Author Description

The United States won the Cold War not by fighting, but by making it too expensive for the Soviet Union to keep up. Today, that same logic is turning against America. After decades of complacency, a bloated defense industry, and a dangerous "failure to imagine" that great power conflict could return, the U.S. military finds itself relying on yesterday's exquisite platforms (aircraft carriers, fighter jets, tanks) in an era being reshaped by autonomous drones, mesh sensor networks, and AI-driven kill chains. The Anduril Thesis is a 100K-word deep dive from Contrary Research spanning a century of military-industrial history to make the case that Anduril, the defense technology company founded by Palmer Luckey and built on Silicon Valley's original DNA, may be the most consequential company of the 21st century. The ability to deter catastrophic war between nuclear-armed superpowers may depend on whether the United States can reboot its arsenal of democracy before it's too late.