Meet the MIC: Anduril’s Legacy of Profitable Failure

Prime example of why I hate the term “drones.”

Seth Harp, midwit journalist, managed to make Anduril’s founder, the zionist con artist Palmer Luckey, look reasonable and informed, because the Harp confused tiny quadcopters with controllable missiles, as both are technically unmanned aerial vehicles, aka “drones.”

This is about as stupid as concluding that a deep sea submersible designed to explore the Marianna Trench is a ripoff, because the thing below costs a couple grand, and “both of them are underwater vehicles with cameras attached.” 

Or, alternatively, looking at the Schwerer Gustav, and throwing your hands up in the air because you can’t figure out why the cannon that fires shells weighing 15,000lbs costs more per shot than a BB gun, as they’re both firearms.

It is no more valid to compare a 5lbs quadcopter with a 5,00lbs reusable missile than to compare one with the 5,000,000+lbs Saturn V rocket that put a man on the moon, just because both are vehicles, and all vehicles should therefore cost as much as a DJI Mavic.

The comparison with the Saturn V rocket may be more apt than is immediately apparent, as ICBMs are essentially modern versions of this. You may not call an ICBM a “drone” but why not? We already have idiots referring to the Shahed/Geran cruise missiles as “drones,” because apparently when the power plant for a cruise missile is a piston prop, it stops being a cruise missile.

And if some cruise missiles are “drones”, why not all of them? For that matter, why not call ballistic missiles drones as well? They also fly through the air and have rudimentary steering surfaces. For that matter, so do GPS guided artillery shells. Let’s start calling those drones as well, just to completely shit up the conversation.

This epistemic pollution, where every vehicle that is unmanned is treated as interchangeable, leads to one of the most annoying myths about UAVs, which is that they are all cheap and disposable. 

Flying a $500-1k recon quadcopter over enemy territory and having it be immediately destroyed – whether by losing line of sight, jamming, running out of battery, being shot by infantry, etcetera – is bad, but not much worse than wasting a single 105mm artillery shell. Within reason, these things can be thought of as disposable munitions.

On the other hand, even the Shahed/Geran drone cruise missiles, renown for being cheap, cost in excess of $35k. Same goes for the Lancet drone loitering munition. It does not bankrupt your country to waste a few of these, but the cost of losing one is about the same as losing thirty five small recon quadcopters.

Then we have the Anduril Roadrunner, which was supposed to be the subject of today’s derision, which costs at least $500k per. Losing a single one of these is the equivalent of losing one thousand recon quadcopters, at least by price tag.

And of course, we have the fighter UAVs, which somehow manage to be more expensive than the manned fighters they’re meant to supplement.

International Defense:

Australia has taken a major step forward in advanced air combat technology by signing a 1.4-billion Australian dollar ($930-million) contract with Boeing Defence Australia for the delivery of six MQ-28 Ghost Bat drones.

Each of these things costs $155 million per.

It’s at this point that I need to pause for a second, and acknowledge the elephant in the room. Yes, the Military Industrial Complex is robbing you blind. No, the manufacturing costs for the garbage they make is not even remotely close to the cost charged to the Government. That’s why a JDAM kit, little more than a tiny GPS antenna combined with a Rasbperry Pi and rudimentary control surfaces costs $50k, instead of $500, or maybe even $50.

GPS guidance only becomes this absurdly expensive thing when American MIC parasites get involved. There are plenty of quadcopters that cost less than $200, yet are capable of autonomous flight to a pre-determined GPS coordinate, often done automatically upon losing connection.

Which is amazing, because it’s a $50k feature.

Expert Drone Reviews:

Drones with Return to Home (RTH) make flying safer and easier. This feature helps your drone come back automatically if it loses signal or battery runs low.

The DJI Air 3 isn’t just able to autopilot a quadcopter to a predetermined GPS location, it’s also able to use its camera to navigate through a complicated environment. The entire product retails for just a shade over 1k.

Yet the tail kit below sets you back a cool $25k.

Anytime you hear the term “technology” in the context of the Military Industrial Complex, understand that you are being robbed to a degree not previously believed possible. Said technology may or may not work, and may or may not be relevant. But even if it works perfectly and is highly effective the profit margins will be obscene.

Having said that, there are legitimate reasons why certain types of vehicles or weapons cost more than others. Fighter planes, whether manned or unmanned, are complex machines weighing many thousands of pounds. For performance reasons they are made with carbon fibre composites and have titanium in the landing gear, airframe, and engine. I wouldn’t be surprised if some country managed to mass produce an exact copy of the F-35 for one tenth the cost, but anything significantly cheaper than that is probably a pipe dream. The same is true for this MQ-28 Ghost Bat.

However, even if the Ghost Blyatt UAV cost $15 million, that’s still the cost equivalence of 15,000 well made recon quadcopters, and even ignoring the cost, Australia only has six of them. If they lose five of them, they’re down to just one. If they lose five of their quadcopters, they pretty much have just as many.

Point being, these “fighter” UAVs are among the least disposable things in the entire military, and if they actually worked, losing even one would be a catastrophically horrible thing that your military might never recover from. All this, despite them being “drones” and therefore, in the minds of  journalists, being comparable to a DJI Mavic.

It’s important that you know the difference, if for no other reason than you never accidentally make this midwit con artist look intelligent and reasonable.

Which is not a particularly high bar to clear, because his company, Anduril, is valued at over $30 billion despite never making a product that hasn’t failed spectacularly.

Reuters:

NEW YORK, Nov 27 (Reuters) – A U.S. military plane soared over Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base earlier this month and released a drone made by the defense tech giant Anduril Industries to test whether it could take flight and conduct surveillance.

The drone – a winged model known as Altius – nosedived 8,000 feet into the ground, according to an Air Force test summary, reported here for the first time. Shortly afterwards, a second Altius drone spiraled to earth during a separate test, the summary said.

Remember that video above where that $1k quadcopter navigated its way through a warehouse? Eight years after founding, Anduril has yet to make a UAV that can reliably fly.

This is far from Altius’s first spectacular failure. Same for their “Ghost” UAV which we’ll get to in a second.

Reuters:

But the Ghost X has also had issues in more recent tests. A video shared with Reuters and separately posted in January 2025 on US ArmyWTF, an Instagram account run by an Army veteran, showed a Ghost model spinning out of control before crash landing near soldiers in an unidentified location.

“I told you this would be a clusterfuck,” said one unidentified person in the video.

Reuters verified the footage as having been recorded during a weeks-long U.S. Army exercise in Hohenfels, Germany that began in mid-January, and included use of the Ghost X.

Anyway, user @DrChrisCombs made fun of the Altius on twitter, which prompted Palmer Luckey’s demand that he fight him IRL.

Which then prompted this spirited twitter war between Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and twitter user @froger14.

All sounds good and well until your Lancet can’t even fly 10% of the way to the target, to say nothing of jamming.

If there’s thing that Anduril has absolutely nailed it’s the jamming resistance.

Dronexl:

While Anduril drones crash during Air Force tests and struggle against Russian jamming, the U.S. government is preparing to ban DJI by default on December 23, 2025, without conducting the security audit Congress mandated. Florida already destroyed $200 million worth of working DJI drones and provided only $25 million to replace them with Blue UAS alternatives that cost 8-14 times more and meet only 20% of mission requirements.

Anduril’s “Altius” loitering munition is America’s response to Russia’s Lancet. As such, they retail for almost one million per, while a Lancet costs just $35k. What you get in return for the thirty times higher price tag is the totally irrelevant ability to launch from a tube and some easily spoofed AI meme program that will, at best, demolish some decoy or murder civilians. 

The only “advantage” it has over the Lancet is range, which is largely irrelevant in a loitering munition. The frontlines/FEBA/Grey zone is target rich. On top of that, it’s extremely difficult for the enemy to intercept aircraft/missiles in that area, because they can’t operate radars and anti-aircraft vehicles near the front as they will be found and then destroyed by artillery. However, they can operate these things 100+km from the front, clustered around anything worth protecting. 

The claimed shoot down rates for Shahed/Geran cruise missiles in Ukraine are anywhere between 80-97%, and that number would be undoubtedly higher for loitering munitions wandering around enemy territory looking for something to hit. It begs the question of why we are atritting our loitering munitions by forcing them through a gauntlet of air defenses involving SPAAGs, towed radars, towed AAA, spotlights, jammers, etcetera, all in the dubious hope of finding a target of higher value than the infantry and AFVs that are present at the front. After all, if we want to attack refineries, staging areas, or other static targets, we already have cruise and ballistic missiles.

As such, it makes far more sense to skip out on the (expensive) long range loitering munitions, and instead mass produce cheap loitering munitions with short ranges. Alternatively, don’t even bother with your Lancet knockoff, and just attach the occasional hand grenade to a recon quadcopter. While the US Army’s claims of having the world’s first quadcopter capable of dropping a grenade are laughable, the concept is sound, and is probably nearly as good as mixing in more specialized loitering munitions like the Lancet.

Nevertheless, there is some value to occasionally attaching a camera and a remote control system to a cruise missile, which is exactly what the Russians/Iranians do with the Geran/Shahed. Incidentally, said cruise missile/loitering munition has three times the loitering hours of the Altius, five times the range, and three times the payload, yet is priced at 3% of the Altius. Anduril’s “long range loitering munition” is a bizarre hybrid cruise missile that excels at neither role while costing thirty times more. 

To learn about Anduril’s “Ghost” UAV I headed on over to the product page on their website, only to learn that it is so poorly coded that it chugs my entire computer. I don’t find it entirely confidence inspiring when the guys selling tech solutions can’t code a functioning website, but luckily I stumbled upon a wonderful shill piece work of responsible military journalism educating us as to the wonders of this miracle weapon. I have highligted a select choice of buzzwords important features. 

TweakTown (September 2020):

The new AI-powered drones are the first generation that can perform reconnaissance missions, according to Luckey, where the drones will fly out and search areas of land for objects of interest. This would include weapons, people, hardware (spy equipment), and more.

Anduril is using machine learning to analyze the images and video that the Ghost 4 drone takes, and feeds it back to base. The 2-meter aircraft can be toted around in a backpack, can survive flights through sand, mud, seawater — all military operations and environments where it will be used.

The new Ghost 4 drone has a 100-minute flight time, and can be either remotely piloted — or autonomously flying around on its own. It packs an array of cameras, radio-jamming systems, and lasers in order to identify and highlight targets.

Not just that, but Anduril’s new Ghost 4 drone can also drop packages weighing up to 35 pounds.

Just think of the military operations it is capable of… cameras, video, lasers, AI, deep learning, and it can even drop packages. Imagine an AI-powered drone flying over jamming enemy radar, so it’s totally stealth — and then dropping an important package in the middle of the battlefield.

Anduril’s Ghost 4 drone is pretty versatile, with Luckey explaining: “One person can manage dozens of Ghosts”. Better yet, Luckey says they can be “programmed ahead of time” in order to fly “dark” where the Ghost 4 will be monitoring a particular location or tracking suspects — but get this, it will send and receive no data — so it won’t turn up on radio signals.

Luckey describes Anduril’s new Ghost 4 drone as a “Swiss Army knife that can do everything”.

Ah yes, the classic Swiss army knife, famous for being great at everything.

I can’t wait until the Brave Ukrainian Defenders of Golden Toilets for Israel Western Civilization Respectors get their hands on these things and immediately AI laser the Russian ruzzian ork hordes into –

Technology:

The Ghost drone program hit its own turbulence early in the Ukraine conflict. Anduril sent roughly 40 of the miniature helicopter-style reconnaissance drones to Ukrainian forces in 2022. Soldiers quickly grew frustrated as Russian jamming systems disrupted the aircraft. Four sources familiar with the situation said the company had miscalculated how terrain and satellite navigation interference would affect flight operations.

Anduril’s Ghost is so bad that Ukraine doesn’t want them for free, and the same is true for the Altius.

The Tech Buzz:

The real gut punch comes from Ukraine, where Anduril’s technology faced its first true battlefield test. Ukrainian SBU security forces found that the company’s Altius loitering drones repeatedly crashed and failed to hit their targets. The performance was so poor that Ukrainian forces completely stopped using them in 2024 and haven’t deployed them since.

Anduril’s list of disasters is as long as their product page.

The most alarming incident occurred during a Navy exercise off the California coast in May, where more than a dozen of Anduril’s autonomous drone boats simply stopped working. Sailors on scene warned of “safety violations and potential loss of life,” according to the Journal’s reporting. 

Imagine losing a major naval battle and becoming shark food because this fucking idiot was put in charge of defense procurement through backroom deals. 

We’re not even close to done.

But the problems don’t stop there. During summer testing, Anduril’s unmanned fighter jet called Fury suffered a mechanical issue that damaged its engine during ground tests. Then in August, a test of the company’s Anvil counterdrone system went so wrong it sparked a 22-acre fire in Oregon. Each incident represents millions of dollars in development costs and, more critically, eroding confidence from military customers.

POV: You were enjoying a hike ten kilometers from an Anduril test site. 

A casual glance for their other meme bullshit products lead me to Pulsar-L, a technically infeasible non-solution to the non-extant problem of enemies wasting all their recon quadcopters by spamming them in your general direction for no reason. Jamming requires a lot of power applied in a very narrow direction, and even cheap UAVs have basic INS fallbacks that allow them to detect when the GPS signal is spoofed or jammed. They do not hurtle themselves into the ground the second that they lose a GPS signal. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so stupid be produced so slickly. 

 

Even when Anduril’s product (maybe) works as intended, it’s still stupid bullshit. For example, their Barracuda-M “replacement” for the Hellfire missile.

Defence-Blog:

The Barracuda-100M is powered by Anduril’s Lattice for Mission Autonomy software platform, enabling collaborative autonomous behaviors that can be rapidly updated to address evolving mission needs.

This is gibberish but this article is already far too long. 

“The Barracuda-100M met or exceeded all vehicle performance criteria, including high-G maneuvers and autonomous mission execution,” the company said in a statement.

This thing flies at purported top speeds of 913.6 km/h, which is about Mach 0.74, or about one kilometer every four seconds. That’s pathetically slow compared to a rocket powered missile,  yet it has even less lift generating surfaces than something like an AIM-120 medium range AAM, let alone an airplane with actual wings. So no, it has no ability to generate high G turns. 

Luckily it doesn’t need to, because it is a cruise missile and it only needs to make minimal turns anyway. The talk about “high G turns” exists so it can differentiate itself from other, already extant cruise missiles. 

But far more ridiculous is the claim to replace the Hellfire missile, which is an entirely different class of weapon. 

The Barracuda-100M is designed for high-volume, affordable production and offers ten times the range of the similarly sized Hellfire missile at a comparable price point, Anduril says. Its modular design allows integration with various payloads and sensors, supporting diverse missions.

The turbojet powered cruise missile has more range than the rocket powered direct fire munition?

I can’t stress enough that I’m not taking this out of context. This isn’t a one-off line written by some propagandist who doesn’t get it. This is their actual sales pitch.

Defense Mirror:

Barracuda-100M is a software-defined, hardware-enabled platform designed for scalable production and high-volume operations. It offers ten times the range of similarly sized Hellfire missiles at similar cost and supports Anduril’s Lattic software and third-party autonomy frameworks. 

Anduril managed to make their direct fire guided rocket have longer range, by making it a cruise missile instead. 

To be fair to Anduril, they’re far from the first to pretend that standoff weapons which take minutes to reach the target are valid substitutes for close in guns and rockets that take fractions of a second to reach the target, usually by not mentioning the whole time thing, and hyperfocusing on the safety of the individual operator. A great example is how Lockheed Martin sells the F-35’s laughably non-existent ability to do CAS by redefining the entire term.

25:50: The final piece of the Close Air Support puzzle is the F-35, which has finally found its way into the role after years of being shoved away. It will mostly serve from extremely far away because the airplane is the USS Enterprise of aviation, with its sensors capable of identifying and leading missiles to target from so far away the enemy’s warning and surveillance systems never realize it’s even in their airspace. 

FFS. I can’t even get to the bullshit about range without addressing the “muh sensors” meme. 

In RealityLand, figuring out the location of the enemy, whether that be infantry, AFVs, artillery pieces, etcetera, is an immense problem that we throw a massive amount of resources at, such as recon satellites, quadcopters with visual and infrared cameras, forward recce infantry, etcetera, just to partially solve. No matter how competent our military is, we don’t get to just know where the other guys are because they do not throw dance parties in the middle of open fields. Instead they have the audacity to hole themselves up in bunkers, trenches, buildings, hiding themselves from our prying eyes. And yes, they are already hiding from the air, because we are already operating recon quadcopters en masse. 

But in LockheedMartinLand, it’s incredibly easy to know where all the enemy guys are. Just fly an F-35 200km away from the frontlines and use its x-ray bloodseeking force multiplier technology to find out where all the enemies are, down to the last infrantryman in a cellar. The way it achieves this seemingly magical feat is by having one single infrared camera, the same thing that our ground forces have in abundance, including on the recon quadcopters, and in the hands of the infantry. 

Am I getting through to you how fake this is?

With that out of the way, let me focus on the bizarre and incredibly stupid fetish for range over immediacy. The F-35, according to that annoying British shill, is supposed to do close air support from “extremely long range.” One can therefore conclude, that it must be using weapons that have correspondingly long ranges as well, such as the Barracuda-M cruise missile. 

There are three versions of the Barracuda, the 100, 250, and 500 respectively. The 100 has a purported max range of 220km, the 250 ranges out to 370km, and the 500 can travel for almost 1,000km. All three of them have the same maximum velocity of about one kilometer every four seconds. If these cruise missiles are fired at their longest ranges, then it will take 880s(13m:20s), 1480s(24m:40s), and 4000s(1h:6m:40s) for them to hit the place where the target was when they were fired.

Let’s compare this to the most common direct fire weapon, the infantry rifle. For our purposes it doesn’t matter which one, as they all shoot bullets that travel at speeds of about 800m/s, and are designed to be used at relatively short distances, where the bullets will hit their targets in a fraction of a second.

Now, imagine that you yourself are an infantryman walking down a street that you thought was cleared. Unbeknownst to you, there are two enemy infantrymen who are behind and to the side of you. You have a half second to live.

It may look dire, but there’s no need to worry. You’re getting CAS from an F-35 flying a mere 100km from your position, whose pilot used sensor fusing force multipliers to telepathically sense the danger you are in. He immediately launched a Barracuda-100, which precisely targeted the enemy’s location.

Half a second after the missile is launched, the enemy soldiers blow your brains out. Five seconds later they’ve melted away to their previous positions. Then, three hundred and fifty nine and a half seconds after you died the Barracuda-100 lands with absolute millimeter precision at a location that the enemy soldiers have not occupied since three hundred and fifty five seconds ago. Just for fun, two more of our guys ran into that area just as the cruise missile landed, so we killed them. Whoops.

There’s a time and place for long range weapons, but if the problem demands hitting the target within a second, weapons which take minutes to reach the target don’t do shit.

Here is a short, incomplete list of weapons/systems that could potentially help in your situation:

An infantryman within 100m of the ambush site, carrying an assault rifle that shoots projectiles at about 800m/s. Or frankly, most other infantry weapons, like a recoilless rifle, an RPG, grenade launcher, etcetera.

A tank, placed in the exact same position as the soldier looking in the exact same direction firing roughly ten lbs explosive projectiles at about 800m/s out of its cannon, non-explosive projectiles at about 800m/s through its secondary machine gun. 

An attack helicopter hovering one single inch above where the tank/soldier was, but apparently doing a totally different thing because once you go one single inch up into the air you are an aerial vehicle which causes you to both spontaneously combust due to MANPADs as well as radars which aren’t in the area finding you and destroying you. Anyway, the attack helicopter is armed with a machine gun that fires non-explosive projectiles at speeds of about 800m/s, and rockets with roughly ten lbs warheads that travel at speeds of roughly 800m/s.

Are we starting to sense a theme here? 

A CAS plane that has to continuously move forwards at speeds of about 30m/s, while carrying all the same weaponry as the attack helicopter. 

Now here’s a short, incomplete list of weapons/systems that won’t do diddly shit:

A mortar team firing bombs that take about 5 seconds to reach the target.

A 155mm artillery piece that fires shells which take 30 seconds to reach the target.

A rocket arriving at your position in 300 seconds.

A ballistic missile arriving at your position in roughly 500 seconds.

A slow cruise missile (Shahed) fired from 180km away, which takes an hour  to reach your position.

A fast cruise missile like the Tomahawk fired from the same distance, which takes 12 minutes to reach your position.

The fastest cruise missile ever, flying at speeds of almost 1km/s, fired from that position 180km distant.

If you’re going to die unless we get weapons on target in less than half a second, then even if we used hypersonic weapons that have a max speed of three kilometers per second, and even if they somehow broke the laws of physics and instantly got up to those speeds upon launch, then the maximum distance we could be from the enemy is just 1.5 kilometers away. 

The entire reason why tanks exist is to be artillery without the latency of effect. Modern artillery using recon quadcopters as spotters might arguably have a better view of the battlefield than the tank commander, and they’re definitely safer. When we figure out how to teleport the artillery shells onto the enemy, we’ll ditch the tanks. 

Contrary to what Lockheed Martin would have you think, when infantry run across fields, or from one building to another, they tend to do this as fast as possible. They generally prefer to not stand in the open for thousands of seconds patiently waiting for the cruise missile fired from the F-35 to finally work its way towards them.

If there are any 14 year old Call of Zionism Duty players who still don’t get it, imagine that your gun didn’t shoot bullets immediately, but rather 700 seconds after you pressed the trigger, and then ask yourself if that might affect your K/D ratio. 

The reason I use the example of you personally being the infantryman who will die without some form of close and therefore immediate fire support is because it puts into perspective the asinine fake morality behind the ethics of centering the safety of the operator of the weapons, as opposed to the customer of the fire support. It is undoubtedly true that it is dangerous to be in a tank on the frontlines, or in some form of real CAS aircraft, and there is a long discussion to be had about the future role and design of such systems. 

But I’d definitely rather not be an infantryman in a gunfight against enemy infantry who also have tanks/CAS, because their military wasn’t run by parasites mindlessly regurgitating MIC propaganda meant to boost support for standoff weapons that don’t solve any of my actual problems. 

For the record, long range weapons can be extremely valuable, and I think it’s a sign of our parasitical MIC that we have such tiny quantities of various types of the aforementioned weapons, such as artillery, cruise missiles, etcetera. There is no contradiction between wanting mass production of standoff weapons, and recognizing their limitations.

With that understood, let’s circle back to the utter stupidity that is Anduril’s Barracuda cruise missile replacing the Hellfire guided rocket. At first glance, it might seem like my previous analysis is irrelevant. After all, the Hellfire’s top speed of about 0.4 km/s is not even twice as fast as the Barracuda’s top speed of about 0.25 km/s. So while it is certainly true that the Hellfire will hit the target faster when fired from in close, you could also fire the Barracuda from in close and it would hit the target nearly as fast. Right?

Well first of all, that would totally negate the entire point behind the longer range. But secondly, no, not right, because one has an airplane engine, and one has a rocket engine. Ever seen an airplane takeoff this quickly? 

 

Below is a video of the Hydra rockets, which weigh about 25 lbs, yet produce 1,400 pounds of thrust for just over one second. The thrust to weight ratio is about 56:1, which is how it gets up to ~750 m/s in just one second. 

We don’t know the exact figures for Anduril’s Barracuda, but we do know the specs for other cruise missiles, such as the Tomahawk. That missile weighs about 3,000 lbs, and is propelled by a turbojet engine producing 430lbs of thrust, for a thrust/weight ratio of 1:7. Assuming similar numbers for the Barracuda, and we can see that the Hellfire rocket will accelerate at a rate roughly 350 times higher. That the hellfire’s rocket engine burns for a second or two, and not the hours of a turbojet, was always irrelevant since it was designed to hit the target within five seconds of launch anyway. That Anduril created a totally different class of missile with longer range is no achievement. 

I bring all this up because I can easily imagine a world where the exact same con artist “genius” replaced cruise missiles with rocket powered missiles. That makes no sense from an engineering perspective, so they pay a couple shills like MegaProjects to mindlessly repeat non-sequiturs such as their rockets acceleration rate being hundreds of times higher (irrelevant for a cruise missile), or that they can fly supersonically (total distance is vastly more important). Then they edit together some stupid, yet slick CGI trailers, and get Peter Thiel and Dicksuckin’ Donald Trump together in one room and before you know it, another couple billion of your taxdollars fed into an obese cosplaying dork who has never met an over-engineered non-solution to a non-existent problem sold at ten times markup that he didn’t love.

Above we see Anduril, a product so bad that, even if it worked perfectly, it would still be cripplingly self-defeating if ever put into action, but this article is already way too long, so I have to end it here.