The Iranian regime's killer drones have been a menace in the Middle East for years. These drones are no longer a tolerable risk.

Anduril just became the first company in history to build an aircraft the US Air Force classified as a "Fighter Jet" without a human inside it. Not Lockheed. Not Boeing. Not Northrop. A private company founded by a kid who made his fortune selling VR headsets walked into the most consequential weapons program of the century and delivered an armed AI combat aircraft in 556 days. The F-35 has been running since 1994, costs $2.1 trillion through 2088, and delivers jets an average of 238 days late. Fury went from paper to carrying an AIM-120 air-to-air missile before most defense programs finish their first review meeting. Two days ago at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium, General Wilsbach showed the world a photograph that belongs in history books. The YFQ-44A Fury. No cockpit. No ejection seat. No pulse. Carrying a missile designed to kill manned aircraft. The same "F" letter worn by the F-15, the F-22, the F-35. Eighty years of air superiority taxonomy just got handed to a machine. Anduril is valued at $30.5 billion. Generated over $1 billion in revenue last year. Still private. Building a 5 million square foot factory to mass produce tens of thousands of autonomous systems. When this company goes public it will be the most significant defense IPO in a generation. The addressable market is not its backlog. The addressable market is every manned fighter program on earth that just became obsolete. Now here is what nobody is connecting. Every chip powering Fury's AI brain requires gallium and germanium. China produces 98% of the world's refined gallium and 60% of germanium. In December 2024 Beijing banned these minerals from export to US military end-users. That ban was never lifted. The November 2025 trade truce explicitly excluded military applications. It expires November 27, 2026. The minerals required to build America's autonomous air force are prohibited from export by the country it was designed to fight. The cost of the bullet just went to zero. The cost of the gun just went to Beijing. 556 days to armed flight. Zero days of mineral independence. 274 days until the truce expires. The arms race that decides the Pacific will not be won by whoever writes the best algorithm. It will be won by whoever controls the atoms that algorithms are made from.

I didn't know they still had catapults on the ground.