(Zero Hedge)—Anduril founder Palmer Luckey has called for critical resets across defense procurement, manufacturing, innovation, and national identity.
Luckey’s defense startup, valued at over $60 billion, is one of the key forces reshaping America’s military power through low-cost, automated systems that can be manufactured and reproduced at scale, from autonomous weapons and AI fighter jets to drones for the modern battlefield.
America’s hollowed-out industrial base is being rebuilt through President Trump’s reshoring push and other domestic policies designed to expand the war economy. This leads us to the latest comments from Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf.
Schimpf spoke with the Financial Times about the urgent need for a “reset” of America’s strict arms-export regime to make it easier for allied nations to produce and deploy U.S. weapons.
“There is an ‘export control reset that needs to happen,’ with other countries contributing to the total supply,” Schimpf said in the interview.
Schimpf said Cold War-era International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) are slowing the West’s ability to mass-produce low-cost weapons at scale. Simply put, ITAR determines who can receive U.S. weapons, military software, technical data, and know-how, and under what conditions.
He noted that the “ability to produce is probably the biggest deterrent gap that we have as a Western alliance, and having nations contribute to that—not just buying, but actually participating in production—is actually a very good thing.”
Schimpf added that producing U.S.-origin weapons abroad could benefit allies, as they could tailor them to their own needs.
The problem that Anduril appears to be identifying is that maintaining America’s military edge over the decades relied on tightly controlling the flow of weapons and technical data abroad. But in the era of low-cost drones, ground-bots, and AI kill chains, those same systems have become a bottleneck, limiting allied co-production, slowing deployment, and weakening the West’s ability to ramp up production and ship at wartime scale.
Schimpf told FT that there have been emerging signals of openness for an “export-control reset” in the Trump administration. President Trump announced plans in February to reset the arms trade regime.
This comes as Luckey recently told CBS News’ Bari Weiss that America must become “the world’s gun store.”
It also comes as Anduril has begun initial production activity in Ohio, starting with its Fury high-speed combat drone at the Arsenal-1 site near Columbus, and is considering a European Arsenal-2 facility as it expands overseas.
The wars stretching across Eurasia and the Middle East, from Ukraine and Russia to the U.S. and Iran, have drawn down critical Western weapons stockpiles to dangerously low levels. There is now an urgent need to rebuild stockpiles of critical weapons while adding new stockpiles of emerging systems, such as one-way attack drones, loitering munitions, and other next-generation weapons
