By Luther Ray Abel
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Anduril Industries, arguably the Apple of this new
generation of venture-capital-funded defense tech firms, just released its
latest weapon system: Thunder. An autonomous attack rotorcraft — think an unmanned
Falcon from Halo or the chick of a V-22
Osprey — Anduril’s Thunder is being sold as the multi-tool wingman for
Apache attack helos and the forthcoming Cheyenne II from Bell
(co-creator of the V-22). The added payload, load-out, and protective envelope
that such slavecraft (in the engineering sense) could offer is enticing.
The concept of concentric defense is nothing new. Troy, Constantinople, even
the humble hill fort, are all
static examples. Layers of protection provide the soft innards multiple
opportunities to retard an aggressor’s advance. The U.S. Navy puts this
strategy to sea, with carrier
strike groups composed of picket vessels — destroyers, cruisers, frigates,
and subs — and aircraft providing a third dimension of surveillance and
interdiction to ensure the continued operation of the carrier, the heart of the
strike group. Should all weapons fail, we were informed that our ship, the USS Rodney
M. Davis, would sail between the incoming threat (be it missiles, drones,
or small-boat explosives) and sacrifice itself (ourselves) so that the carrier
would survive. The same is expected of any vessel that orbits the floating
nuclear airfield.
What Anduril aims to do is swap out the 200 souls aboard
a frigate and replace them with swarms of sacrificial drones/chaff/missiles
launched from autonomous motherships similar to the Thunder rotorcraft. Doing
some napkin math, each sailor’s family would be due a minimum of $100,000 in
the event of the ship’s loss. So $20 million and the public’s outrage at the
very least but, more likely, something north of $250
million after all survivor benefits are factored. And that’s just for the
loss of our most basic ship class with the smallest crew.
Whether Thunder will be successful, I can’t say. Anduril
is a young, hungry company making products no government has commissioned. Yes,
that’s right, they use VC funds to make products they think the military needs
and only then sell them, which is an inversion of the procurement status quo
since the 1990s. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Having developed
this system with Archer Aviation for commercial or defense applications,
Anduril may ultimately sell more for domestic rather than military use. I’d be
interested to see what such a system could do for firefighting in California,
for example.
I’ll be writing at length about Anduril and its peers in
an upcoming magazine piece, but I’m not spoiling anything by admitting that
their marketing chops are something else:
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