Anduril President: Era of Dominance by Expensive Military Platforms Alone is Over

The traditional American approach to building an army around extremely expensive and complex-to-manufacture military platforms no longer corresponds to the realities of the modern battlefield.

This was stated by Christian Brose, president of the American defense technology company Anduril, in an interview for the Interesting Times podcast by The New York Times.

According to the company’s CEO, over the past decades, US defense strategy has been based on the assumption that in any potential conflict, American forces would have an absolute technological advantage, and the war itself would end quickly and without significant losses of equipment or ammunition. However, current global conflicts have proven these calculations to be flawed.

The military campaign in Ukraine and operations in the Middle East have clearly demonstrated that the era of dominance by exclusively expensive systems has come to an end. Christian Brose emphasized that sophisticated and expensive weapons systems, such as F-35 fighter jets, aircraft carriers, or submarines, remain necessary for performing their specific tasks, but they are no longer capable of securing victory on their own on the modern battlefield.

Instead of focusing on ‘luxury’ products, the modern theater of war requires the implementation of a so-called “combined approach of high-tech and low-tech weapons.” Brose noted that the Pentagon is already beginning to recognize this need, as the military critically needs a large number of significantly cheaper, more mass-producible, and fully autonomous unmanned systems.

A key feature of these new, low-cost platforms is the use of commercial technologies and artificial intelligence, which allows for rapid manufacturing and scaling of production without requiring billions in investment. The use of unmanned aerial vehicles allows military commanders to take calculated risks and lose equipment in combat without endangering the lives of service members.

“Over the past ten years, we’ve actually tripled funding for Patriot, Tomahawk, and similar missiles. The problem is that even with a 200–300% increase in spending, production hasn’t kept pace—it’s only grown by 14–23%. You can check each type of munition and see that we’re investing significant resources but aren’t getting the corresponding production volumes. For me, the problem is that these are wonderful technologies, but in reality, they’re one-off products. They’re luxury items,” added the president of Anduril.