Stories like this one are my favorite because they get down to the fundamental issue of why I do all the things I do socially. I get pretty frustrated with people sometimes, and a few times in 2024, I came really close to just closing up my tent flap and not opening it again for anybody and letting them rot away. To be honest, I don’t try to help people because I want to help them with their lives. I do it because I have to share space with them and I get tired of their limitations holding back the kind of world I want to live in. So, I try to teach as many people as possible how they should live so they don’t hold back so much from the world I want to live in. But when they stall out and don’t listen to what I tell them, I come close to just letting them rot away and turn to things that make me personally happy, and forget about them. But sometimes it is worth it, and stories like the announcement in mid-January in Ohio about Anduril, the defense contractor, investing a billion dollars to a south of Columbus campus led by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Facebook Oculus virtual reality headset, are a ray of hope. The plan is to build a giant campus to build autonomous drones for a direct market defense need that is going to arise during the Trump administration in the year 2027. So, this manufacturing ambition will be over 90 football fields long and host over 4000 jobs. It will be quite an addition to the loop around Columbus, Ohio, and will join the new Intel factory that is being built just north of the city. And as exciting as all this is, I can say from inside knowledge that this is just the tip of the iceberg in Ohio.
Many people have worked hard to lay the political foundation for something like this Anduril project. They could have gone anywhere in the world that they wanted, but they picked Ohio, a spot just above Washington Court House for a reason. I know all those reasons, and there is a reason I have been saying the things I have about vertical takeoff taxi markets, regenerative medicine, and hyperloop. I told everyone weeks ago that Vivek Ramaswamy would be the governor and Jon Husted would be appointed to J.D. Vance’s senate seat. And that Bernie Moreno would be the other very pro-business senator. Many very good people have been building this political structure to facilitate massive growth in Ohio, which I think will be the next Silicon Valley, but only much more significant. Ohio is the place to be and I’m not surprised by any of this news. More people are out there, like Palmer Luckey, a wonderful young man who was homeschooled full of ambition, so he knows how to think outside the box. I think he’s fantastic. He is proposing essentially with this Anduril ambition to be the SpaceX of the defense industry. He is a massive Trump supporter. He gets what is coming, and he is building this fighter drone technology to meet a change in state war obligation that is looming from information that is well known. Trump will try to negotiate us away from a war with China. But odds are, all that will fall apart; they will lose their power and won’t like it. And they aren’t going to just turn the world back over to the sovereignty of America. No, they are going to want to fight it out. And Palmer Luckey is doing what he needs to do to get out in front of it with this Anduril factory.
But this is where things get interesting. The defense industry is filled with cost-plus companies and a structure that protects it from innovation, so what does this young man Palmer Luckey think he will do to change things? Luckey is talking about shipping drone units in 2026 ahead of a 2027 need date. And things just don’t happen that fast in the defense industry. Well, they will now. The people behind Anduril, including the investors, understand what the game is, and that is the destruction of the cost-plus model that has long hampered the defense industry. You see it everywhere: the old legacy companies and their suppliers all act like trolls under a bridge, charging extraordinary amounts of money to do basic things. Most of these cost-plus companies have radical labor unions whose costs are way out of alignment with reality, so you must throw a lot of congressional money at delayed schedules to get mediocre results. Anduril is proposing to take the cost plus out of the equation and to become the SpaceX of the defense market, and they will change the way business is done. And the Trump administration will be very supportive, so Anduril’s timeline is not far-fetched. Anduril has the money. They have the vision. They have a political structure that wants them to succeed. They have all impediments out of their way. And it makes me happy because I want to see more people like Palmer Lucky and companies like Anduril born into reality.
The way it works at SpaceX and Andruil is that to avoid the cost-plus supply chains; they vertically integrate so they can work around the compliance loops that protect cost-plus companies and their sandbagging techniques that are designed to prevent the product from hitting schedule targets so they can always drive congress to more funding through the extortion of the schedule. Cost-plus suppliers constantly force expedited fees based on their purposeful limited capacity because that is how the cost-plus game has always worked. Companies like Andruil and SpaceX are just doing everything themselves, which is why Andruil is building such a large facility: for self-reliance and vertical integration. The trend was to get as many people in a supply chain as possible in as many countries as possible. However, globalism put that trend into motion to protect the cost-plus scam. And that is all coming apart now under this new Trump administration and Ohio politics. And people like Palmer Luckey are some of the first to see it. That’s also why Intel is building a plant in Ohio out of all places. Innovation needs to be fast and vigorous. Not slow and stupid. And I am very encouraged that there are companies like Andruil out there and that there are young people like Palmer Luckey who want to do good things in the world. I want to see a lot of companies, preferably all companies and education systems, adopt approaches to business like Andruil and SpaceX. It’s the rate of resolution that I can get excited about, and while the industry hopes Andruil will fail in its ambitions and slip schedule like all the other fools in the world, I am betting they won’t. I think Palmer Luckey understands in a way I have been working to teach people for many years. And he’s doing it, and once people see his success, they will all want to copy it. And for me, that is the best news of this century! I can live in a world with people who think like Palmer Luckey. But I have no desire to deal with the losers of the cost-plus structure of stalled ambition and lazy labor that has emerged from the defense work scams that have been so embarrassing. With this announcement from Andruil, I see a lot of hope for the future.
Rich Hoffman
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