Anduril founder touts defense

‘FORTRESS OF FREEDOM’: Taiwan should convince Beijing that the cost of winning a war against Taiwan is ‘insanely high’ and ‘not worth winning,’ Palmer Luckey said

• By Lee I-chia / Staff reporter

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Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey yesterday told a forum in Taipei that “freedom is the most powerful weapon that Taiwan has.”

Luckey, who was sanctioned by China last year due to his defense firm’s weapons and drone sales to Taiwan, made the comments during his keynote speech on Responding to Emerging Threats and Modern Warfare, which was part of a discussion at the Resilient Taiwan for Sustainable Democracy International Forum of the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee hosted by the Presidential Office at the Grand Hyatt Taipei.

Talking about building his first company and seeing Chinese companies take US-developed technologies and them being protected by their government, Luckey said that he realized what China cannot copy is “a country where people are free to improvise, experiment, to ask, act without permission and come up with a lot of this technology in the first place.”

Anduril Industries founder Palmer Luckey speaks at a forum focusing on whole-of-society defense resilience in Taipei yesterday.

Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters

“Freedom usually gets described as the thing that Taiwan is defending, but I think freedom is the most powerful weapon that Taiwan has,” he said.

Luckey said Taiwan can use this advantage and turn it into resilience, not only economically, but also militarily, and change how Taiwan fights and how Beijing calculates its victory.

Explaining the three aspects of resilience that Taiwan can work on, he said “operational resilience” is not about making scientific breakthroughs that change the nature of technology, but figuring out how to integrate, assemble, mass produce them cost-effectively and use them effectively on the battlefield.

“The kinds of technologies that Taiwan needs to steel itself against adversaries’ assaults are already abundant,” Luckey said, adding that Taiwan is already a leader of many technologies in the industrial and consumer realm, but it needs to apply them to defense.

Luckey said Taiwan needs to ask itself “what the final stage of Taiwan’s deterrence will look like, one that will persist for years, decades and centuries, and start working towards that steady state today.”

He said Taiwan can already make cost-effective and high-quality machine tools, semiconductors, precision components, advanced composites and others, but these production lines need to become increasingly interchangeable with weapons production at volumes measured in the millions.

Luckey said Taiwan’s domestic demand is not enough to sustain the defense industrial base that it needs for a deterrence level that is unstoppable, and that it should make countries depend on the nation for advanced capabilities the way the world already depends on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co for commercial capabilities.

“The goal should be for everyone in the world, whether they’re buying from you or just afraid of you, to see a label that says, ‘designed in Taiwan, made in Taiwan,’ on a weapons system, and immediately understand what it means,” he said.

He said this “fortress of freedom” can only be built together by the people from the inside — to convince Beijing that the cost of winning is insanely high and there is no victory in invading Taiwan, as what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) believes would be a short military operation, would actually be the beginning of a fight that could continue for years.

If Taiwan can reach a durable, shared view of its own future, even though it might look slightly different for everyone, and if the CCP understands that this view can survive any political fight, disagreement, campaign or economic coercion, Beijing would know this war could be winnable, but is not worth winning, he said.

Asked by moderator National Security Council Deputy Secretary-General Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) to assess China’s military buildup and capabilities, Luckey said the seizure of Taiwan is China’s major strategic objective, so it has been preparing well, but “Taiwan has a lot of home advantages.”

“It is going to be much harder for China to fight on your shores than it will be for you. You don’t need to go and invade China. You just need to make it so painful for them and for them to know that it’s so painful that they don’t come for you,” he said. “I think that that is absolutely a doable task.”

As China spends about eight to 10 times more on defense than Taiwan, Taiwan must “cheat” in fighting back, he said. “You can’t fight fair. You need to come up with things that are more asymmetric… You need to have no honor in fighting.”

Nobody in Taiwan should believe it is a hopeless fight, and that those who say it have a reason to believe it, including many who are funded by adversaries, who want people in Taiwan to give up hope and want to take away their right to self-determination, he said.

If it is an easy win for the adversaries, they would not be flooding social media with ideas of helplessness to make people believe nothing can be done, he added.