Dec 2, 2025
Madeline Hart is co-author with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar on the forthcoming book Mobilize, coming March 2026.
Last week The Wall Street Journal and Reuters published pieces critiquing Anduril’s practice of testing its weapons to failure, the press’s latest go at attacking technology companies working in the national interest. (You might recall the predictably negative coverage of many a SpaceX test launch, from Falcon 1 to Starship.)
It wasn’t always this way. The press once recognized that developing frontier technology is hard, and it’s better to have an explosion on the test range than the battlefield. During the Cold War, testing to failure helped America build the best weapons faster than the Soviet Union. Media coverage reflected this reality in order to help, rather than hurt, America’s interests.
lulu cheng meservey shares the never-before-revealed playbook that shaped Anduril’s early communication strategy and helped its founders turn the company from black sheep to household name
palmer luckey on defense contracting, anduril's new weapons factory arsenal, the US industrial base, heretical ideas, the media, and more
new threats on the horizon, subterranean war and the challenge of gaza, troubleshooting the next pandemic, manufacturing, chips, trade, international contracting, and the business of defense