Palmer Luckey on rapidly fielding counter-UAS

Here’s a very interesting story from Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril, at the 2021 Reagan National Defense Forum.

There was an event where we were testing our counter-drone system against a bunch of other companies that were testing their counter-drone systems. The cool thing about our drone counter drone system is it’s not just one thing. So it can jam GPS, it can jam communications, it can take over drones, it can knock them out of the sky with a kinetic interceptor, it can use RF triangulation to find where the operator of the drone is so you could apprehend them at the same time you knocked the drone out of the sky.

 

It’s a really cool system. All of the other systems we were up against — each of those individual parts was made by a different vendor and they were being tied together by some integrator.

 

I remember we showed up to one event where we were really worried that weren’t sure how we were going to perform at night. All of our testing had mostly been during the day. There was a sudden, “Hey you guys are going to be doing a bunch of night stuff.” We got, I don’t want to say lucky, but luckily everything that we had developed was developed the right way and we kicked everyone else’s butts. We did way better than everybody else. We knocked everything out of the sky that was thrown our way.

 

Then the really interesting thing coming off of that was all the operators on the ground — like the guys who are actually downrange that you were evaluating the system — they were blown away. They said this is the coolest thing ever. We got to get our hands.

 

The best or worst part of the story to me is they said “Okay, we need this right now. We’re being attacked by drones in a place we can’t talk about right now. How fast can you get this to us?” We said “It’s probably gonna take about 18 months.” They’re like, “Holy — I’m not even going to be there if you’re deployed in 18 months. We need this right now. I said, “Guys 18 months is like the lower bound that’s the if everything goes perfectly and you guys vouch for this system. It might happen. More realistically, it’s going to take years.”

 

The good news is that everyone did go and vouch for our system and try to get it downrange. I guess the happy ending to the story is we did actually get downrange way faster. It took about eight or nine months because we had people saying we need this we need this right now or we’re going to be screwed.

Of course this is an unusual story in DoD because of irregularity. In the summer 2021, DIU awarded Anduril a $99 million OTA contract for counter-UAS (potential value). Just looking at USA Spending data, it’s not clear to me what contract vehicle that was, or how much has actually been obligated. But that $950 million ABMS IDIQ awarded to Anduril in September 2020 resulted in just $3,800 actual dollars going to the company.

DHS seems to have adopted Anduril faster and at great scale than DoD, having obligated $100 million vs. DoD’s $44 million. However, both agencies have decreased their contract obligations to the company in FY 2021 relative to the previous year ($90 million to $47 million — but note that not all FY 21 data has been reported yet, and it also doesn’t include classified activities).

All this to say — Even if Anduril really does have the best product that warfighters demand, their growth/success isn’t assured due to the peculiarities of the acquisition system. Distribution channels dominate product innovation.

I’ll note that Anduril was able to bring the counter-UAS system to field in less than a year because it took a great deal of risk and initiative to develop the thing (of course, with help of government contracts but private capital might be between 5 and 10 times greater). It sought to deliver functionality to the field, capabilities building on an enterprise suite of tools like Lattice, rather them demo some one-off that had “promise” and would line up a program of record to go develop in 5-10 years.

Experimentation, refining requirements, and rapidly scaling should be built into the heart of defense acquisition rather than pop up here and there as an effective irregularity.