Hegseth: AI Autonomous Warfighting Systems Are The Future

POINT MUGU, CALIF. — Artificial intelligence-powered, autonomous, and unmanned warfighting systems are a major focus of the Trump administration’s new military build-up, likened the “arsenal of freedom” by War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The Federalist traveled with Hegseth to California over the weekend where he delivered the keynote address outlining the forthcoming National Defense Strategy (NDS) at the Reagan National Defense Forum. But before he gave that speech, the secretary was briefed on the latest in military technological innovation and toured some industrial facilities.

The facilities are part of the fourth pillar of the NDS, aimed at reviving the American defense industrial base to innovate and build domestically, instead of relying on foreign countries, and often adversaries like China, to build American weapons systems for the U.S. military.

“If we don’t revive the defense industrial base, if we can’t make the things we need at scale, then we can’t deter, we can’t defend,” Hegseth told the staff at Anduril Industries. “Lethality is something you’re focused on delivering every day, but we also need to inject, alongside the warrior ethos, urgency, real urgency, not Washington, D.C., old Defense Department, Pentagon, bureaucracy, urgency — which is we’re going to deliver this in two years after we coordinate it across 19 different agencies no one ever heard of, and we create 14 prototypes that sit on a dusty shelf until they get approved by some regulator — that’s not the kind of urgency we’re going to deliver.”

He said waiting that long for approval has created a dynamic where what was once the latest in technology would be essentially obsolete by the time it was being used in actual war scenarios.

Anduril Industries

Perhaps no company in this space is more innovative than Anduril, headquartered at the old Los Angeles Times printing building in Costa Mesa, California. It was founded by Palmer Luckey and named after Aragorn’s sword meaning the “Flame of the West” in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

An Anduril staffer told The Federalist that the company was founded because “America wasn’t building for what it should be building for” in relation to China’s innovations, while another warned not to necessarily believe “China’s propaganda” on their drone technology.

While the threat of Chinese innovation, and the seemingly lackadaisical focus on American innovation into new war tech, are deeply serious concerns, it is also true that there are very few technological innovations more concerning than the apparently fleeting role of human discernment in warfighting, ethical questions around robot autonomous decision-making, and whether or not actual human beings with a respect for human life should be the final say behind a decision to kill in war.

Luckey’s focus is to put “a lot more risk to robots versus people,” he told a group of reporters during a tour. Each of Anduril’s systems uses the same proprietary AI “brain,” as Luckey described it, called Lattice, which helps make the system fully customizable to the needs of the user as well as informs its autonomous decision making.

Another focus of Luckey’s was to be able to patch manufacturing into existing factory equipment, like in automobile factories that can be operated by those same factory workers without the need for much additional training. He said that manufacturing technique was the same used during World War II, when factories switched focus to wartime needs, and it would not have made sense to make the workers obsolete by using equipment that was foreign to them.

“What we actually did was start designing our fighters and bombers to be made in automotive factories,” he said. “You had the same workers, you had a lot of the same machines. But we started saying, ‘Okay, what does an aircraft look like when I can only bend metal in a certain way, when I can only heat treat it to a certain amount, when I can deal with certain thicknesses or certain engraving or certain welding processes?’”

“We never would have scaled up in World War II if we need to re-skill and retrain everybody to a totally different type of level of skill and knowledge,” he said.

They hire a mix of automotive workers, recent college graduates, and those with existing aerospace experience.

That kind of mentality appears to be a major selling point for the Trump administration, as another stop on Hegseth’s tour was at a facility called Hadrian in Torrance, California, which has a similar ethos.

While manufacturing the tech domestically is a clear national security issue, the fact remains that the technologies coming out of Anduril closely resemble Skynet, the creator of the Terminator of the eponymous film.

The systems Luckey is creating will be able to execute missions, and people, with full autonomy, including the ability for some pieces of equipment to be given a mission and go completely undetectable until it is completed. That means a human will not be in control of the decision at the time the mission is completed — whether that involves killing people or jamming enemy systems.

Pulsar, an electronic warfare (EW) system that “is as smart as a human EW operator, but much, much, much faster,” Luckey said, is aimed at not “just jamming, spoofing, hacking, doing targeted cyber effects, but also protecting your communications, making sure that you are getting out under the thumb of the guys who are trying to jam you trying to where you can’t talk.”

“You just turn this, push a button, and as long as it’s green, you’re good. It’s important to have systems where you don’t need to have a specialized operator who’s out there running this,” he added.

He said Anduril weapons systems have been in Ukraine since the second week of the war, and that systems like Pulsar have destroyed “hundreds of millions of dollars in Russian hardware, including deep inside of electronic warfare bubbles.”

Fury, an AI-powered fighter jet designed to fly alongside manned aircraft but to take more risks than would be acceptable for human beings, is designed to take the same weapons that the Air Force is already using, as well as new weapons developed by Anduril, in order to maximize integration into the military.

Anduril is in the process of opening a new facility, “Arsenal One,” in Ohio that will employ about 6,000 Americans to build the product, which boasts a slogan “fight unfair.”

Anduril systems are already being used domestically as well, with about 35 percent (roughly 350 units) of the U.S. southern border being monitored by its Sentry tower, where Luckey said the AI system can distinguish between humans and animals with an extremely high level of confidence, allowing Border Patrol to not be distracted by having to respond to a coyote moving in the brush, for example.

While the Sentry is making it much easier to ensure that there are zero illegal border crossings, the integration into domestic national security missions raises significant concerns about the expansion of the kinds of systems Anduril makes into domestic law enforcement.

As Americans know all too well, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was passed under the guise of only being used for foreign adversaries, but has been used to illegally spy on Americans as well.

How long until autonomous, AI-powered systems are pulling Americans over for traffic violations, or being used as the first choice to breech doorways, or responding to domestic violence situations?

For domestic and foreign applications, how much robotic autonomy is tolerable?

What are the ethical concerns behind autonomous systems making their own decisions to take human life? Conversely, what are the benefits of being able to send unmanned systems into warzones in order to save the lives of American troops?

Those were all concerns brought up to Luckey, and Hegseth didn’t take on-the-record questions, but the answers seemed to lack urgency.

Hadrian

Hadrian does not design weapons systems themselves, but rather contracts with small, medium, and large (called “primes) defense industry companies to fabricate parts needed to build their systems, as well as optimizes the supply chain.

Their business model seems to be the major reason Hegseth visited them, as they have found a way to essentially copy-and-paste their factory dynamic anywhere in the country, using proprietary software to allow essentially any American, no matter the level of experience, to operate the machinery.

Hegseth himself used their software to machine a part for a satellite.

“There is a kinship in the passion and the urgency for the re-industrialization of our country, the re-establishment of our defense industrial base,” Hegseth told the Hadrian staff in a speech. “You actually produce tangible things that are needed across the joint force right now to scale up what we need to do. We need not just one of these, we need many of these, and we need them all across the country. And I know that’s the vision for what you’re doing.”

Hegseth added that everything else in the defense strategy, including lethality, deterrence, burden sharing with allies, and “reviving the warrior ethos,” does not matter if the defense industrial base is hollow.

Hadrian is capable of setting up facilities essentially anywhere and has built four factories in four years, with one being built in Arizona right now. That kind of replication ability means it could target its locations toward reviving places like the Rust Belt or Appalachia that have been decimated by America’s politicians selling jobs overseas and destroying communities.

“We’re America, we’ve been able to do find brilliant solutions,” Mackenzie Bohannon, General Manager at Hadrian, told The Federalist, saying that it is unfortunate that “we just believed for so long that being a services economy was the way to create national strength and national power, and offshore to all of our all of our industry, all of our capacity.”

Yet, despite the fact that industry has become so fractured and that “none of the systems are here anymore,” Bohannon said, Hadrian has found a way to undercut the narrative that hiring Americans and building in America is not sustainable, or that the American people do not have the talent or skills to do these jobs.

“It’s not about the talent. The talent is here. People can learn. Americans are smart, Americans are tenacious,” she said. “Americans are expensive, but we have ways to get around that — adding in automation, we are proving right now we can build things at higher quality, at a faster speed.”

The company has over 350 employees, and Bohannon said that “zero percent” of their technicians had prior machining experience, explaining that they source their employees from a wide variety of professions, including teaching, truck driving, and restaurant workers, as well as trained machinists and others.

Breccan F. Thies is the White House correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.