300 Pages on Anduril: Inside Modern Warfare

In order to understand Anduril as a company, you genuinely have to understand 100 years of military history that it is being counterpositioned against. Since the end of the Cold War, we have been constantly tripping over ourselves into the hubris of thinking that we have officially become the only great power left in the world and things will never change, when the reality is that was like a very brief period of time. Ukraine snuck a million dollars worth of drones into Russian territory and basically were responsible for like $7 billion of damage and destroyed like a third of Russia's long-distance bomber fleet. That's a million dollar cost to generate $7 billion of damage. That is modern conflict. We as a nation are not good at that. Palmer Luckey talks about this a lot, where in their very first pitch deck he said we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars. They called their shot early and basically nailed it. Military superiority is run by industrial superiority. We did that in World War II. The problem is now that China is doing that today. Pacifism really is a privilege of the protected. There is somebody else who is willing to do those things and build those capabilities to protect our right to say I don't want to be involved in that, because anybody who can do something who doesn't do something is ultimately responsible for the outcome.

Thank you for having me.

I did it just for you.

So we started working on a deep dive for Anduril, and Anduril honestly, like towards the end of 2023. So it's been several years evolving in what it looked like. The original idea came out of so we've gotten to appreciate Anduril first as an investor. So Contrary has been an investor in Anduril since the early days, and then as we started to build out the firm, Contrary Research basically grew out of that. So that's our public-facing research arm where the goal is rather than like writing blog posts about how smart we are, which is the normal sort of VC marketing fodder, the goal is to be able to actually try and contribute something valuable to the ecosystem. And so Contrary Research has grown to 100,000 subscribers. We've written about 500 different companies, and we've been working our way through really in-depth reports of some of the most influential companies. We've done OpenAI, we've done Stripe, things like that. So basically we've just worked our way towards Anduril, and we've tried very hard to be objective, even despite obviously we're biased towards Anduril as an investor, but we want all of our research to be fairly objective. But as we dug into it, we realized that in order to understand Anduril as a company, you genuinely have to understand like 100 years of military history that it is being counterpositioned against. And in order to do that, it did not lend itself to our typical sort of long-form online writing, and so a book sort of morphed over the course of several years. And then we started collaborating with them on it, and it got even bigger. And so it's been a lot, it's been a very big lift for the last couple years for our team. So we're very excited to have it out.

So it started as each of us write. So we have a research team within Contrary. So I run the research team, we have an editor, we have a research associate, and we have basically a small army of research fellows that are more people who are working in the industry. They are engineers, they're working in investing, whatever it might be. But in order to get exposure on the writing side, they will come and write with us about things they're interested in. So we have this massive army. So over the years there have been a lot of contributors to that project. I have been sort of the main driving force in trying to get it across the finish line. And then in terms of process, it started out very much as like me just consuming everything there was, reading every Anduril blog post that they've ever put out, every press release, listening to dozens of interviews with each of the individual founding members, and all kinds of different reports and white papers and stuff like that. Reading several books. Eventually, once we get into the deeper military history, then it's not enough to watch a YouTube video. You actually have to go back and read the literature. And so a lot of it was just immersing myself in a ton of the underlying resources. Then the team collaboration really came from, okay, how do you take this mountain of context and structure it into this sort of narrative? And that became very much a collaborative process with me and our editor and several folks on the team. And then over the course of just, you know, several months getting it to a place where it was like we had all the context in the right place. Then it was a function of collaborating with the Anduril team and making sure that we were getting the details right, that we were understanding how things actually evolved, technical details, things like that.

So first I think the history is the most important context. It's one of the things I think that is missing from the conversation is everybody talks about Anduril the same way that we talk about a Stripe or OpenAI or a Databricks or something, that it feels very similar. The reality is that while all of these other companies have a technological history, most of them don't have the same like deep cultural, industrial, military, geopolitical history that they actively are defined by today, where Anduril does. So when I think about the history, one of the things that is both the most frustrating and like surprising is that it's just been multiple decades of like a self-own. Like we have been basically since the end of the Cold War, we have been constantly tripping over ourselves into both the hubris of thinking that we have officially become the only great power left in the world and we will never be and things will never change, when the reality is that that was like a very brief period of time that that was true, when it's never been true in history. But everything about military and industrial policy operated on that assumption. That assumption was just deeply wrong. And so it's just this very, it's honestly heartbreaking. You especially when you find the people, the nuggets throughout history of like, man, this guy was calling it in '97, he was saying this is going to be a problem and this is going to, you know, catch us off guard and stuff, and it just nobody listened. So in the historical context that's the most surprising. On the Anduril side, I think the thing that is most, maybe not, I don't know if it's surprising, but because Palmer Luckey talks about this a lot where in their very first pitch deck he said we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars of costs, and so that like revenue-cost equation, like that has always been the process that Anduril has pursued as a company. I think probably what is most surprising is that like they called their shot early and basically nailed it. Like we'll talk more about the details and stuff, but they had in their first pitch deck there, if I can remember all of them, they basically had five things and they had all these weird ways to describe things like, you know, VR for war fighters and perimeter security on a stick and all these things that were like they sounded, I'm sure they sounded insane to their early seed investors, that basically one by one they have nailed every single time they've tried to build it out. So that's, it's a pretty impressive example by calling your shot.

There's probably two big buckets. So the biggest bucket is actually like white papers. Like the DoD is prolific in trying to do studies, war games, postmortems, exercises, evaluating different things.

I mean these are all, you can access this. These are on the internet, like it's a, there's a massive amount of context on the internet and it's, I mean things like the CSIS is an organization that has put out, a lot of think tanks and stuff like they've put out reports on different things. And so that was probably the largest corpus of stuff is you just drill in and you say why don't we build ships anymore and then you dig in and there's a specific law that was passed 150 years ago and has basically screwed us ever since. So there's all these big problems that have, you know, caused issues. So that's the biggest corpus. And then the second bucket is like some pretty incredible books that have been written by people who were boots on the ground involved in different aspects of these processes. Probably the two that we reference the most is actually one is by who, when he wrote it, I think he was in the process of becoming, of joining Anduril, but he wasn't at Anduril as he was writing it, is Chris Brose, who's now the chief strategy officer and co-president I think of Anduril.

By far. Yeah. Like The Kill Chain I think we referenced over 150 times.

So it's, I mean it's, it is the best introduction to the problem set. I think that the gap that this book ideally fills is that there's so much context of history, but then also mapping Anduril's trajectory onto that. And he clearly, I would imagine that it's a function of both like he wasn't at Anduril yet, but also you don't want it to feel biased. You want it to be able to stand, you know, this is true independent of Anduril. Everything in The Kill Chain is true. What we do is we say all these things are true and there's additional context you need to know and now let's map Anduril against that and say okay this thing is broken, here's why, and operates this way, this thing sucks, here's why, and does it right back and forth. So The Kill Chain is by far the most referenced piece in the book because it's one-to-one exactly what we're trying to describe in the first half of the book. The second book is a guy named Ben Rich wrote a book called Skunk Works, which is one of the best books just in terms of like high-performance teams building incredible things. So it's a lot about the journey of building the stealth bomber, but there's also a lot about the U-2 spy plane. Kelly Johnson is the guy who originally sort of founded the, so Lockheed is the company. Skunk Works is like the lab and Kelly Johnson founded Skunk Works and he is probably one of the most impressive people in like industrial history. So those two books together, I would say there's a handful of others that we list in the sources, but those two books, I would say, like laid a lot of the foundation of like how did we get ourselves into such a mess when we were so capable.

So if you set the stage for what things looked like at the end of World War II, the US was like 40-plus percent of manufacturing capacity globally. So just massive powerhouse. And even in World War II, they say that we basically just outbuilt the enemy where it's like a lot of time they think take cases like the tanks that we were making. Our tanks were technologically inferior to like the tanks of the Germans. We just built so many of them and just threw so much industrial capacity at it that that is literally how we won. So it's, we're just this powerhouse industrially. And then you look at the DoD specifically. So at one point into sort of like during the Cold War into the '50s and '60s, the DoD alone represented 36% of global R&D. So all of the research and development being done the world over, 36% of it was coming from the DoD funding different projects and keeping going through the Cold War and stuff like that. So there's this massive capability and you look at all the things that we accomplished. I mean we were spitting off, you know, one bomber plane per basically per day, like just spitting out massive amounts, right. So it's like this industrial powerhouse. Then we go into sort of post World War II. We're getting into the Cold War and we'll have spats in Korea and Vietnam and stuff like that. But sort of in the '60s, there was a guy named Robert McNamara who became the Secretary of Defense. And he came in with this hypothesis that we were just spending too much on defense. And so while you had this industrial powerhouse that was important, it was in his perspective, it was too much. We were just spending too much. So we need to control spending. And so he introduced this system that is, it's called PPBE, which is like planning, programming, budgeting, execution, like something. But basically so Ben Rich who wrote Skunk Works, he basically, he describes it as like a plague descending upon the Skunk Works of just like auditors and bean counters. Like it was just this army of people who came in to not just say you need to build this and you need to try and do it with the lowest cost labor, but it was like literally counting every single purchase, every single order, was it absolutely the most like the cheapest we could get it. And so it introduced this just like just disgusting level of bureaucracy, thinking that well that will control spending if it's so, there's so much friction it will control spending. And it worked for a couple years, like our spending did go down. But then we rip into Korea and Vietnam and we go back into conflict phase and basically McNamara has strangled the golden goose that we had of industrial capacity where he's made it so high friction to build anything that now every single individual project is dramatically delayed, significantly over budget, it's just so expensive to do anything that as that becomes the new paradigm of building things.

So just the process of like when you think about bureaucracy, right, it's like if I ask you to build something that you don't know how to build, it requires a ton of experimentation. But if you have a bean counter along the way where every time you try and run an experiment, they're introducing 3 to 5 to 12 weeks of process to say, well, you need to fill out these forms in triplicate to make sure that we're evaluating these vendors appropriately and you can't look at these vendors, you have to look at these vendors because there might be a cheaper vendor or whatever. Like it's just so much friction. It's not any one thing. It's not any one like tax. It is a million taxes of friction. So that like breaks the process. And now you go into these conflicts. And so the problem is that we get used to like, okay, well now everything is just way more expensive. And so we're, if we're going to spend money and we're going to spend all this time and everything's going to be behind budget and over budget and behind deadline, then what we should do is just build the biggest things. And during the Cold War, that mentality kind of made sense because we were doing a lot of what is effectively you can think of as like day one framing where it is what you want is you want to have the biggest baddest stick, right? The biggest ships, the biggest navy and army and air force, and you want to bring that to bear day one. So that just conflict is, it's just too expensive. Don't forget about even nukes, like you want to have so much big stuff. And so we retrained our ecosystem to build these large exquisite assets and to pour all of our time and money into that stuff. And that is largely what you have now fast forward to today is we are probably pretty good at building, you know, massive aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines and stuff like that, but everything is ungodly expensive, way behind deadline in some cases, like literally decades behind deadline. And like you have projects that should have cost 13 to 15 billion that are upwards could cost a trillion dollars like the F-35 program, right? It's like dramatic overages. So that's the broken system that we largely have today.

So it's actually, it is even worse than just a cost imbalance. It's actually we, you lack the iterative cycle to stay anywhere close to the cutting edge. So to your point it's not only that everything is super expensive and super delayed. It's actually not anywhere close to the cutting edge either. And so there we have things like, so for example, if we're really good at building big expensive aircraft carriers. The Chinese have developed missiles that they affectionately refer to as carrier killers that literally it's like, I mean these still might be fairly expensive missiles, right? These are 15 to 20 million missiles, but they can destroy a multi-billion dollar ship. And so, and that's kind of at the cutting edge, right? It's such a destructive power that has been developed over time. Whereas our munitions are dramatically delayed. And so it's, they're, it's an imbalance not only because it's more expensive but also because it's more old school. And so the problem with that is that if we get into any conflict with China, there's suddenly a huge swath of our naval assets that we don't want to put anywhere near China because they could just demolish it. And so it invalidates even a lot of the exquisite assets that we have, they become invalidated. So we're really stuck behind. We don't have as much like iterative feedback cycles in the assets that even of the stuff that we are building, like conflict is change and you look at Ukraine like that has been like basically, I tweeted, somebody described like Ukraine was like the military-industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff way more rapidly even than like even the US at its best, even China or whoever in Ukraine, it's just we try something and we immediately field it and you get a ton of experience.

Yeah.

And I think like Ukraine is a good illustrative case study of this new age of kind of modern conflict. Where it is increasingly becoming all about high volume, low-cost assets, right? What people call attritable, where it's just this thing you can burn through a lot of them and make them very quickly and whatever. So in Ukraine, there was this, I think it was called Operation Spiderweb, where Ukraine snuck basically like under false floorboards of a truck, they snuck a million dollars worth of drones into Russian territory and then the drones basically took flight and were able to autonomously identify high-value targets and engaged and basically were responsible for like 7 billion dollars of damage and destroyed like a third of Russia's long-distance bomber fleet. And so it's like that's a million dollar cost to generate 7 billion dollars of damage. Like that's the, there's several other cases of this, but like that is modern conflict is like you have to be capable of spitting out a high volume of these low-cost assets to be able to engage and we are not, we as a nation are not good at that.

The good news is, so the defense bill every year is one of the most bipartisan passages each year. Like it is representative of the fact that it actually spans across sort of partisan politics where it's not like Republicans love defense and Democrats hate it or whatever. I think it was like in 2022 even, President Biden openly acknowledged that China represented an existential threat which was something that like candidly even, you know, five, six, seven years ago was not openly talked about. It was kind of taboo, right? We didn't acknowledge that risk. And so I think increasingly what has changed is it's less about the current administration is doing something unique. I actually think that you go back to like Ukraine as sort of a wakeup call for a lot of people or even Chinese posturing in the South China Sea and stuff with Taiwan. A lot of those actions are acting as wakeup calls for a lot of people. And so I think it's more so a function of people are acknowledging that there is conflict whether we like it or not and we do have to be capable of responding to it and we are not, despite we continue to have a lot of like the sort of like on the scorecard like largest things or biggest things or whatever. In practical terms we are not the biggest dog at the party and so we have to acknowledge that there's some strategic changes we have to make to stay relevant.

Yeah. So I do think that because you look at increased conflict even over the, and this is one of the hardest parts about writing the book is that like call it from the end of 2023 through the end of last year basically we were iterating on it and in that time alone you have like escalation in Ukraine, you have Israel and Palestine happened while we were writing stuff, like October 7th happened, you have, you know, Trump's and Israel's action in Iran, you have stuff that's going on in Venezuela. So it's like even just over the course of like writing the book, global conflict has changed shape. And so,

It was, I'll tell you what, it's actually, it was dueling forces of urgency because on the one hand, the global climate was changing frequently and there was frequent things we had to change. At the same time, Anduril is probably one of the most prolific shippers of product, new iterations of things and new versions of stuff, entirely new projects, things that they weren't talking about that we thought we had kind of like a sneak peek and then by the time we got around to putting it in print, they'd already talked about it and stuff like that. So Anduril's pace of execution against the backdrop of like a global environment that's changing super fast. You know, I think we were on draft 35 by the time we were like, okay, lock, like we have to at some point we have to actually print the book. But it was a lot of iteration.

So the core crux of the thesis behind Anduril is understanding that 100 years of military history and then systematically walking through every aspect of Anduril that is deliberately counterpositioned to the way that the defense department and the US military is set up today. So that is how we acquire new capabilities, right? So there's things like fixed cost contracting is what Anduril does versus cost plus, like there's a rich history there of why we do that and why it made sense briefly but why it doesn't make sense anymore but we continue to do that. Why the DoD believes in a sort of build-spec approach of like we will tell you exactly what to build and that grew out of, you know, back in the '40s and '50s and '60s, like I said the DoD was like 36% of global R&D, they had a pretty good handle on what the cutting edge was when they were controlling almost half of all of the latest technology. I mean, Silicon Valley literally was born out of the defense industry, right? So at that time, that made sense. Today, it is sub 1% of global R&D. So the DoD doesn't really know what the cutting edge is. And Palmer has this great line where he says, we absolutely want to listen to our customers because they understand their problem. We don't necessarily listen to them about what the solution should be because they don't have a good framework for what the possible solutions are. And so where the military is trying to acquire things built to spec, the goal of Anduril is to acquire things built to mission, right? So they fund their own R&D, they put their own money up rather than asking the government for R&D dollars to go spend and build some brand new thing. Anduril is saying we're going to put our capital at risk. And the goal is that we so effectively satisfy the mission that you will want to pay for it without you having funded the R&D yourself. So there's so many aspects of Anduril as a business that are all, you don't appreciate why they are so important unless you go back and map it to the 100 years of history that have gotten us into this sort of, you know, wormhole mess.

The shape of the innovation block in military contracting, defense contracting generally has really flipped on its head. So in the early days when we talk about McNamara and introducing all this friction and you have guys like Ben Rich who over the course of their career, they might work on 20, 30, 40 iterations of different types of planes and bombers and all kinds of different things. You get to this place where it becomes standard that you'll maybe work on one over the course of your entire career. Everything just slows down, right? And so now what you have is you don't have like the existing primes. It's not an army of Ben Riches who wish they could be unfettered by this bureaucracy. It is people who were born and raised in the bureaucracy. So they like it. It's comfortable that they have reshaped their entire business to be like purpose-built for that bureaucracy. And so now you go back to like the fixed cost contracting that Anduril is trying to push and say we want to be rewarded for our outcomes. The standard is cost plus where you say whatever it costs you we will guarantee a certain percentage. It's usually sort of like high single digits, low, you know, 10, 15% whatever, we'll just tack on that margin. Okay. So think about the incentives in that. If the incentive is no matter what it costs you I will give you 10% on top of that. That's your profit. Well 10% of 3 billion is a much bigger number than 10% of 150 million. And so as a traditional prime you are deeply incentivized to reinvent the wheel from scratch every single time. You're not going to pull anything off the shelf. You're not going to use any commercial products. You're going to go to the government. You're going to say, I mean, what you're asking for is a multi-billion dollar project, right? And it's, and maybe it's not even possible. So take like Anduril's first fielded product, the Sentry Tower. Originally, I'm trying to remember, I want to say it was, I want to say it was Boeing, but that doesn't sound right. But there was a contractor who had, maybe it was Lockheed. There was a contractor who had originally a contract back in the early 2000s. They had a contract with border control to build effectively these like digital fences to be able to observe and monitor the border. And they said, we think that this is going to cost 5 to 10 billion, take 15 years, and probably it defies the laws of physics and we can't do it. And so they tried and tried and tried and spent a ton of money on it. And eventually they just said, sorry, like the military is trying to get us to break the laws of physics and we just can't do it. No one could do it. It's impossible. Because their incentive is take as long as you possibly can, make it as expensive as humanly possible, build everything from scratch, and get this fat fee on top of that of a much bigger number, right? Then you have the Anduril team comes along and they say, well, look, like you don't need to reinvent sensors and cameras and batteries from scratch. There are some very effective tools in the commercial market. Let's get cameras and sensors and batteries and build a pack and put it on a stick and stick it out on the southern border and stuff. And we do. And like their first customer, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even the government. It was a private like ranch owner who wanted to monitor because there was like drug traffickers coming across his land. And so originally it was like a private citizen just paying to put up these towers so they could demonstrate it. But eventually the, you know, like Homeland Security and stuff like, they became a large customer of the Sentry Tower and it was dramatically cheaper than anything that this prime was trying to do. It didn't have to cost billions of dollars because Anduril was incentivized to make it as cheap as possible, as quickly as possible, as effective as possible, and then go and sell that prepackaged capability rather than trying to convince the government that they should pay them a billion dollars to play around with a possibility of a product. So the Sentry Tower was the first product that they went after.

So, one of the things that is the most fascinating of like walking through the history is that it really is like a deep vein of rich mythology that like the deeper you go the more impressive it is. And so, one of the things you find out is that Palmer has been thinking about defense since he was in high school. So while he was in high school, he volunteered at a lab where they were basically doing research around how to use virtual reality to help soldiers deal with PTSD. So like a combination of his loves of like VR, but also like military technology that goes back as far pre-Oculus days. There was some basis there. Then there is this other vein of history which is, so Palmer is one of the younger of the four. But the other three I think were all in high school during 9/11. And Trey Stevens talks about that the most of like that awoke something inside of him of like he saw what happened and he said I need to do something to be of service to my country. And so when he joined the intelligence community and like went to, he like wanted to go to Georgetown deliberately, like went to work as a spook, like he wanted to do that because of that sort of early sort of patriotism.

That's right. That's right. So like each of the founders have these sort of early days exposure that like, you know, sparked the passion. The real linchpin is, so Trey was at Founders Fund. Founders Fund had invested in Oculus. There was an event that Founders Fund threw where they invited Palmer to come. Palmer and Trey met and they were talking and I think the first idea that they batted back and forth was how could we build a force field? That was the first like, could we, how would we do that? And eventually it evolved into like somebody needs to build a real life Stark Industries. There's other inspirations of like Palmer, I can't remember the character's name, but there's an anime character who was like, he's like a billionaire. And he like plays, he like builds video games with the money that he made as an arms dealer. And so Palmer is like,

He's right. He did it backwards. That's right. He did it backwards. So he's like literally like inspired by that, you know, guy. I think he has like a dragon like jet that he drives around and stuff like flies around and stuff like that. So there's all these like little passion projects. There's all these little like sort of passion threads throughout each of their history but the way that they come together is very much after Palmer gets fired from Facebook, he says, okay, I'm going to start another company. There's a handful of things and this is a deeper mythology of like there's a bunch of random stuff that Palmer thought about doing. But building a new defense prime of Stark Industries was at the top of his list and so he called up Trey and said we should do this. So you have Trey who is the sort of like palunteer thread where he pulls Matt, who he sees as sort of the operational excellence genius and Brian who is the engineering mad scientist and then Palmer pulls Joseph who's the other co-founder who is an engineer at Oculus and I think is the only of the five co-founders who actually served in the military. So they all come together from their sort of prior experiences and the story is

That they get some Chick-fil-A, they have a bad Google Slides, and they sit down with a handful of people that they've met from their past, basically recruiting lunch, to try and lay out exactly what they're going to do. And this, I think, is where they have this sort of famous experience of they lay out there's five things. I'm not going to remember all of them, but there's five things that they laid out to say these are some of the things that we could do. And two of them kind of like are good bookends for Anduril's current sort of product portfolio. So, one was perimeter security on a stick is how they described it. And it was literally what became the Sentry Towers where they said, you know, camera and sensors and battery and stick it out there and stuff. So, that was their first commercial product. But another one of the projects was I think like VR for the warfighter. And at the time, this is in 2017 when they're getting started, Microsoft is actually competing for an IVAS contract. I think it's like the integrated visual augmentation system or something for basically AR for warfighters. Palmer desperately wanted to go compete for it because he's been, you know, he's been doing Oculus. It's right there. Defense and VR perfectly suited together. And some of his early investors convinced him that you need to bide your time. Like that's a thing that is going to be a big thing to chew on and it's going to take everything we can to compete for that versus like the rapid iteration process we need to engage in. And so he let it go. Microsoft got this project, did pretty poorly for several years, and then a year ago, Microsoft basically admitted defeat to some extent and the government said we're going to recompete the contract. And Anduril first as a potential partner to Microsoft and then eventually took over a $22 billion IVAS contract which has now become their Eagle Eye product which is this like ballistic shell helmet augmented vision which is like there's crazy videos of use cases of like with a combination of the AR and a ghost drone flying overhead, you can literally see through walls. Like if there's somebody coming back through this thing, the drone knows where they are. It can display that visually as they're moving from behind the wall and stuff. And so that sort of product portfolio has expanded dramatically in large part because from day one they were not, it was not about one individual product. It was not about one individual platform. It was about this software-defined, hardware-enabled web of products that can all work together and focus on capabilities that they're trying to enable.

Well, fun fact, do you know what their actual like first, they never fielded, they never like commercialized it, but their first product they ever built and prototyped was? It was called Sentry, but it wasn't the tower. It was an autonomous firefighting tank that would roll into a forest fire and could deploy like fire suppression and so like actually save people and stuff. And that was the original product was just trying to figure out like what was something they could do with autonomy, be able to field a contract. And what is funny about the way that their product evolved is like you can kind of see these early days of like them throwing a lot of stuff at the wall, but Lattice was this consistent through point in everything that they did. And so the reason that they talk about even though like everybody kind of knows the drone or the munitions or the submarines or whatever, the real core product is, a couple people talk about it different ways. So, DARPA has this great phrase where they describe it as like mosaic warfare of like pulling all these things together. Chris Brose talks about it as a military internet of things of like having all these sort of edge devices woven together. But basically it very much is this like hub and spoke model of Lattice as an AI sensor fusion driven brain and then the goal is across every domain and every capability and every force level how can you plug as many assets into that brain as possible. So you start with Lattice. One of the advantages is you can start with just monitoring like it's just we just need to get information into the system and so Sentry becomes the first product and it's a sensor that can pull everything in but still Lattice is there to be able to identify and say hey this looks like this kind of person versus this is a known thing, this is a dangerous thing, this is a normal, this is just a fox, like whatever, right? So there's actual intelligence there from the sensors. You start to expand out into UAVs. So you're getting into actual flight. It's still a lot about data gathering. So they had like a quadcopter that they built. I think you saw, I remember in your video you saw the early like prototype pieces of it with Matt and stuff like those. It was again, it's very similar idea of it's just about gathering information but to do it from different angles and with different flexibilities. So you have a quadcopter, you have a ghost drone, larger sort of longer distance drone. And then eventually you start to get into counter drone systems. And so you have systems that not only do you want to just go observe, you actually want to be able to like intercept a drone. Going back to the like throwing Ferraris at Frisbees, the goal is for that to be ideally with not a multi-million dollar asset taking out a $20,000, you know, Walmart drone or whatever. And so they start to get into some of these like loitering munitions. And so Altius is a product that they bought and it's basically like a tube launched drone that can sort of circle, identify, and then engage with a drone to take it out. And then you quickly see them expand into okay we have capabilities. We have sensors. We have, you know, monitoring and stuff like that. We're aerial but now you get into like actual munitions. You have things like Roadrunner which is a payload carrying asset that can destroy different threats and stuff. You start to get into this like you have the originally they had a sentry tower that was like near the ocean. Eventually you deepen the sentry product suite into the Sentry Seabed which is like a sensor on the bottom of the ocean.

You can talk to whales which is the ideal use case I think is like number one.

So you start to expand out into all these different and then you get into things like their dive line of autonomous undersea vehicles and stuff. And now increasingly what is most impressive is that what started as very much a sort of like product suite of adjacencies of like these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially like asset replacements. So there's things that we can do instead. So they have like Copperhead is a torpedo product and it can replace existing torpedoes but it is also autonomous. So you have this ability to be able to effectively loiter, you know, under sea, identify targets and things and then be able to engage. But you also have I'd say like probably their crowning product today. I think there's a lot of things that are on the come that are going to, you know, blow people away. But I think that Fury is this very impressive capability because it is effectively an autonomous fighter jet. Like it is. And one of the things that is most important about that is that being a fighter pilot is one of the most difficult dangerous jobs.

Also, by the way, most of America is completely removed from the military and like the industrial complex around that that they don't actually understand the training, the day-to-day, the actual combat that goes into being a fighter pilot. Like that's you're literally dodging missiles in active war zones. And that's true of the majority of technology enabled roles in the military. So like you look at so Fury as an example is not only replacing in some cases because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger. We can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and speed and perspective, but you can extend a pilot's capability with a small sort of set of Furies that can go out and they can go further and identify danger. They can observe things. They can engage in a way that doesn't put the pilot at risk. Like that's a capability. But even things like just monitoring, right? We've had drones for a long time, but when you think about like a drone's capabilities, if you were to try and do something like send up a drone, have it go, you know, a couple miles distance, observe a target, identify where weak points are, where there sort of things to be aware of, and come back and report on that information. That could take a room full of a dozen people having to switch between, you know, several dozen different screens and messaging people. Chris Brose talks about this in the Kill Chain. He's seen these distracted, stressed out, exhausted individuals who have to constantly be trying to say, "Okay, well, this is the data point I need here. I need to send it to this person because that's what's going to control the messaging to the force that's engaging here or whatever."

That's not a good, that is not going to lead to ideal outcomes. And so autonomy introduces this incredible capability where we are going to do the things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, we need to do those things. This way ensures that the outcome is very likely higher quality and puts significantly fewer people at risk in the process.