Steelman Press
Palmer Luckey

Nobody Else Is Coming

Why is a tech billionaire personally delivering missiles to Taiwan?

Preface

In 1909, a British journalist named Norman Angell published a bestseller arguing that war between great powers had become economically impossible. Trade was too intertwined. The costs were too obvious. Rational nations would never fight. Five years later, they did.

Palmer Luckey keeps returning to this story. He's told it on the All-In Podcast, at Pepperdine, at an Anduril company talk, and on Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. Not because the history is obscure — it isn't — but because the delusion it represents keeps repeating. He describes reading the 1909 text and finding it indistinguishable from a globalist economist think tank report from 2020, using identical language about how economic interdependence would preclude any conflict. The "Golden Arches Hypothesis" — Tom Friedman's theory that no two countries with McDonald's would ever go to war — held until February 2022. Then Russia invaded Ukraine.

Luckey founded Anduril Industries because he believed this was going to happen. Not Ukraine specifically, but something like it. The world had convinced itself that history was over, that trade made war irrational, that rational actors would always choose profit over conflict. He rejected every premise. He was called the "worst person in Silicon Valley" for it. Bloomberg labeled Anduril the most controversial tech company in America when it had barely two dozen employees. He built it anyway.

Now he is making the same argument about Taiwan.

The Theory of War That Drives Everything

To understand what Luckey thinks about Taiwan, you have to understand what he thinks about war in general:

Warfare between nation states typically starts when one or both sides misunderstand who is going to win the conflict... That's why it's so important to not be evenly matched with your enemy. Evenly matching your enemy is what leads to the most dangerous form of conflict.

Palmer LuckeyPepperdine University

Wars don't start because nations want to fight. They start because nations think they'll win. If both sides know the outcome in advance, the weaker nation typically capitulates rather than fight. The most dangerous scenario is parity — when both sides believe victory is within reach.

The goal, then, is not to make war costly. Cost is acceptable to a regime that thinks in terms of centuries. The goal is to make defeat certain in the adversary's own calculations. Not expensive. Certain. And if you build your deterrence strategy on the assumption that your adversary shares your values, you will build the wrong thing.

What China Believes

On Bloomberg in 2024, Luckey was asked how a China-Taiwan conflict might play out:

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.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Originals

Then, quietly:

I'm probably gonna eat these words, but if China ends up invading Taiwan, I'm gonna feel like we've really failed in our mission.

Palmer LuckeyBloomberg Originals

He takes Xi Jinping's public statements seriously. On stage in Taiwan, he catalogued a decade of them — the military should be built to fight, reunification is inevitable, there will be a great struggle with the West — and argued these represent genuine intent, not posturing. Chinese state media has threatened to destroy Tokyo with nuclear weapons if Japan sends a single warship to aid Taiwan.

Behind the words, there is a buildup. China has constructed the world's largest navy, plans to build thousands of hypersonic and cruise missiles within a decade, and has required civilian vessels like car ferries to be built to military specifications, including deck strength sufficient to carry tanks. These ferries constitute a "ghost fleet" — a civilian shipping fleet that operates openly in peacetime but can be instantly converted into military assets during wartime. China possesses roughly 300 times more shipbuilding capacity than the United States.

Why would Xi accept the economic damage of a war? Because for him, economic productivity is a means to an end, which is the reunification of China for the first time in 3,000 years. The evidence that authoritarian regimes weigh cost differently is not theoretical. Russia is losing 7,000 men a week and Putin's approval has gone up. In the United States, that casualty rate would end any politician's career in a single week.

If an invasion comes, Luckey predicts it will be preceded by a propaganda campaign: Taiwan is a US proxy state, the Taiwanese people want reunification, the invasion will free brothers and sisters from Western imperialist rule. Everything omitted — Taiwan's higher standard of living, higher literacy, higher earnings, higher productivity, and flourishing democracy. Then the grim prediction:

They're gonna lie to people to get them to do what they want, not tell them the truth. And then they're gonna make a nice monument to the two or three million people who die in that amphibious assault and call them heroes.

Palmer LuckeyPepperdine University

But Luckey doesn't think it starts with an invasion. Anduril operates under what it calls "China 27" — an internal policy assuming that anything the company builds must be ready by 2027. The more likely opening move, in his view, is something harder to respond to:

It's much more likely that they do something like a blockade. So they'll come up with some pretense... and I worry about them kind of boiling the frog. They blockade one port, and then two ports, and then the airports, and then the people of Taiwan are running out of money, running out of food, but you've boiled the frog enough where there's never a point where Taiwan really wants to fire the first shot.

Palmer LuckeyThe Joe Rogan Experience

Close one port over a customs dispute. Then another. At what point does the US start World War III over a trade disagreement?

Why No One Is Coming to Save Taiwan

Unlike Ukraine, which could receive weapons through neighboring Poland, Taiwan is an island. There are no neighboring countries willing to facilitate arms transfers at existential risk to themselves. Once a conflict begins, resupply becomes nearly impossible. Whatever Taiwan has on the island when the crisis starts is what it fights with.

And what the US can actually provide is far less than most people assume. Taiwan currently sits on $20 billion in unfulfilled US arms orders for systems it needs urgently. The broader picture is worse: US war gaming shows the country would exhaust critical precision munitions somewhere between one day and two weeks in a conflict with China. And as Luckey notes, two weeks of pain doesn't mean much to a dictator who thinks in terms of centuries — if China can get through the pain and come out the other side with a depleted American arsenal, that's an easy trade.

There is also a psychological dependence on last-minute solutions:

There's a uniquely American delusion, probably from our own Hollywood films, that we can solve any problem at the last second... That isn't how Taiwan is gonna go. There is no deus ex machina. We know exactly what's gonna happen. The war planners have figured out exactly one of several scenarios it's going to go.

Palmer LuckeyAll-In Podcast

Luckey's alternative is what he calls becoming the "world's gun store" rather than the world's police — providing allies with the weapons, intelligence, and industrial capacity to fight for themselves rather than deploying American troops to fight on their behalf. On The Free Press, he traced this conviction back to a childhood conversation with his mother about protecting your sister on the playground, then set it against the political reality that Americans no longer have the appetite for sustained overseas military commitments. The gun store isn't his ideal. It's what remains possible.

But a gun store has to keep things in stock. It has to deliver on time. And it can't tell customers how and when to use what they've bought. The US, he argues, fails on every count — expensive, late, never in inventory, and loaded with usage restrictions that push allies toward Russian, Chinese, or Indian suppliers instead.

Which brings him to the core of his argument: Taiwan must build its own.

The Industrial Argument No One Else Makes

Small island, massive adversary, 300-to-1 shipbuilding disadvantage. The conventional reading is grim. Luckey replaces it with a question most analysts never ask: what does Taiwan already have that it isn't using for defense?

Taiwan is one of five, maybe six countries in the world that could credibly build their own industrial base to build weapons of their own design, own components from scratch, from nothing, that can go toe to toe with China. You basically have, like, the United States, Japan, Korea, maybe Germany on a good day, and Taiwan.

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

Most people hear "Taiwan" and think "semiconductors." Luckey hears "Taiwan" and thinks weapons platform. The gap between where Taiwan is and where it needs to be is not a gap in capability. It is a gap in application:

They need to be using their own national industry to build not just semiconductors for export, but semiconductors for defense. Not just censors for your smartphones and for digital cameras, but missile seekers. Not just carbon fiber bicycles, but carbon fiber cruise missiles.

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

He calls this a "techno-industrial renaissance in national defense built on top of its renaissance in consumer electronics." The skills for building phones, cameras, and laptops are exactly the same skills needed to build large-scale autonomous munitions and attack drones — and the same people and manufacturing lines can seamlessly move from one to the other.

Anduril is already testing this. The company has opened an office in Taiwan, is building a local engineering team, and is working with Taiwanese contract manufacturers on munitions and aircraft platforms. Their first full manufacturing quote from a Taiwanese ODM came in barely more expensive than the US-made version. On Joe Rogan, Luckey mentioned that he had personally traveled to Taiwan to deliver missiles and weapons systems designed to counter a Chinese invasion. Luckey is, of course, a defense CEO whose company profits from the arms sales he advocates. He addresses this directly — "I have plenty of money. I sold my first company for billions of dollars. I don't need to work... Defense, you make a lot less money for each hour of work you put in than you can make in tech or media." The reader can weigh that.

Taiwan doesn't need to match China's output. It needs to make itself, in Luckey's repeated phrase, "too prickly to step on." At West Point, he explained why China's manufacturing advantage doesn't guarantee victory. The bottleneck isn't total missile count — it's the amphibious landing itself. China must land on one of a handful of viable beachheads and then sustain an occupation for years against a hostile, technologically sophisticated population.

Think about Afghanistan or Iraq, and you've got Bob building IEDs. Imagine that instead, he's the guy building your iPhone.

Palmer LuckeyWest Point - The U.S. Military Academy

There is one significant vulnerability in this vision, and Luckey acknowledges it: Taiwan's consumer electronics supply chain is heavily dependent on mainland China for chemicals, minerals, and critical feedstock. Unlike Ukraine, which maintained supply lines through Europe even after the war started, Taiwan under blockade would have no such option. Building defense supply chains entirely independent of mainland China is an urgent prerequisite — and one that must be solved before a crisis, not during one.

The Psychological War Before the Shooting War

They need to believe that they could win that fight and that there are decisions they could make that would cause them to win it. Because the moment that they think they can't win, that's the moment China has won.

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

Deterrence, for Luckey, is ultimately about self-perception. If Taiwan absorbs the narrative that defeat is inevitable, the invasion becomes unnecessary. He recognizes the same dynamic operating inside China — a regime whose most effective strategy against dissent is convincing people that resistance is futile, fueling cynicism about political change. He notes that only about 3% of the American population supported the Revolution, and the best way to prevent that 3% from emerging is to convince them their efforts are pointless. Learned helplessness is a weapon, and it can be deployed against an entire nation.

His counter-weapon is a vision of Taiwan winning so decisively that China's own generals can't hide the result. In his address in Taiwan, he described two scenarios. In the first, Taiwan repels a 2029 invasion using AI-powered drones and mass-produced missiles. But the second scenario is the one he actually wants:

Xi asks his top generals to analyze what an invasion of Taiwan would look like... This time they run the numbers and they report back to him. A new result has emerged different from their previous war games, Taiwan wins decisively... Everyone would have to agree that what Xi wants would come at too high a price because of the strength of Taiwan's defense, that it simply cannot be done, that China must give up without firing a shot.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

The ideal outcome is not victory. It is an enemy who never attacks because his own simulations tell him he'll lose.

What This Fight Is Actually About

On a Japanese television interview — not a defense conference, not a Washington think tank — Luckey was asked about his support for Taiwan and reframed the entire issue:

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

His answer draws on libertarian principles of self-determination at the individual level and the national level. He extends the same principle to Japan, to Ukraine, to anywhere the pattern repeats. In his framing, the question isn't whether defending Taiwan serves American strategic interests — though he believes it does. The question is whether any nation has the right to overrule a democracy by force. This is why he never asks the question most foreign policy realists would consider essential — what terms could Taiwan accept? In Luckey's framework, the terms are Taiwan's to set, and only Taiwan's.

He has put something personal behind this conviction. Luckey has been sanctioned by the CCP, Russia, and Belarus, and he keeps the notification framed on his office wall. He calls it a trophy. When he's working and feeling tired, he looks up at it and smiles.

The Paradox of Doing This Well

If Luckey succeeds — if Anduril's weapons and Taiwan's industrial mobilization produce a deterrent so convincing that China never attacks — no one will know it worked:

The more successful I am in my job, the more likely it is that everyone gets to keep thinking I'm a fucking idiot. If I was perfectly successful in my job, we would have successfully deterred Russia's invasion of Ukraine... everyone'd say, 'Man, Palmer sure wasted all his time, didn't he?'

Palmer LuckeyThe Free Press

The longer a military goes without being seen winning a fight, the more people forget it deterred the fight in the first place. Successful deterrence erodes the public support needed to maintain deterrence. Veterans die or age into irrelevance. The stories fade. And the next generation concludes — as every generation seems to conclude — that war is a thing of the past, that the "end of history" has finally arrived, that Norman Angell was right all along.

Then the cycle breaks again.

"It's Just You. It's Just Me."

On August 23, 2025, Luckey stood in front of a Taiwanese audience. He told them there is no secret arsenal of technology waiting to save anyone — not in the US, not in Taiwan. He told them the work is corrosive, that when things go wrong people die and when things go right people die, and that there is no moral high ground in leaving this work to people who are less ethical or less competent. He told them Taiwan's secret weapon is its people who understand that the freedom to choose their future is what will keep them safe in the long run.

There's nobody else. It's just you, it's just me. So answer the call, dare to build, and never yield in the defense of your country and its freedoms.

Palmer LuckeyfOx Hsiao

All excerpts sourced via Pod Nebula. Drawn from Palmer Luckey's appearances on the All-In Podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, Bloomberg Originals, The Free Press, fOx Hsiao, Pepperdine University, West Point, Upstream with Erik Torenberg, IMPAULSIVE, Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, The Logan Bartlett Show, Special Competitive Studies Project, TV Tokyo BIZ Digest, WSJ Podcasts, Anduril Industries, Core Memory, and the Hoover Institution (2021–2026).