Anduril’s Real War Is With Itself

Anduril’s missile motor factory near the Gulf Coast of Mississippi already seemed to be running behind schedule when, about a year ago, a young engineer scorched his hand. The employee, whose previous job had been at a company that made outdoor gear, was assembling one of Anduril’s first electrical igniters, known around the factory as a “white hot.” It was a small but crucial part in the $30.5 billion defense startup’s plan to transform the design, assembly, and sale of military technology. The “white hot” would light a test sample of Anduril’s propellant—a rubbery substance meant to power an array of different US and allied missiles.

Before the injury, the engineer’s team hadn’t conducted a job safety analysis or mandated the use of a safety shield. He wore rubber gloves not rated for fire protection. When the igniter misfired in a flash of white, the worker’s right hand suffered burns.

Local emergency services didn’t receive a call; the engineer’s boss drove him to a hospital, one person says. A photo his partner posted showed him sleeping with his hand wrapped in gauze. She solicited donations on Facebook, saying the family would lose its sole source of income while he recovered and visited Alabama for checkups.

The igniter incident is among a number of safety concerns and project challenges at Anduril’s manufacturing operations that WIRED can reveal here for the first time. This investigation is based on interviews with 37 former and current employees and contractors, including more than 20 with direct knowledge of Anduril's production lines. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing nondisclosure agreements and fear of retaliation from Anduril or current employers.

Shannon Prior, an Anduril spokesperson, said on Wednesday it would not be productive to respond to WIRED’s questions about the incidents and details described in this story and declined to do so. “Upon reviewing the fact-check questions, we have identified claims that are inaccurate or misleading, reflecting a reporting process that relied heavily on former employees while excluding the company’s perspective,” she wrote in a statement. “At this stage, responding to individual assertions would not address the underlying issues with how the story was developed.”

Prior added, “If WIRED chooses to publish claims that are inaccurate or misleading, we will correct the record publicly.”

Like Elon Musk at SpaceX with rockets, Anduril’s leaders want to prove that weapons can be made faster, cheaper, and better than at legacy behemoths like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. But parts of Anduril have faced what some of the sources view as process dysfunction, management turnover, and deadline pressure beyond what they consider typical of defense and tech companies. Others describe the reality as standard growing pains. By either interpretation, the workers’ accounts reveal some of the obstacles Anduril has faced as it pursues what it views as a modern approach to making the tools of war.

In Anduril’s portrayal, traditional defense companies typically don’t build something until the customer has specified exactly what it’s looking for. By contrast, Anduril has developed about a dozen different prototype products, and acquired the startups behind a dozen more, without always knowing for sure that someone will buy them. The company can do this because of support from venture capitalists including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital—more than $6 billion so far, with another $4 billion likely on the way. Its annual R&D spending is on the order of Lockheed Martin’s $2 billion last year, says Paul Kwan, managing director at investment firm General Catalyst and an observer on Anduril’s board. “That's crazy,” Kwan says.

Though Anduril executives expect the company to remain unprofitable for years given the upfront spending, it is aiming to double its valuation to $60 billion, roughly on par with L3Harris, one of the top 10 US defense contractors, which has 10 times more annual revenue. Nearly a decade into Anduril’s journey to disrupt the military-industrial complex, its more than 7,500 employees have delivered at least four Dive uncrewed submarines, several hundred Sentry border surveillance towers, hundreds of Roadrunner missiles to destroy airborne threats, and a couple thousand drones small enough to fit into a pickup truck. (And that’s not including software systems and classified orders.)

The company’s 10 or so factories, half a dozen test sites, and around 30 offices span at least 18 US states and territories and eight countries abroad, WIRED found based on public data and interviews with people who have spent time at the sites. In anticipation of orders growing, Anduril is expanding. A billion-dollar R&D facility is planned near its Southern California headquarters. A billion-dollar multipurpose factory known as Arsenal-1 is under construction outside Columbus, Ohio. Anduril expects to hire 4,000 people there by 2035, an Ohio record that led the state and an economic development group to approve nearly $800 million in grants and tax credits. Anduril has said it tries to keep its operations deliberately human, shunning the expense, time, and inflexibility of automating production.

Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality pioneer who founded Anduril in 2017, has said the goal is to be agile, providing cutting-edge software and products just when militaries need them while saving taxpayers money through innovative design and production. That fits with what secretary of defense Pete Hegseth told Andurilians during a pep talk at the company’s Rhode Island factory last month: “We believe that the 85 percent, 90 percent solution tomorrow in the hands of a war fighter is far better than a 100 percent, exquisite solution five years from now.” The US and Israel’s war against Iran has underscored Luckey’s pitch. Cheap Iranian drones are hitting oil fields, diplomatic outposts, and military targets, while stockpiles of expensive and slow-to-make US weapons are reportedly depleting.

President Donald Trump is proposing the largest increase in defense spending since the Korean War, and the Pentagon is demanding better value from suppliers. It’s the perfect moment for the so-called “neoprime” to boost production. But to scale up to the flexible assembly line that Anduril executives are envisioning for Ohio will be a new feat. And descriptions from its existing factories—not only in McHenry but also in Atlanta and Morrisville, North Carolina—show the company has its work cut out.

Before Anduril got into the business of making solid rocket motors for missiles, it first tried to buy one off the shelf. According to CEO Brian Schimpf, a “traditional” supplier told the company there was a 24-month backlog—and that it wouldn’t take the business anyway. So, in mid-2023, Anduril acquired a startup called Adranos, born out of research at Purdue University. It had a recipe for a lithium-laced propellant that it claimed would offer a more efficient and less toxic burn. In hopes of commercializing the research, Adranos had set up at a mothballed post-9/11 armor plant on the edge of McHenry, in a county of roughly 20,000 people known for sawing trees into power poles. Viewing the business as potentially highly profitable, Anduril paid a sum large enough that one of the Adranos cofounders began driving multiple pricey cars, including a white Ferrari, to work, sources tell WIRED. (Reached by phone, the Adranos cofounder declined to comment.) Anduril then set about investing tens of millions of dollars and felling trees to expand the site.

Where larger competitors Northrop Grumman and L3Harris separate the steps of their propellant production across multiple buildings, Anduril planned to use unique machinery and processes to make the material in a single building, to be called Roberto, several people say. The approach promised more motors faster but could carry risks. Northrop has claim