Palmer Luckey Talks About How America Should Evolve from Being the World’s Police to the World Gun Store…..and more
From the PRI 2026 Spring Retreat, Reagan Library
ON THE US ROLE ON THE GLOBAL STAGE
Peter Robinson:
On 60 Minutes, you said, “I’ve always said that the United States needs to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store.” What do you mean?
Palmer Luckey:
Well, there’s a lot packed in there. The first one is the United States has a history of fighting for other countries that maybe aren’t very interested in fighting for themselves. Maybe there’s times that we want to go in there for US interests, but generally speaking, it doesn’t make sense for us to send our people to go die for a country or a form of government or anything that’s not directly aligned with US interests, if they’re not willing to die for themselves.
I think, for example, our withdrawal from Afghanistan prove this out. The moment that we weren’t there, it turned out that the people there didn’t really care much to maintain what we had been saying was what they wanted the whole time, and so if you’re the world police, you’re out there trying to fight that battle for these countries. I think we need to transition to a role where we are equipping these countries with what they need to defend themselves. If they want to fight for themselves, if they want to defend themselves, we should help them do that.
I think that the gun store analogy works in a few other ways. If you’re going to be the world’s gun store, you need to do things that a store would generally do to stay in business. You have to deliver on time. You have to keep things in stock. You cannot necessarily pretend that you’re the only store in town, because we aren’t anymore. Countries have options in China, they have options in Russia, and we need to recognize that and not pretend like we’re like we’re the only store in the entire world that these guys can buy from.
HOW ANDURIL’S PHILOSOPHY DIFFERS FROM HIS COMPETITORS
Peter Robinson:
So, let me, let me list what I take to be the main categories of your products, and because time is limited, you choose one and wax a little bit rhapsodic about it: anti-drone defenses, maritime and subsurface platforms, autonomous aircraft, and then this lattice software that ties it all together. If you had your way, would the Pentagon operate entirely on your systems?
Palmer Luckey:
Look, these companies are building some cool products. They have a long history, so I’m not here to say that they’re awful. In fact, I work with most of them. But there’s a big difference between us. Anduril is not a defense contractor, we’re a defense products company. The key word there is products company. We use our own money to decide what products to build, how to build them, and then we build those products, then we sell them to the government. It is a model that exists across more or less the entire United States economy.
This is how almost everything you buy is built, and there are very few examples otherwise. One industry where cost plus is still common outside of defense, is residential renovation . . . How many people . . . who have done a renovation on a cost plus contract were satisfied with the incentive structure and the outcome? Of course, you were right, you know. It goes longer, the contractor makes more money, the GC is asking all his subs to boost their prices. And then, oh, I’m gonna give you a nice little kickback on the side, where the money comes back to you, but because the invoice is bigger, I get to charge the government a bigger 6 percent on top. It’s all the same. It is identical, and so the difference there is, we make more money when we make our products cheaper, we make more money when we make it faster.
When I deliver a year ahead of time, I don’t have to fire half my team because there’s no money to pay them. In fact, I’ve just saved an enormous amount of money. I probably get to promote those people and have them work on some other product. And then the other big difference is we take all of our money and put it back into research and development, every single penny. So, a lot of other defense companies are putting about 1% to 3% of their revenue back into internal research and development, and much of that is cost matched by the government. We are putting 100% of our revenue back into it.
HOW LUCKEY AND ANDURIL WORK WITH THE PENTAGON
Peter Robinson:
We have all the really interesting actions taking place in the private sector outside this military industrial complex, and the men and women in charge at the Pentagon are still the pretty buttoned up crowd. Those flag officers are pretty disciplined, and the people running the defense tech companies, you know what, some of them even wear Hawaiian shirts.
So, my question is, how do you deal with the Pentagon? I mean, you guys have to work together. How’s it going?
Palmer Luckey:
I think that people rise to what is expected of them. Take a guy who spent his whole college life smoking pot and coding interesting things for some tech company. Then you expose them to problems, and sometimes this is done by the Pentagon, where they can give you the briefing and say, “here is the threat, here is what’s going on.” You’d be surprised how when you can get them to comprehend the threat, and a lot of smart people can, they very much rise to the occasion. I’m not saying they’re not going to wear their hoodie, but you can get them to stop smoking pot, and you can get them to work on something more important than advertising or video games, or something else.
I think it does help that the people in the Pentagon are pretty tolerant these days of people who are not exactly in the mold of a military man. So, it works. I think that they are very practical, right? A lot of the people in the Pentagon realize that if you are only willing to work with personalities that look like you and talk like you, you’re going to miss out on a lot of really good talent.
In fact, if I really had to be honest, I’d say maybe the pattern matching has gone a little too far. I think that a person who has a mullet and a Hawaiian shirt and is a bit of a larger than life charismatic guy is actually going to do better than he should in the Pentagon. I’m not just talking about myself. I’m saying there’s a lot of other people who realize sometimes it pays to be a caricature and a character, and they expect the breakthroughs to come from not the guy with the pocket protector, but the guy with the dreadlocks.
WHY ISN’T THE USA BETTER THAN CHINA RIGHT NOW?
Peter Robinson:
We have a Pentagon budget of upwards of $900 billion. You can’t trust Chinese figures, but as best I can tell, the Chinese spend well less than $500 million, and most estimates seem to be around $400 million. Why aren’t we better than the Chinese right now?
Palmer Luckey:
Do you believe that the Pentagon could spend its money 50% better? You know, I do. Like you, there’s just a level of inefficiency that exists, where if they’re just more efficient with each dollar, then they can do more.
I used to make millions of virtual reality headsets in China. I’ve been to Shenzhen a bunch of times. If you want to get stuff done and you want to build things, it is the place to be. And they don’t get 50% more for their dollar, they get like 10 times for their dollar.
Their people are just genuinely extremely good. They have the world’s best battery engineers, they have many of the world’s best metallurgists, many of the world’s best optical engineers. American companies have been hollowed out because our companies and our degrees, which feed these companies, because the companies feed these colleges a whole bill of goods on what they should be teaching people. Basically, we were not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore. We’re not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured. We’re teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together design packages that get sent to the real engineers in China, and they actually figure out how to do the work. This is true even with our mechanical engineering programs, even with our electrical engineering programs.
How am I actually going to put this together? How am I going to build a manufacturing line to make this thing? How am I going to figure out how to do the 12345 different revisions of this board to pass radio emissions and interference standards? That’s all done in China. So they are the real engineers. We’ve hollowed out our real engineering capacity. I don’t want to put down Apple too much, but Apple used to have to figure out how to actually make their stuff. These days, most of the really hard work is being done by the Chinese, by Chinese ideas.
Peter Robinson:
Our only hope for its systematic chance against China is innovation. How do we keep them from stealing innovations?
Palmer Luckey:
Stop patenting everything. Patents are Chinese instruction manuals. You’re taking your most valuable stuff. The founding fathers never predicted a world where you would have a globalized economy, where the entire patent office could be downloaded every single morning, and then ripped off, and then used to fight a war against you. The problem that we have right now is that Western companies patent things so that they can trade temporary exclusivity on an idea in exchange for when it eventually enters the public domain. All that really means in practice is that for 20 years or so, between when you file for a patent and when somebody could launch a product that is a ripoff, China could just rip it off right away. Western companies can only rip it off after 20 years. Then you repeat this cycle over and over again, for every single generation, and it’s killing us. So I don’t get patents anymore.
THE FUTURE OF THE AMERICAN MILITARY
Peter Robinson:
The United States Navy today features, 11 carriers, just under 300 other surface combat ships, and about 70 submarines, all of them nuclear. The fleet includes, as best I can tell from doing the research online, four unmanned ships and a few hundred small drone boats. What should the United States Navy look like, say, three years from now?
Palmer Luckey:
You go to the war with navy you have, not the one you want to build. I think that if you give it about five years, you could start doing some useful contributions, but it’s going to take about 10 years to do the really interesting things. Here’s the reality: we don’t need a 300 ship navy, we need about 1,000 ships or more.
Autonomy is a thing that enables you to make the right decisions in certain cases. I’ll give you an example. There’s going to be ships that are fully autonomous, with no people aboard. What’s going to be much more common are ships that are very lightly manned, because most of the jobs have been automated on them. In other words, an aircraft carrier that doesn’t have 5,000 people aboard, but it has 120. A destroyer that, instead of having 1000 people aboard, has a crew of 50. By automating a lot of these jobs and using a combination of robotics and automation, and materials that don’t require so much constant anti-corrosion treatment, we could build US ships that are the answer, but autonomy integrated everywhere is the only way we’ll do it.
Because if we have a navy that is, let’s say, three times as big in terms of ships, but we do not have enough people to have three times as many people in the navy, it’s just never going to work. The worst part is when you build a new ship, you don’t just build a ship and then let it sit and wait for war. You have to fill it with people, and you basically have to have them place, play and pretend continuously, so that you’re there ready to fight. They know how their ship works. You need to sail all over the place, you need to do exercises. It costs almost as much to do nothing as it does to fight a war. In some cases, with autonomy, you might be able to change that equation.
ON THE LACK OF AMERICAN PATRIOTISM IN SILICON VALLEY
Peter Robinson:
More than 600 Google workers signed an open letter to the CEO, expressing concerns about negotiations between Google and the Pentagon. Davos men, internationalists, globalists, and along come Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and you. Palmer Luckey, why are you such a patriot?
Palmer Luckey:
That’s a really intelligent and articulate way to put it. But you don’t have to be that intelligent or that articulate to understand the problem. I think a lot of people, Americans, understand the problem. They’re all members of the “mono party” or “uni party” here in the US and abroad, and they buy into a certain set of political values and social values. They largely didn’t decide for themselves. They’re isolated from the consequences of those decisions.
I saw a lot of this when I was in Silicon Valley. I don’t want to beat up too much on Mark Zuckerberg, you know, for, you know, learning Chinese, or, or asking the Chinese to help him with everything. But I go back to my time when I was there, and there were a bunch of flags that flew on the Facebook campus. You had a pirate flag, an Instagram flag, a gay pride flag, a world peace flag. There was a Black Lives Matter fist for a while, but no American flag.
That was because, if you asked them at the time, “are you an American company?,” the official answer – which they testified under oath to Congress – was, ”we are an international organization that transcends borders.”
The main reason for that is that they were headquartered for tax purposes in Dublin, Ireland. And so if you say that you’re an American company, the jig is up, but it’s a little unfair. It was really a tax, but it was also culturally true.
They thought of themselves as part of this Davos-elite-type person, and even the individual programmers thought of this other way. By the way, half the people at Facebook weren’t born in America, and I’m not saying that there’s something bad about being an immigrant, but when you have a place where most of the people did not grow up in a country with its values, you’re going to end up inherently with a place that much more greatly centers its care outside of the United States and prioritize things outside of the United States.
You might remember the Claude Constitution at Anthropic, its publicly posted constitution was that it considered all answers from a perspective that does not unduly weigh Western perspectives or values. It is explicitly being told to not value these things that the West has decided are important around self-governance, freedom of association, freedom of speech, that we mostly still have, and the Europeans are forgetting about.
The reality is, we all know who these people are, and I think the first people to figure it out were not the intelligentsia, I think it was actually blue collar workers. Oh, you’re working, working in Detroit, Michigan. They understand way better than the people who go to Davos. Do
Robinson:
Are you a blue collar worker in your head?
Luckey:
Look, my dad’s a car salesman growing up. My mom’s a homemaker. When I started Oculus, I had a job sweeping a boat yard for minimum wage. And so it’s a little hard to think of myself as blue collar today, I guess. But I certainly feel like I feel like I come from that background.