Behind Anduril’s Effort to Create an Operating System for War

Early last month, a member of the US Air Force donned a virtual reality headset and scanned a 3D map of a desert landscape. This was no video game: The command led to a real projectile taking down a mock cruise missile over White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The episode was a demonstration of the future of war as seen by Anduril, the defense company cofounded by Palmer Luckey, the politically contentious cofounder of Oculus, the VR company acquired by Facebook in 2014. The idea is to provide service members a single place to take in, and act on, information from disparate systems more usually connected by people talking over radio or phone, with help from artificial intelligence. For the past five years, top military brass and successive secretaries of defense have coveted the tech industry’s software skills and tried to lure companies more aligned with Silicon Valley than the Capital Beltway.