Here's how Palmer Luckey's Anduril wants to beat General Atomics for the US Air Force's next big bet
Anduril Industries has revealed new details on how it plans to keep costs down for the US Air Force as it competes with defense heavyweight General Atomics for the drone wingman program.
The defense startup, cofounded by Palmer Luckey, was featured in a CBS "60 Minutes" segment on Sunday. During the segment, Anduril's CEO, Brian Schimpf, said the firm designed its AI-powered fighter jet, Fury, to be built from commercial parts to make manufacturing easier.
"We tried to eliminate really every bottleneck we could find around what makes an aircraft hard to produce," said Schimpf.
Schimpf said the Fury's designers, for example, chose to go with a commercial business jet engine instead of a military one.
The Warzone reported in 2023 that the Fury was designed with a Williams International FJ44-4M turbofan engine, which is popular in light business jets such as those in the Cessna Citation Series. Anduril didn't say in the Sunday CBS segment if the Fury still uses the same engine.
Schimpf also said that the Fury avoids "very exquisite, big aircraft landing gear" in favor of a simpler model.
"We designed it so that it can be built in any machine shop in America," he said of the landing gear.
"We've designed nearly every part of this that can be made in hundreds of different places within the US from lots of different suppliers," Schimpf added.
The Fury, designated YFQ-44A by the Air Force, is Anduril's bid to win the Pentagon's Collaborative Combat Aircraft contract, which seeks to build large autonomous or semi-autonomous drones that can fly in tandem with piloted advanced fighter jets for Next Generation Air Dominance.
The service wants these new aircraft to be much cheaper than regular fighter jets. Gen. David Allvin, the Air Force Chief of Staff, said in November that the purpose of the drone wingman program was to bring "affordable mass" to aerial missions.
It's a priority that reflects mounting concerns in the US that the American military could run out of weapons and ammo in a matter of weeks or even days if it were to go to war with a rival such as China.
Now, the Air Force says the drone wingman program is a core part of its mandate to recalibrate itself for near-peer conflict.
Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force Secretary until January, said he'd accelerated plans to develop Collaborative Combat Aircraft when analyses showed the drones would "change air warfare in some very fundamental ways."
Anduril was one of two contractors selected to be the drone project's lead in April 2024, meaning it already beat Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman to reach this phase of development.
General Atomics, which manufactures the MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1 Predator, has also billed its offering — the XQ-67A — as a "low-cost, modular" uncrewed system.
Both companies' prototypes were shown on May 1 at California's Beale Air Force Base, which Allvin said would be the home site for initial testing and assessments. The Air Force is expected to make early selection decisions in its fiscal year of 2026, which starts in October.
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A recent deployment of six of the U.S. Air Force's 19 prized B-2 stealth bombers to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which wrapped up earlier this month, had offered a new datapoint in the shelter debate. Diego Garcia only has four specially designed B-2 shelters open, which are not hardened in any way, and the bombers were seen parked out in the open while on the island. More recently, a detachment of F-15E Strike Eagles arrived on the island to help provide force protection to other assets still there. 'While 'active defenses' such as air and missile defense systems are an important part of base and force protection, their high cost and limited numbers mean the U.S. will not be able to deploy enough of them to fully protect our bases,' a group of 13 Republican members of Congress had written in an open letter to the heads of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in May 2024. 'In order to complement active defenses and strengthen our bases, we must invest in 'passive defenses,' like hardened aircraft shelters and underground bunkers, dispersal of forces across both within a base and across multiple bases, redundant logistical facilities, and rapid runway repair capabilities.' 'While hardened aircraft shelters do not provide complete protection from missile attacks, they do offer significantly more protection against submunitions than expedient shelters (relocatable steel shelters). They would also force China to use more force to destroy each aircraft, thereby increasing the resources required to attack our forces and, in turn, the survivability of our valuable air assets,' they added. 'Constructing hardened shelters for all our air assets may not be economically feasible or tactically sensible, but the fact that the number of such shelters on U.S. bases in the region has barely changed over a decade is deeply troubling.' In January, the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., released a report that underscores the points made above about the benefits that new hardened aircraft shelters offer in terms of reducing vulnerability and increasing the resources an enemy would have to expend. The authors of the Hudson report assessed that 10 missiles, each with a warhead capable of scattering cluster munitions across areas 450 feet in diameter, could be enough to neutralize all aircraft parked in the open and critical fuel storage facilities at key airbases like Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, or Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The general points made here about the particular danger of submunitions from cluster weapons could also apply to drones with similarly sized warheads like the ones Ukraine just used in its attacks on Russia's air bases. Even fully-enclosed, but unhardened shelters could provide a modicum of additional defense against these kinds of threats. Last year, officials at two U.S. air bases – Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina – expressed interest in the possibility of adding nets or other similar physical defensive measures to existing open-ended sunshade-type shelters to help protect against attacks by smaller drones. It's unclear whether there has been any movement since on actual implementation. Nets are among the drone defenses currently used on both sides of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Waves of still-mysterious drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base in December 2023, which TWZ was the first to report on, remain a particular focal point for broader calls from Congress and elsewhere to better protect U.S. military facilities against uncrewed aerial threats. What happened at Langley is just one of a still-growing number of worrisome drone incidents over and around U.S. military facilities, training ranges, and warships off the coast of the United States, as well as critical civilian infrastructure, in the past decade or so, many of which we have reported first. Overseas bases well outside of established conflict zones that host American forces have been the site of concerning drone overflights in recent years, as well. There was also a flurry of reported drone sightings last year over New Jersey and other parts of the United States last year, many of which quickly turned out to be spurious. However, the surge in public attention underscored a real threat, as Ukraine has now demonstrated in dramatic fashion. While Ukraine says its covert drone attacks on Russia took more than a year to plan, prepare for, and stage, they also underscore how the basic barriers to entry for carrying out drone attacks, especially ones involving weaponized commercial designs, have long been low in terms of cost and technical aptitude. The operation notably leveraged ArduPilot, described as an 'open source autopilot system' that is freely available online. Of course open source software has been used in war before, but seeing ArduPilot Mission Planner being used to blow up Russian strategic bombers is still wild. — John Wiseman (@ 2025-06-01T15:55:48.877Z Additional footage shows another FPV drone overflying the airfield; multiple Tupolev Tu-95 bombers are seen aflame. — Jimmy Rushton (@JimmySecUK) June 1, 2025 18 years after @Jrdmnz @jason4short and I created ArduPilot, here it is destroying large parts of the Russian air force. Crazy — Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) June 1, 2025 Drone threats are only to expand and accelerate in terms of sophistication, thanks in large part to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as time goes on. Uncrewed aerial systems with rapidly improving autonomous navigation and targeting capabilities that do not require a human in the loop present particularly serious threats. Without the need for an active link to a human operator, those drones are immune to jamming and do not pump out radio emissions that can help provide early warning to defenders. They are also not limited in range to keep a connection with their controllers. Improving capabilities to autonomously find and prosecute targets are already emerging on one-way-attack drones, and this is something that can be expected to proliferate, as well. Autonomous drones that can target objects dynamic targeting without having to rely just on a fixed set of coordinates via satellite navigation like GPS, another signal that can be disrupted, will only make drone threats more complex and vastly harder to counter overall. TWZ has explored all of this in great detail in this past feature. Swarming is another area that will make lower-end drones so much harder to defeat. Working cooperatively as an integrated team at computer speeds allows drones to operate and react with extreme efficiency beyond the pace of the enemy's decision cycle. This, along with sheer mass and the resilience that goes with that, can quickly overwhelm defenses. 'In general, the technology to field systems has far outpaced the technology to defeat those systems,' Rear Adm. Paul Spedero, Vice Director for Operations, J3, Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the House Oversight Committee at a hearing on drone threats in April. 'It's a much wider, broader, deeper market for drone application, for commercial and recreational purposes, so hence that technology has evolved very quickly from radio control drones to now fully autonomous drones that may or may not even rely on reception of a GPS signal, which would make it very challenging to intercept.' Ukraine's covert drone attacks on Russia also underscore that these are increasingly threats unbounded by basic geography. An adversary could launch uncrewed aerial attackers from 1,000 miles away or from an area right next to the target, or anywhere in between. There are many drone types that can address those missions needs, and affordably so. Those drones could be launched from the ground, from ships at sea, and/or from aerial platforms, including other lower-end drones. Complex attacks involving different tiers of threats approaching from multiple vectors at once only add to the complications for defending forces. Ukrainian "Dovbush" UAV carrying and releasing two FPV drones during "Dovbush" UAV is reportedly capable of carrying up to six FPV drones at the same — Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (BlueSky too) (@Archer83Able) November 19, 2024 Despite all this, America's armed forces have also continued to lag in the fielding of counter-drone defenses for forces down-range, as well as bases and other assets in and around the homeland. Domestically, an often convoluted array of legal, regulatory, and other factors have presented challenges. On the sidelines of a U.S. military counter-drone experiment called Falcon Peak 2025 in October 2024, TWZ and other outlets were notably told that lasers, microwaves, surface-to-air missiles, and guns were all off the table as options for neutralizing drones within the United States, at least at the time. For over a decade I have outlined the exact scenario as we just saw in Russia. It could happen in the U.S. tomorrow. This was a pivotal event. U.S. military and political leadership cannot live in partial denial of this threat anymore. Our most prized aircraft are sitting ducks. — Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) June 1, 2025 The biggest challenge with this issue is education. Many just don't take the time to learn the ins and outs of the UAS threat, there are many layers and nuances, emerging technologies. There are high up people in the military that don't even really understand these basics. Then… — Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) June 1, 2025 The U.S. military does continue to push for enhancements to the authorities it has now to protect its bases and other assets domestically against drone threats. As part of a new Pentagon-wide counter-drone strategy rolled out last year, U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) has a 'synchronizer role' that includes making sure commanders know what they are allowed to do now if drones appear around their facilities. Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian air bases this past weekend can only add to the already intense debate over investments in hardened aircraft shelters and other fortified infrastructure, as well as fuel calls for new counter-drone defenses, in general. The stark reality of what Ukrainian intelligence services have now demonstrated makes clear that uncrewed aerial threats, including to key assets deep inside a country's national territory, are well past the point of something that can be ignored. Contact the author: joe@
