more competition, more disruption, more innovation."

 

The past decade offers insights, Mr. Brose argues. A decade ago, "investors didn't want to invest in defense. They thought it was a dry hole. The government was a terrible partner. There was no money to be made. No successful company could ever emerge in that space. No founder or engineer who was worth a damn would ever want to go work on those issues. And that's all changed."

 

What changed? "Partly a recognition of changing threat." More Americans "see the Chinese Communist Party as a challenge, not as a source of investment or a market opportunity." Meanwhile, "the war in Middle East has crystallized a lot of people's minds: 'Wow, things that I never really thought were possible are actually quite possible still.' That there is evil in the world, that bad things do still happen, that there's a reason why the United States and democratic countries need to have militaries to defend ourselves."

 

"Anduril is atop the CNBC disruptive companies in America list -- who thought a defense company could even make that list, let alone be on top of it?" he says. "We created an entire category of technology that didn't even exist, dozens and dozens of companies that are funded with billions of dollars of private capital . . . trying to build military systems and defense capability."

 

Washington may be slow to adapt to a dangerous world, but investors are reorganizing capital and betting that the U.S. will meet the moment. At bottom, Mr. Brose says, "the reason I'm absolutely optimistic on America is our endless ability to adapt and reinvent ourselves."” [1]

 

1. The Weekend Interview with Christian Brose: The Coming Revolution in Military Tech. Odell, Kate B.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 July 2025: A11.