A mullet cut, a goatee, Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. Palmer Luckey, barely 32 years old, does not correspond to the image we have of an arms dealer. After tinkering with promising prototypes in his parents’ garage, this little electronics genius founded Oculus, a pioneering company in virtual reality masks. Its resale for 2 billion dollars to Facebook allowed it to launch in 2017 a new start-up specializing in arms, called Anduril.
Palmer Luckey and his company are today the symbol of the engagement between Silicon Valley and American defense. At a time of the promises offered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Pentagon is counting on American tech innovators, their software and their agility to remain at the forefront of the planet’s military forces. And increasingly, these companies welcome cooperation that brings them billions of dollars, beyond their civilian activities, and helps strengthen national security.
Anduril thus aims to do with autonomous weapons, in particular drones, what Tesla did with cars: revolutionize industrial habits to produce quickly, by shaking up long-established arms heavyweights (Lockheed Martin, Boeing , RTX, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics), thanks to constantly updated software. “Some American technologies are very bad, they are also extremely expensive and not necessarily suitable for the types of conflicts we are going to see in the future,” claims Luckey. Its weapons are intended to be less expensive than those of the competition.
For disruptive innovations, the American army already has Darpa. This research agency is notably at the origin of GPS, the Internet and, more recently, autonomous vehicles. “Its approach is radically different from the bureaucratic model of calls for projects that we know in Europe, analyzes André Loesekrug-Pietri, president of the Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI, precursor of a European agency on the model of Darpa). 75 scientists and technological experts have total freedom to push the boundaries and their two-year mandate, renewable only once, encourages boldness and the most innovative approaches.”
Reluctance at Google
At the same time, American forces are committed to accelerating the development of their capabilities so as not to fall behind the Chinese. To support the movement, “they felt the need not to limit themselves to the usual suppliers and internal solutions in terms of defense, by soliciting much more Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft”, underlines Philippe Gros, researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research. All provide cloud services (data storage) to the armies.
Participation in more operational projects does not come without resistance. In spring 2018, several thousand of its employees took Google at its word, reminding it of its motto: “Don’t be evil” (“Do not be the architect of evil”). Under their pressure, the Californian firm gave up a contract with the Pentagon, which the discontents considered to be contrary to its values, the Maven project. This planned to use AI developed by Google to better distinguish people and objects in videos captured by military drones.
To be as close as possible to high-tech ecosystems, the Ministry of Defense has nevertheless been able to rely, for a decade, on its Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which inspired France to launch its Defense Innovation Agency. Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, the DIU serves as an interface with commercial start-ups that have dual technologies, of both civil and military interest. Among its successes: Jigsaw, a digital tool for streamlining in-flight refueling planning that has resulted in significant savings.
“The future is daily updates in the systems, and no longer that it takes a year for the approval of software,” explains the Franco-American Nicolas Chaillan, responsible for software at US Air Strength from 2018 to 2021, where he carried this vision. But he is worried: “There is still too much waste of money and time at the Pentagon and a bureaucracy which slows down innovation likely to make the difference compared to a China that is ahead of certain technologies such as AI or hypersonics.” A gap that only tech know-how can fill.
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