Palmer Luckey Uses Anime-Inspired Trailer to Announce New Cruise Missile

Anduril, the defence tech startup founded by Palmer Luckey, released an anime-inspired trailer for its caller cruise rocket connected Thursday.

The trailer’s aesthetic is highly Evangelion. It opens with a faceless antheral successful a Hawaiian garment (presumably Luckey) speechmaking a newspaper. “U.S. Urgently Needs More Missiles to Deter China,” screams the headline. Then it cuts to a NERV-style mill that’s churning retired tons of the caller Barracuda-M missile.

The transportation is that Anduril tin marque missiles faster, cheaper, and easier than the competition. “Barracuda-M is the astir producible cruise rocket connected the marketplace today: 50 percent little clip to produce, 95 percent less tools, 50 percent less parts—at a fraction of the cost,” says the statement nether the video.

Cruise missiles are expensive and the marketplace has agelong been dominated by bequest defence contractors similar Raytheon. Broadly, the extremity of a cruise rocket and different standoff missiles is to onslaught an force people from a region and debar retaliatory fire. But a Tomahawk costs astir $2 cardinal to marque and 2 years to build. Shipping weapons to Ukraine and Israel and defending the Red Sea from Houthis has severely depleted America’s stockpile of missiles.

Western subject powers person besides watched what Ukraine has been capable to bash portion warring backmost thousands of Russian tanks. Expensive cruise missiles are effective, but Kyiv has been capable to destruct Russian armor astatine a fraction of the outgo with disconnected the support drones carrying improvised explosives.

The Pentagon has been paying attraction and it wants much munitions faster and cheaper. A caller breed of Silicon Valley defence tech disruptors, typified by Luckey, person rushed to capable the space. “These are systems that tin beryllium assembled with tools, literally, that you astir apt person successful your store – screwdrivers, pliers, things of that sort,” Anduril’s Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose told The War Zone. “So it is not gated successful presumption of its producibility connected highly specialized tooling, highly specialized manufacturing processes, highly specialized labor, nary of which we’re ever going to person capable of.”

The Barracuda household of missiles includes 3 antithetic variants, each with its ain M variation. Anduril has not specifically said what the portion outgo of immoderate of the missiles is. “The Barracuda household of [Autonomous Air Vehicles] is 30 percent cheaper connected mean than different solutions, enabling affordable wide and cost-effective, large-scale employment,” the institution said successful a post connected its website. Thirty percent cheaper than what, exactly? Cruise rocket prices alteration wildly. The Tomahawk costs millions, sure, but Hellfires are as inexpensive as $200,000.

Luckey isn’t the lone tech-bro chasing dreams of cheaper cruise missiles and abdominous Pentagon contracts. Last month, YCombinator announced it was backing Ares Industries, a institution that’s promising to bring the outgo of $3 cardinal anti-ship cruise missiles down to $300,000.