There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space

Thursday, March 31st, 2022

In 2016, Facebook unceremoniously pushed Palmer Luckey out of the virtual reality startup he founded, Oculus. Then Luckey founded Anduril:

Luckey is now winning billion-dollar Pentagon contracts. One of them is for a counter-drone system based on its “battlefield operating system,” called Lattice. Anduril’s demo video shows one of the company’s sentry surveillance towers detecting a hostile drone and dispatching a small high-speed drone of its own to literally knock the intruder out of the sky. Recently, Anduril acquired a company that makes robot submarines.

[…]

Anduril has a valuation of nearly $5 billion, making Luckey a rare founder of two unicorns. He is unusual for a military contractor. Perpetually garbed in a Hawaiian shirt, and occasionally still in cosplay threads, his vibe is much more cheerful hacker. His conservative politics also make him an awkward figure in Silicon Valley. (One of his sisters is married to the right-wing provocateur and congress member Matt Gaetz.)

[…]

There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space: Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril. All three of those companies were founded by people who had just sold their previous company for billions of dollars.

Posted in Business, Policy, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Comments

Pseudo-Chrysostom says:

March 31, 2022 at 11:35 am

His appreciation of Tolkien’s oeuvre is probably not a coincidence.

Jim: Design really is everything.
Jim: Superb excerption.
Jim: I predicted thith.
Phileas Frogg: “Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news.” I wonder how much of this is social norms vs self-perception. Do the wealthy and educated feel in touch with (or that they should be in touch with) national and global events, or is it mere mimicry? How about the working-class? The two are necessarily mutually exclusive of course, but I wonder if there’s a different primary...
Phileas Frogg: As advances in weapon’s have improved the range and effectiveness of the individual soldier’s impact on the battlefield, the number of soldiers has increased in importance relative to the quality of any individual soldier. It’s the Thermopylae Principle in reverse because of weapons advancements. Reminds me of RTS balancing, where to effectively implement melee units developers need to give them either unrealistic speed or durability relative to the ranged capabilities of...
Bob Sykes: Calling Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s militia a mob is a bit much, but they were lightly armed and poorly trained. However, they defeated the US/UN mission to Somalia, or at least fought it to a draw. We’re still fighting Aidid’s grandchildren, and we still haven’t won. The war is now in its 4th decade, with no end in sight. Settling aside our Indian Wars (1607 to 1918). Somalia is the longest US war.
McChuck: Anybody who has ever played a wargame can tell you that your defenses can handle a certain amount of opposition, but when enemy numbers, regardless of quality, exceed that number, you get overrun. The mobs in Mogadishu back in 1993 weren’t well organized, weren’t well equipped, weren’t well trained, and weren’t well led. But there sure were a whole lot of them shooting at the Rangers.
Russell: New article about Thorp https://archive.ph/fq5JC
Phileas Frogg: The class divide in the US is as deep and wide as any as has existed in history, but instead of acknowledging the divide, much less trying to bridge it, we have chosen moralization and mutual animosity, which will be the death of us.
Freddo: https://www.zerohedge.co m/geopolitical/us-drones -are-expensive-and-error -prone-so-ukraine-turns- china
Jim: The principle applies whatever the source of the wall-penetrating radio waves in question.
Phileas Frogg: In conjunction with the Rob Henderson excerpt one can safely conclude that neither drug use, nor sexual immorality, can be meaningfully correlated with class. “But poverty causes crime!” Does it?
Bruce: Green energy is a patronage fraud, and Terraform Industries is working with it. But their tech isn’t a fraud.
Handle: What is Henderson taking about? I was under the impression that it was a broadly believed meme and one frequently portrayed in popular entertainment for several generations before Henderson was born that college kids got drunk and enjoyed / experimented with recreational drugs quite a lot. Maybe Rob’s poorer friends couldn’t afford to watch those episodes of South Park or didn’t hear about George W Bush’s “youthful indiscretions”? Man, the left really is...
Bob Sykes: How effing stupid are we supposed to be. The energy input to make the methane will be several times the energy of combustion when the methane is burned. And, of course, all the methane will become exactly the amount of carbon dioxide originally removed from the atmosphere. Net, no carbon dioxide removal. And considering all the carbon produced during the manufacture of the Terraform system and the solar/wind systems, this proposal actually increases atmospheric CO2. And the cost claims are...
Gaikokumaniakku: If it’s “synthetic,” they could just call it “synthetic methane,” right? Calling it “synthetic natural gas” makes my brain hurt because I like to think that natural things are not synthetic. I love methane tech because I was raised on Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Typically I like to see it as a way of dealing with dung from agriculture, but I am a fan of methane tech regardless of how they make it.
Bruce: Very glad to see @TerraformIndies here. This could be really big. For example, why not put a Terrform Indies converter on every nuclear power plant in front of those electric heaters in the cooling towers? Closer to where people need natural gas than oil wells where they just burn the natural gas off because it’s not worth transport costs. And if CO2 is bad, like the climate change people say, it’s great to have a way to turn CO2 to something useful. And worse case, it’s a...
Namur: Well, it’s all about EROI (Energy Returned on Invested). Can this machine produce more energy in the form of natural gas than it consumes in the first place? Also, the energy to build and operate it also counts. Now, let’s say that it works: we are still far away for something like it that works for Diesel, the holy grail of our energy society.
Wawa: Misery causes drug abuse, whether rich or poor. Junkies and drunks are just self medicating in a self destructive way. When thousands of American soldiers, who were hooked on heroin, returned from Vietman the vast majority quickly kicked the habit. With the reason for their misery gone they stopped using. I noticed this first hand, when a buddy moved in with his girlfriend. Before she moved in he was a social drinker, after a few months with her he was an alcoholic. When she moved out he fully...
Bob Sykes: While the focus in Ukraine has been on the land war, and how drones have changed it, navies seem to be especially vulnerable. The Russian navy can’t seem to cope with them. I bet the US Navy will also be unable to cope. At 70 ton, $5M tank is easy prey to a cheap, small drone. US/NATO navies are unable to suppress Houthi drones and open the Red Sea. Are aircraft carriers viable? Some think that they would have been eliminated by the Soviet navy and air force in the 70′s.

Isegoria

There have been only three unicorns in 35 years in the defense space

Comments

Leave a Reply

Search

Recent Comments

Categories

Archives