Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched—fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. “The government said to me, ‘We need you to make drones,’ ” Yakovenko told me. “So I said to my guys, ‘You have four hours to make up your minds. Leave or stay—and, if you stay, promise me that you’ll do your best to help our military.’ ”

Yakovenko’s task was to set up factories to mass-produce unmanned vehicles, designed to overwhelm whatever Russia sent across the border. When I visited his fab, as the plants are called, more than a hundred employees, many of them women, were working intently in a setting that seemed more college campus than munitions factory. With techno music humming in the background, they tended to 3-D printers, assembled carbon-fibre components, carried out flight simulations, adjusted video cameras and radio transmitters. “It’s quite meditative,” one of the women told me.

The TAF fabs are part of a constellation of similar facilities, hidden in basements, warehouses, and old factories, which have helped the Ukrainians battle the Russian Army to a stalemate. The one that I visited makes about a thousand drones a day. They are sophisticated and lethal and, above all, cheap, produced for about five hundred dollars apiece. Some are used for surveillance and some to ferry supplies, but most of them, laden with explosives and directed by an operator through a video screen, are crashed directly into their targets. One of Yakovenko’s managers showed me a fuzzy black-and-white video, taken in April, of a night operation behind enemy lines. Onscreen, a drone equipped with a thermal camera dived toward a TOS-1 rocket launcher, and then the screen exploded in a white flash. Russia builds TOS-1 units for about five million dollars apiece. “One of our drones costs a tiny fraction of what it destroys,” the manager told me. “That’s our advantage.”

When the Russian Army rolled into Ukraine, it was equipped for a conflict from an earlier era: an old-fashioned land war prosecuted by tanks and heavy artillery. In response, Ukraine devised a futuristic take on hit-and-run guerrilla operations. Now when a Russian column tries to advance it is met by a swarm of buzzing bombs. Russia has suffered about a million casualties in its attempt to invade. Since early 2024, according to an estimate by Mykhailo Samus, a researcher in Kyiv, about eighty per cent of its losses in men and matériel have been inflicted by drones.

The most dramatic application of this asymmetric approach came in June, when a fleet of more than a hundred Ukrainian drones struck targets as far away as Siberia, destroying or damaging some twenty Russian warplanes. It was the most militarily significant attack on Russia since the Second World War. The Ukrainians released a taunting video, in which first-person views of the drones careering into the planes were set to a pulsing techno soundtrack. The videos were stamped “Failsafe,” a military term that suggests immunity to harm.

While the future of warfare is being invented in places like Ukraine, U.S. officials are looking on with a growing sense of urgency. For decades, the American armed forces have relied on highly sophisticated, super-expensive weapons, like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, which take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce. (The country’s failures in Iraq and Afghanistan were not for a lack of technical prowess.) Since the end of the Cold War, these munitions have given the U.S. near-total dominance on land, sea, and air. But now the technological shifts that have stymied the Russian invasion of Ukraine are threatening to undermine America’s global military preëminence. David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official and a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, told me that the American way of war is no longer viable. “We are not moving fast enough,” he said.

Throughout history, technological advantages have altered the course of wars, sometimes suddenly. In the late nineteenth century, railways displaced horses as a way of moving and supplying armies, and the Prussians exploited them to overwhelm their French opponents. In the first Gulf War, the U.S. used precision-guided cruise missiles that could be steered into an office window from a thousand miles away. The Ukrainians argue that they represent a similar technological vanguard. “We are inventing a new way of war,” Valeriy Borovyk, the founder of First Contact, whose drones carried out the strike on the Russian warplanes, told me. “Any country can do what we are doing to a bigger country. Any country!”

America’s best approximation of Oleksandr Yakovenko is Palmer Luckey, who helped found the defense startup Anduril in 2017. Not long ago, he met me at the company’s headquarters, in Costa Mesa, California, amid an array of high-tech weapons: drones, missiles, pilotless planes. Anduril is housed in a cavernous building that once contained the Orange County offices of the Los Angeles Times, whose faded logo is still visible on the exterior walls. At thirty-two, Luckey embodies the stereotype of a cocky, gnomic tech mogul: shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, flip-flops, a mullet and a soul patch. As we talked, he snacked from a bag of chocolate-chip cookies.

He wanted to show off his creations, autonomous weapons that he believes will upend many of the American military’s most cherished notions of strategy and defense. He walked over to a model of the Dive-XL, an unmanned submarine that can go a thousand miles without surfacing and is designed to be produced as quickly as an IKEA couch. “I can make one of these in a matter of days,” he said.

The U.S. military is accustomed to doing business with huge, entrenched players: companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman that employ tens of thousands of engineers and military veterans in a culture not unlike the one inside the Pentagon. Luckey, by contrast, built an early career in video games and virtual reality. At nineteen, working from his parents’ home, in Long Beach, he created a V.R. headset called Oculus, a technology that he promised would “transport us into worlds we cannot hope to experience in real life.” He sold the company for two billion dollars to Facebook, whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, brought him on to oversee the Oculus team. Their collaboration was brief. In 2016, following a controversy over a contribution that Luckey made to a pro-Trump group, Zuckerberg fired him. “I had a real chip on my shoulder,” Luckey said. “I wanted to prove that Oculus wasn’t a fluke.”

A few months later, Luckey met with Trae Stephens, a principal at Founders Fund, a venture-capital firm led by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and libertarian political activist. Thiel had helped found Palantir, which was transforming the American defense establishment by integrating computer operations and simplifying tasks like tracking and destroying enemy targets. At Founders Fund, he and Stephens were searching for fledgling companies that could bring the breakthroughs of the tech world to the military.

Luckey told me that his central insight with Oculus was to distinguish himself from competitors by focussing less on the headset’s mechanism and more on its software. Unlike hardware, software could be easily replicated and regularly updated, improving it quickly and at little extra cost. For generations, the U.S. military had fielded fantastically complex systems that ran on software Silicon Valley regarded as substandard and overpriced. Luckey envisioned cheap, mass-produced weapons whose main value lay in their operating system—in their brains, not their brawn. He began working at the juncture of weaponry and artificial intelligence, to devise systems that could accumulate data and then act on it. With machines to do the fighting, humans could be kept far away from the battlefield. The goal, as he has said, was to “turn warfighters into technomancers.”

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Trae Stephens joined Luckey and two additional partners to form Anduril, with seed money from Founders Fund and other investors, including one of J. D. Vance’s financial ventures. The company’s name was taken from “The Lord of the Rings,” in which Andúril, a reforged sword, stands for the renewal of the civilized world in the fight against darkness. Luckey saw his work as part of a civilizational conflict. “I wanted to take people out of the tech industry and put them to work in national security, which actually matters,” he said.

In the showroom, Luckey stopped before the Fury, a pilotless jet designed to operate at g-forces that could flatten a human pilot against her seat. To prepare the Fury for dogfights against piloted planes, Anduril’s engineers were feeding it maneuvers from the Air Force’s Top Gun school. “We’re teaching this plane all the ways to get in a position to kill the other guy and come home alive,” Luckey said. “But the cool thing is, it’s not human—right?”

Anduril has secured billions of dollars in defense contracts, as the Pentagon has been swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for unmanned systems. But many questions remain, including the fundamental one of whether such weapons work as well as Luckey says they do. Even with the Pentagon pouring cash into experiments, the vast majority of the budget still goes to the same kinds of programs that it has been pursuing for decades. A growing consensus of defense experts holds that the United States is dangerously unprepared for the conflicts it might face. In the past, the country’s opponents were likely to be terrorist groups or states with armies far smaller than ours. Now planners must contend with considerably different threats. On the one hand, there is the prospect of insurgents who can field swarms of armed drones. One the other, there is the rise of China—a “peer competitor,” which by some measures has surpassed the U.S. as a military force. There is no guarantee that we have the right matériel to prevail against either. “Shit,” Luckey said. “We’re like a gun store with no stock.”

During the Second World War and the decades after, the American armed forces devised technologies far more advanced than anything made in the private sector. “The military produced an astonishing amount of innovation,” Bill Greenwalt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told me.

Facing an existential threat, the Pentagon adopted a free-form procurement process, with senior leaders often assigning several contractors to make prototypes for a single weapon and then giving a contract to the most successful contestant. “The generals threw money at good people, broke furniture, and picked winners,” Greenwalt said. This unconstrained methodology helped lead to the first reconnaissance satellites, the first integrated circuits, the first atomic weapon. “The important thing to remember about the Manhattan Project is that there were multiple pathways to success,” Greenwalt pointed out. “It was incredibly competitive.” In 1949, Admiral Hyman Rickover was assigned to oversee an effort to use the newly harnessed atomic energy to power a submarine—an idea that many observers considered fanciful. Five years later, the first nuclear submarine entered service.