The Enshittified Military
The Pentagon’s leading drone maker and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Big Tech’s embrace of the national security state—Anduril—is profiteering off of poor performance. A series of stories have appeared recently confirming as much.
The company, helmed by Palmer Luckey, the doofus in the photo above—screenshotted from a TED talk he recently gave—has failed in Ukraine. Anduril’s sales pitch is that their drones can operate in “non-permissive” environments, yet they can’t deal with Russian electronic warfare:
Anduril’s only real battlefield experience—in Ukraine—has been marred by problems as well, including vulnerability to enemy jamming…Some front-line soldiers of Ukraine’s SBU security service, for instance, found that their Altius loitering drones crashed and failed to hit their targets. The drones were so problematic that they stopped using them in 2024 and haven’t fielded them since, according to people familiar with the matter.
There have been other failures. Anduril’s “lattice” software—which coordinates drone swarms—partially lost command and control during a recent Air Force-supervised military exercise off the California coast. And in August, Anduril’s counter drone system accidentally caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon.
Despite all that, as of now, Anduril is supposedly worth some $30 billion dollars. From a purely bookkeeping perspective, that starts to make sense when you consider that Anduril’s getting a piece of Trump’s “golden dome” and “golden fleet” projects—impossibly expensive grifts with negative strategic value. And much of Anduril’s valuation owes to the Biden administration, whose one big idea in the Pentagon was the “Replicator Initiative.” Replicator is a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to mostly Anduril (but also other contractors) under the guise of a crash two-year plan to spend over a billion dollars fielding thousands of small drones meant to complicate a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Replicator did not succeed on its own terms of production—it fielded hundreds of drones, not thousands, and more than half were the Switch-blade kamikaze drone (made by AeroVironment, not Anduril). Where Replicator did succeed, according to its boosters, was in quickly getting money out the door, assigning 30 contracts in a short period of time—and Anduril was one of the main recipients. But is spending money faster a metric of anything good? Neither taxpayers nor peace lovers would call it success.
But the story of Anduril—walking away with eye-watering profits while underdelivering on a shaky product and nobody else matters, The End—is norm, not exception. Anduril is in the barrel right now, but the enshittification of the military has been accelerating for years.
One sign of the rot was the now decades-old truth in the humorous “Augustine’s law,” which claimed that “in the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft.” The quip was meant to convey how capital-intensive and inefficient military spending is on its own terms. Anduril, ironically, touts itself as an answer to the Augustinian form of enshittification.
But there have been other signs:
The US Navy entered a conflict with Houthi Rebels in 2024 with a highly unfavorable cost-exchange ratio, and the Houthis fought the US to a truce. As part of that fight, two F-18s (worth around $70 million each) basically fell off the runway into the ocean.
Between 2006 and 2020, more than 5,600 US troops have died in military exercises—that’s almost as many as died in the War on Terror overall.
Despite spending a trillion dollars on the military annually, and tacking on an extra billion for the Replicator Initiative, the US still can’t prevail in a war with China over Taiwan.
At the same time, the purposes to which the military are put make no fucking sense.
Why do we have troops in Israel supporting its genocide, to say nothing of arms sales? Why have we spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s aerial bombardment of Yemen? Why did we stay in Afghanistan for a decade after most strategic analysts were saying counter-insurgency was doomed to fail? Why did we nearly start World War III to prevent North Korea from getting nukes, only to then spend the next decade ignoring North Korea entirely? And this is all bracketing off military deployments to occupy US cities and an ongoing illegal war against Venezuela.
What I’d like to suggest is that the reason for Anduril’s “success,” the reason the Pentagon siphons a trillion dollars each year, and the reason the US national security state habitually inflates foreign threats and struggles to win wars are, at root, all the same: The permanent war economy in a deeply corrupt oligarchy.
An enshittified military costs more, delivers less, and deploys for ever-more dubious purposes. Military contractors’ performance is unfalsifiable, judged on metrics that have nothing to do with outcomes that matter in the real world. It’s a sick joke that how quickly contractors get paid is a metric of anything but corruption.
More can be said about this, but US oligarchs have been facing a crisis of capital accumulation. The permanent war economy—national security Keynesianism—has been a way to manage that crisis without inadvertently strengthening the working class. And that means you have to have profiteering agents like Anduril to sop up surpluses of capital that oligarchs have no wish to redistribute to workers but that also have few profitable places to go in a world of low/negative growth.
Anduril, in other words, is a beneficiary of oligarchy’s need to navigate a crisis of capital accumulation. Palmer Luckey doesn’t have to be smart if his product doesn’t have to be good.
Hey, there! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.