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- Anduril founder Palmer Luckey explains why working on defense technology is important
Anduril founder Palmer Luckey explains why working on defense technology is important
Palmer is asked about the morality of working on defense technology and how he feels knowing that his products are going to kill people.
He recalls a recruiting ad for the Norwegian military that asked:
“Why do we need you to join? Why do you need to fly fighter jets? Why do we need you to man all these tanks? Why do we need you to become a precision marksman? What are we hoping is going to happen? Nothing.”
Palmer says this is how everyone at Anduril feels:
“Nobody’s there saying ‘I’m so stoked that my thing gets to kill people.’ It’s like, ‘I’m so stoked that I get to build the thing that is so good that the other guy is so terrified of it that he’s not willing to step over that line.’… We’re not going to keep these dictators from expanding their power unless you meet them with a credible threat of violence.”
Prior to World War II, there was an idea called “the end of history”, which argued that economic entanglement would prevent the outbreak of future wars. Clearly that turned out to be wrong, but people had similar ideas leading up to the Ukraine war.
Palmer explains:
“The people who think that we don’t need weapons and that we don’t need a better military than Russia and China, they’re only able to have that belief - that crazy, irrational belief that doesn’t make any sense in the real world - because there’s so many people around them who understand what the real world looks like. It’s a luxury belief. If everyone thought like they did, we’d be screwed overnight. They’re only able to have that opinion because Russia knows that most Americans don’t agree with them… God forbid that those views ever become pervasive because, I’ll tell you the second they do is the second that China invades Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam - the list goes on.”