Steelman Press

Palmer Luckey

Preface

Somewhere in Palmer Luckey's office, a framed document hangs on the wall. It is a sanction notification from the Chinese Communist Party, labeling him a "separatist terrorist." He also has one from Russia. And one from Belarus. When he's tired and the work feels heavy, he looks up at them and smiles. They are, in his words, "trophies".

Luckey is the founder of Oculus VR and CEO of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company that builds autonomous weapons systems, cruise missiles, and AI-powered military hardware. He is 33 years old. He operates his entire company under an internal policy called "China 27" — the assumption that everything Anduril builds must be ready for a fight with China before the end of 2027. If a feature won't be ready by then, teams are told to stop working on it and find something that will.

Across dozens of podcast appearances between 2021 and 2026, Luckey has laid out a detailed case for treating China as an existential threat to the democratic world. His views are informed not by think-tank abstractions but by manufacturing millions of VR headsets in Shenzhen, discovering Chinese-planted wiretaps in his own product samples, and then building a weapons company that most of Silicon Valley initially refused to fund. What follows is an attempt to reconstruct that thinking faithfully.

The Unnamed Threat

Luckey draws a sharp line between China and the diffuse dangers that have dominated post-9/11 thinking. Terrorist groups can build bombs. Rogue actors might develop bioweapons. But none of them can take over a democratic nation and seize control of the semiconductor supply. China can. And it has said, repeatedly, that it intends to.

Luckey's worldview rests on a single principle: believe the dictator. Where Western executives treat Xi Jinping's rhetoric about Taiwan reunification as performative — domestic posturing, the kind of thing leaders say but don't mean — Luckey treats it as a planning document. He grounds this in precedent. Putin spent 20 years publicly discussing how the Soviet Union's collapse was a great tragedy he intended to reverse. People dismissed it as bluster. Then came February 2022.

Xi Jinping has made numerous statements over the past decade declaring that the Chinese military should be built to fight, that reunification with Taiwan is inevitable, and that there will be a great struggle with the West. Chinese state media has even threatened to destroy Tokyo with nuclear weapons if Japan aids Taiwan.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

These are not, in Luckey's reading, the words of a bluffer. They are the words of a man building the world's largest navy, converting commercial shipyards to military compliance, and conducting the highest number of fighter jet incursions into Taiwanese airspace on record.

And China's ambitions do not stop at Taiwan. China invaded Vietnam in living memory, currently occupies territory in the Philippines, illegally builds artificial islands in other nations' sovereign waters, and Xi Jinping has suggested claims to Okinawa. At West Point, Luckey cited Xi's public statements about discovering in China's national archives that the Ryukyu Islands sent a tributary gift to China 650 years ago — framing this as justification to "reconsider the Ryukyu Islands issue."

[Xi is] writing revisionist history because he knows he can't motivate a bunch of young Chinese guys to go and take over a territory they have nothing to do with, and absolutely no way of convincing anyone that is theirs. He has to tell them a story where this is actually part of the great Chinese empire. And so that, that is actually why I think China is their own unique threat. They, they are willing to reinvent history with their own population, much like how Russia has with Ukraine to justify death and violence at mass scale.

Palmer LuckeyMoonshots with Peter Diamandis

No nation in history has built a massive amphibious landing force, used it once, and then voluntarily dismantled it — except the United States.

The Economists Are Wrong

In 1909, a book called The Great Illusion argued that global economic integration had made war between great powers economically unviable. It was a bestseller. Groups formed to study it. Five years later, World War I began. Luckey sees an identical delusion operating today:

You read these books in 1909, and it could have been printed straight out of a globalist economist think tank report from 2020. Identical words about how countries being economically intertwined would preclude any conflict.

Palmer LuckeyAnduril Industries

He extends this to the "Golden Arches Hypothesis" — Thomas Friedman's theory that two countries with McDonald's would never go to war. It held until Russia invaded Ukraine.

Economic deterrence fails with China specifically, because the models assume Western rationality — short-term economic optimization, democratic accountability, cost-benefit analysis measured in quarterly earnings. Xi Jinping does not think this way.

[China has] a 100-year plan. They have a 500-year plan. They look at it as an abomination to their multi-thousand-year legacy, and they don't really necessarily need to act with near-term economics in play.

Palmer LuckeyAnduril Industries

The assumption that China would avoid war because it would damage their economy presumes Western rationality and values, he argues, but Chinese leadership may prioritize entirely different objectives. He points to Russia's tolerance of losing 7,000 soldiers weekly — casualties that would end any American politician's career within a week — as evidence that authoritarian states operate under different calculations. You can see it, he argues, in insurance payouts, in factory safety standards, in how they handle injury and disability.

I don't think that Xi values economic productivity as the end. It's a means to an end, which is the reunification of China for the first time in 3,000 years. That's a mentality people can't grasp.

Palmer LuckeySpecial Competitive Studies Project

The Dependency America Built

Luckey's understanding of Chinese manufacturing was built in Shenzhen.

During the Oculus years, he spent extensive time in China because that's where they conducted their manufacturing operations, and they didn't really have alternative options. He acknowledges his own role in the broader pattern of offshoring, describing America as having enabled China's economic ascent by providing blueprints, technology, and shipping manufacturing overseas.

If I had no national allegiance, I would move to Shenzhen immediately because manufacturing there is so much faster and easier.

Palmer LuckeyTetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

And it isn't just the speed advantage that he saw:

[China doesn't] get 50% more for their dollar. They get like 10X for their dollar. Things that here would take you a million dollars, you do there for $50,000, $100,000.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

This is not about cheap labor. That's an outdated concept, he says. China automates most labor-intensive production.

[China's] people are just genuinely extremely good. They have the world's best battery engineers. They have many of the world's best metallurgists, many of the world's best optical engineers.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

A comparable Chinese bridge costs roughly 100 times less per ton than the East Bay Bridge in San Francisco. Their philosophy is that they'd rather have one out of 10 bridges fall early than not have any bridges.

[American universities are] not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore. We're not teaching designers how to actually design things to be manufactured. We're teaching them how to be high-level design shops that put together a design package that gets sent to the real engineers in China. This is true even with our mechanical engineering programs, even with our electrical engineering programs. People are turning into architecture astronauts.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

Even Apple, he says, now relies on Chinese engineers for most of the really hard manufacturing work.

Think how much trouble Apple would be in if China decided they wanted Apple to be in trouble. Almost all their manufacturing is there. They cannot exist as a company without that. You have a nearly $3 trillion company, the biggest powerhouse of economic value in the entire United States, totally beholden to the whims of one person in China.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Live

Why doesn't anyone talk about this? Because the potential outcomes are so catastrophically bad that they're essentially unthinkable. Companies that made their manufacturing decisions decades ago now have to pretend those decisions were correct.

How did the United States win World War II?...Some of it was new factories, but most of it was taking over old factories. We took all of our farm implement factories, like John Deere and Caterpillar, they were building tanks and guns. We took all our automotive factories, we had them building aircraft, we had them building weapons, we had them building missiles. In fact, we even designed those weapons so they could be manufactured by those plants...literally the specifics of how thick of a gauge of metal you could bend to a certain radius, we were limited by the automotive manufacturing machines as to what we could do in aircraft.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

Luckey argues that China would love to wipe out the American automotive industry — it's not just to dominate the EV market.

If China could wipe out our industrial capacity entirely, they never need to worry about fighting a war with the US again, because they know that we wouldn't be able to get back in the game fast enough to matter.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

At the Hoover Institution, Luckey put it another way:

Imagine if there had been a Tom Clancy novel that says, 'In just 20 years, all of the Pentagon's most secure command and control terminals will be made by the Soviet Union under Kremlin supervision, and we're going to buy them by the millions.' It would have been unthinkable. It wouldn't have even been believable as fiction. And yet, the largest laptop manufacturer for the Pentagon is Lenovo, which is owned by China. Their headquarters has a flagpole with the CCP party flag and then the Lenovo logo under it.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

At Oculus VR, Luckey's team discovered covert surveillance hardware embedded in product samples from Chinese factories:

There were multiple times we discovered actual wiretap electronics in product samples that were given to us. They would listen to us and transmit the voice samples over a cellular radio. And so, if I experienced that, even as a small company... surely they're targeting every government, every military, every company.

Palmer Luckeyテレ東BIZ ダイジェスト

The detection problem is nearly impossible. A compromised component might appear in only one out of every thousand units — inspect a hundred and you'll find nothing.

This same dependency bought the tech industry's silence. From 2014 to 2017, major tech companies refused to do any work with the United States military — not because they thought it was unethical, but because working with the American military would jeopardize their access to Chinese business opportunities. They adopted the CCP's official position that Taiwan is a rogue province. They avoided discussing the enslavement of Uyghur Muslims, reeducation camps, and China's export of surveillance technology that enabled dictators worldwide to build durable police state dictatorships.

If you were speaking out about these issues, then other American companies would refuse to work with you for fear that the CCP would punish them for associating with you.

You're living in Silicon Valley, one of the most socially progressive places in the country. You can be anything you want. If you say you're a man, you're a man. If you say you're a woman, you're a woman. But there's one thing you can't say you are, and that's Taiwanese.

Palmer LuckeySpecial Competitive Studies Project

And by the way, this still goes on today. There's a lot of leaders out there who will not say a single negative word about China or anything they do, even as they have deep and oft verbalized opinions about things that are going on all over the world, including here in the United States, that are happening on a much smaller, much lesser scale.

Palmer LuckeySpecial Competitive Studies Project

The Bigger Party

Luckey distinguishes between the CCP and the Chinese population.

He holds out the theoretical possibility that China could become an American ally. Most Chinese people like American culture and have no inherent hostility toward America, he argues, and since only 25-30% are CCP members, a political transformation could shift the relationship entirely — similar to Japan's post-war transformation from mortal enemy to close ally within a single lifetime.

But his on-the-ground read of Chinese political culture is darker. He describes most Chinese citizens as viewing political dissent the way Americans might view someone shouting in a library — not as courageous but as annoying. The typical Chinese view of Tiananmen Square, in his telling, is that it's an irrelevant issue from decades ago, and anyone who keeps bringing it up is just a troublemaker.

It's a lot easier to be apolitical when it's a futile exercise...You're probably familiar with the numbers in the American Revolution. Only about 3% of America supported the revolution. It was a really niche movement of very dedicated, motivated people. And so, the best way to probably stop that 3% from existing in China is to convince them that it's futile and to kind of fuel that cynicism almost.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

On Taiwan, Luckey frames the moral question differently:

The real question is, what do the people of Taiwan want? Democracy should never be overruled by force. And that is what Xi Jinping is trying to do. He's trying to say, 'I'm more powerful than you, so it doesn't matter what your people want. It doesn't matter what they vote for. I'm going to overrule that.'

Palmer Luckeyテレ東BIZ ダイジェスト

He extends this universally — to Japan, which should do whatever the people of Japan vote to do.

Taiwan

All of Anduril's research and development is oriented toward one scenario:

Everything that Anduril is working on the R&D side is oriented towards that fight. Right now, China believes that they can take Taiwan. They believe that the United States is some combination of won't stop them, isn't willing to stop them, won't win if we do try to stop them. They believe Taiwan is in a similar position with their own military. We have to change their minds...If China ends up invading Taiwan, I'm gonna feel like we've really failed in our mission.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Originals

The goal is to change that calculation. His preferred outcome is deterrence without conflict — if China's war games show Taiwan winning decisively, forcing Xi Jinping to abandon invasion plans without firing a shot. But his realistic assessment is grimmer. The most likely Chinese approach is not a full-scale invasion but a gradual blockade:

They'll come up with some pretense... 'Taiwan is exporting goods that say Made in Taiwan,' and our position is that Taiwan is part of China, and therefore they need to pay Chinese taxes on those made-in-China goods, so we're gonna blockade their port and not let them export anything until they resolve this.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

Then they'll blockade two ports. Then the airports. Then food runs short — but the escalation is so gradual that there's never a clear moment to fire the first shot. Boiling the frog.

Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan cannot receive weapons overland once a conflict begins. There are no neighboring countries willing to facilitate arms transfers at existential risk to themselves. Everything Taiwan will fight with must already be on the island. And the United States is currently $20 billion behind on arms deliveries.

Luckey's proposed American role:

The United States needs to stop being the world police, stop sending our people overseas to die for other countries, and instead we need to become the world's gun store.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

But Taiwan is not helpless. It is one of only five or six countries globally that can credibly build weapons of their own design using their own components from scratch. Semiconductors for defense systems. Sensors for missile seekers. Carbon fiber for cruise missiles instead of bicycles. The industrial base exists. The question is whether Taiwan will use it before it's too late.

At a 2025 address in Taipei, Luckey made this personal:

There is no secret arsenal of technology waiting to save anyone — not in the US, not in Taiwan... it's just you, it's just me.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

When the Missiles Run Out

What happens if deterrence fails?

Luckey's answer begins with a number:

[In] US war gaming results — we run out of munitions somewhere between one day and two weeks in a fight with China.

Palmer LuckeyWSJ Podcasts

The range varies by source, but the direction is uniform.

Two weeks of pain doesn't mean much to a dictator who thinks in terms of centuries. If China believes that we can put up a good fight for a week or two and then it's gonna take us years to rebuild our industrial capacity, that's an easy trade for someone like [Xi] to make. Just get through the pain and come out the other side with the world's largest military standing unopposed and a US arsenal that is empty.

Palmer LuckeyWSJ Podcasts

His response is not a guarantee of victory but a strategy of layered doubt:

You can make them think that day one of the invasion is going to be too painful. You can make them think that day 100 of the invasion economically with global trade is going to be too painful. You can make them believe that day 1,000 they're still going to be fighting against an anti-Chinese insurgency in Taiwan armed by the United States covertly that makes Afghanistan look like a cakewalk.

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

The goal is not to promise China it would lose. It is to ensure that enough doubt rumbles around in their heads as they consider whether or not to launch that invasion.

On the specific question of whether the US needs to out-manufacture China, Luckey's answer is no — because China's military objective is narrow. The US and its allies only need enough capability to deny China access to Taiwan. And occupying Taiwan would be uniquely difficult.

Think about Afghanistan or Iraq, and you've got Bob building IEDs. Imagine that instead, he's the guy building your iPhone. Like, they are going to have a hard time taking and holding Taiwan.

Palmer LuckeyWest Point - The U.S. Military Academy

How to Win

Luckey believes America can win. But he's specific about why it isn't guaranteed: we cannot beat China with 500 million Americans. It will never happen. We'll become economically irrelevant. He invokes the Dutch Navy — once arguably the world's most powerful, but nobody destroyed it; the rest of the world simply advanced so much faster that the Dutch became strategically irrelevant.

Defector visas. Luckey advocates reviving Cold War-era programs to recruit Chinese technical talent, but reframes the politics. Don't call it merit-based immigration, he argues. Call it what it is:

It's pure red meat. We're gonna kick these guys' ass. We're gonna steal their people. We're gonna ruin their entire military.

Palmer LuckeyUpstream with Erik Torenberg

The math is simple. If we take a million of their tech people, that's it, you just wiped out their entire machine.

End the patent system as we know it. Luckey calls patents Chinese instruction manuals:

The founding fathers never predicted a world where the entire patent office could be downloaded every single morning and then ripped off and then used to fight a war against you.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

His solution: massively expand national security patents — classified filings that grant exclusivity without public disclosure, restricted to US citizens.

Build supply chains with fanatics. At Anduril, being in compliance with the law is quite easy, even when you are in fact still dependent on China. True independence requires people who will chase hidden dependencies through adhesive backing, rare mineral sourcing, and supplier scalability.

Find ideological fanatics who are going to go far beyond the law and then when the engineer says that, 'We did it. We got away from China.' The fanatic is gonna go in and say, 'No, you didn't. Here's, how they're going to get you still.'

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

Tariffs as national security. Luckey supports tariffs not as economic policy but as strategic insurance — because you destroy your entire ability to defend yourself without domestic manufacturing capacity. Take the free-trade logic to its conclusion, he argues, and the endpoint is absurd:

It probably is cheaper for us to have child slaves in Africa make everything for us. Why would you want a Trump tax on your car when it can be made by child slaves in the Congo?

Palmer LuckeyPirate Wires Podcast

Leverage America's innovation advantage. The Chinese system does not generate very many queen bees — it generates a lot of worker bees. Its educational tracking makes mid-career reinvention nearly impossible, producing capable specialists but few polymaths. And America's venture capital ecosystem provides something China's central planning cannot replicate. Luckey uses himself as the proof:

I was a 19-year-old kid working a minimum wage job with no college degree, living in a 19-foot camper trailer, and Peter Thiel gave me a million dollars when nobody else would to start Oculus...That's not happening in China. I'll tell you that.

Palmer LuckeyHoover Institution

DJI, the world's dominant drone company, succeeded because the government basically anointed them the chosen drone provider and gave them huge transfers of government technology, free land, free factories, and massive subsidies.

But America's innovation edge is not an automatic moat. On artificial intelligence, Luckey concedes the gap is extremely small, with China distilling American AI models, copying US technology, and leveraging open-source advancements into deployment far faster than the US manages. China doesn't need to innovate from zero if it can copy at speed.

Uncertainty

I was of the opinion that Putin was gonna do an extremely limited incursion into a handful of eastern towns full of people who really liked Russia, and he was just gonna declare victory. I was telling people, 'I just can't see Putin remotely trying to go for Kyiv.' And it was not four days later that that's exactly what happened.

Palmer LuckeyWest Point - The U.S. Military Academy

He cringes at the memory. Then uses it to make a point: the U.S. should not overfit to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. A war with China would look nothing like what's happening in Ukraine. And the historic American habit of building a military to fight the last war could repeat — except this time, we risk building a military designed to fight the last war that Ukraine fought.

Asked directly whether it's too late to compete with China, he gives a two-part answer. First, he believes it's not. And second:

Even if I'm wrong, this country needs people like me who believe that it is so. Our country needs people who believe things that are sometimes irrational or obsessed with a particular problem... Would you trust a lifeboat designer who thinks the Titanic is unsinkable? Would you trust an airbag designer who thinks that cars can't crash?

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

Asked why any of it matters to him personally?

I have this controversial opinion that people should have the right to self-govern.

Palmer LuckeyNew York Post