Palmer Luckey

That approach has allowed us in less than eight years to build autonomous fighter jets for the United States Air Force, school bus-sized autonomous submarines for the Australian Navy, and augmented reality headsets that give every one of our superheroes superpowers, to name just a few.

We also build counter-drone technology, like Roadrunner, which is a twin-turbojet-powered reusable counter-drone interceptor that we took from napkin sketch to real-world combat-validated capability in less than 24 months.

And we did it using our own money.

Now, coming from a guy who builds weapons for a living, what I'm about to say next might sound counterintuitive to you.

At our core,

We're about fostering peace.

We deter conflict by making sure our adversaries know they can't compete.

Putin invaded Ukraine because he believed that he could win.

Countries only go to war when they disagree as to who the victor will be.

That's what deterrence is all about, not saber-rattling, making aggression so costly that adversaries don't try in the first place.

So how do we do that?

For centuries, military power was derived by size.

More troops, more tanks, more firepower.

But over the last few decades, the defense industry has spent far too long handcrafting exquisite, almost impossible-to-build weapons.

Meanwhile, China has studied how we fight, and they've invested in the technologies and the mass that counter our specific strategies.

Today, China has the world's largest navy, with 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, the world's largest coast guard, the world's largest standing ground force, and the world's largest missile arsenal, with production capacity growing every single day.

We'll never meet China's numerical advantage through traditional means, nor should we try.

What we need isn't more of these same systems.

We need fundamentally different capabilities.

We need autonomous systems that can augment our existing manned fleets.