Anduril’s Real War Is With Itself

According to Wired's reporting this week, a test engineer at Anduril's Mississippi rocket motor factory was assembling an electrical igniter when it misfired. He was wearing rubber gloves not rated for fire protection. No job safety analysis had been conducted. No safety shield was in place. The flash burned his right hand badly enough that his boss drove him to a hospital rather than call emergency services. His partner posted a photo on Facebook of him sleeping with his hand wrapped in gauze, soliciting donations because the family would lose its sole income while he recovered.

This happened at Anduril Industries, the $30.5 billion defense startup that wants to build weapons the way Silicon Valley builds apps. The engineer was one of more than 7,500 people the company has hired since 2017 to prove that rockets, drones, and missiles can be made faster and cheaper than Lockheed Martin or Boeing will permit. That mission is not going smoothly.

Wired reported that Anduril's Mississippi rocket motor factory opened with half the required equipment missing, that its Atlanta drone plant had key engineers quit under management pressure, and that more than a dozen of its drone boats failed during a Navy exercise off California last year. The account, based on interviews with 37 former and current employees and contractors, including more than 20 with direct knowledge of Anduril's production lines, describes a company discovering that solid rocket motors are not an iPhone supply chain problem. Anduril's spokesperson declined to respond to specific questions about the incidents, saying the story relied on former employees and excluded the company's perspective.

According to Wired's reporting, the test engineer at McHenry, Mississippi was building igniters for propellant that Anduril planned to use in an array of missiles for the U.S. Navy, Army, and allied militaries. He had come from a company that made outdoor gear. After the injury, Anduril says it improved safety procedures, including issuing fire-safe gloves. He returned to work about six weeks later.

Anduril was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality pioneer who previously founded Oculus, along with Trae Stephens, who serves as executive chairman, and Brian Schimpf, its chief executive. The company has raised more than $6 billion from venture firms including Founders Fund, run by Peter Thiel, and Thrive Capital, run by Josh Kushner. It operates roughly 30 offices across 18 U.S. states and eight countries, according to Wired, and has delivered submarines, missiles, and drones to the U.S. military and allied governments. It also recently delivered the first batch of nearly 300 Altius attack drones to Taiwan in an estimated $300 million deal, with Luckey present for the August 2025 delivery. The Taiwan Ministry of Defense confirmed the delivery.

But production has repeatedly fallen short of Anduril's own targets. At McHenry, where Anduril acquired a startup called Adranos in 2023 to develop a lithium-laced rocket propellant, the company built a mass production facility called Roberto that was supposed to demonstrate it could make solid rocket motors at scale. According to Wired's reporting, on July 1, 2025, construction crews handed over the keys. Site leaders went to Buffalo Wild Wings to celebrate. The morning of July 2, the head of production was let go and escorted out of the complex.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony hours later, Anduril executives stood onstage alongside U.S. Senator Roger Wicker and other dignitaries. Behind black curtains, much of the required equipment was still in crates. According to Wired, which cited former employees present at the event, about half the necessary tools were in place and working. The facility had no way of dispensing chemicals into mixing buckets to produce propellant. No way to make casts or manufacture and install nozzles or igniters for the motors. All 700-plus test motors Anduril had fired to that point came from a separate prototyping lab on the same campus, where engineers provided close oversight for each one. No California executives attended the ceremony. Trae Stephens did a television interview from San Francisco. Workers at the site described feeling dismissed. One said it made them feel unimportant.

Keith Flynn, a former Tesla manager who is Anduril's senior vice president of manufacturing, brought in new leadership after the production head's departure. Problems persisted. According to Wired's reporting, which cited three people familiar with the incident, machines from supplier Coperion, meant to automate chemical dosing for propellant, began malfunctioning and oozing an inert hardening chemical when emergency stop buttons failed to work. No one was injured but the machines were inoperable until safety and quality checks were completed. Coperion had previously told Anduril that its equipment had not been designed for that application. A former Anduril employee said they were unaware of anyone who would want to use that type of machine with energetics. Coperion declined to comment.

The incidents at McHenry are part of a broader pattern across Anduril's manufacturing operations. In Atlanta, where Anduril makes Altius drones through a facility acquired from a startup called Area-I in 2021, former employees described to Wired a culture of intense pressure after former Uber executive Burhan Muzaffar was elevated to oversee the drone and eventually rocket businesses. One person who left said the stress made them physically ill. Another said they began looking for ways to quit while paying back their signing bonus. Engineers including several key leaders departed, multiple people said. Components sometimes took months to arrive when design changes required different parts, as Anduril was a relatively small buyer in the defense-industrial world and could not jump supply chain queues.

Anduril's drone systems have also failed in military testing. According to Reuters, an Altius drone nosedived 8,000 feet during an Air Force test at Eglin Air Force Base in November 2025. A second Altius spiraled to earth in a separate test. Reuters also reported that a Ghost X drone spun out of control before crash landing near soldiers during a U.S. Army exercise in Hohenfels, Germany, in January 2025. TechCrunch reported that more than a dozen Anduril drone boats failed during a Navy exercise off the California coast in May 2025, with sailors warning of safety violations and potential loss of life, and that an August test of its Anvil counter-drone system caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon. Anduril has said the point of testing is to identify issues, consistent with its stated philosophy of failing fast.

The company's financial projections have also compressed significantly. According to Wired, Anduril now expects profit margins of approximately 3 percent annually, about a tenth of what it initially told investors it would achieve. Anduril disputes aspects of the Wired reporting. The company says it has delivered real products to real customers, and that some of its lines, including Sentry border surveillance towers and Roadrunner missiles designed to intercept airborne threats, have performed in combat and field conditions.

The scale of what Anduril is attempting becomes clearer in Ohio. The company is building Arsenal-1, a roughly $1 billion multipurpose factory outside Columbus, with the goal of producing its Fury uncrewed fighter jet at rates of up to 150 annually by the end of this year, along with Barracuda and Roadrunner missiles and at least one classified product. The state of Ohio and an economic development group approved nearly $800 million in grants and tax credits for the project, with Anduril expecting to hire 4,000 people by 2035. The project has drawn protests over water supply concerns and the impact on local communities, and has fueled comparisons to Intel's delayed Ohio chip plant, which pushed its timeline back five years to 2030 or beyond.

Anduril has already begun initial hires for the Fury program, according to LinkedIn posts, despite not yet having a production contract for it. Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey has noted that the Fury uncrewed fighter jet went from prototype contract to test flight in 556 days, which he says is faster than any fighter plane since the Korean War. But General Atomics, Anduril's competitor for an Air Force contract to build similar drones, held its test flight two months earlier. Roughly half of Anduril's product lines have won mass production contracts so far, according to Wired.

Anthony Di Stasio, a former Pentagon official who oversaw a $14.3 million grant to the McHenry plant in the final days of the Biden administration, said he was not surprised by the difficulties. He said he had calculated 2028 for mass production, discounting the company's public timeline. Everyone says they can do everything right away, but they cannot, he told Wired. This is just normal growing pains of trying to rebuild manufacturing in the U.S. I warned them it was going to be three to five years before they were competitive.

Anduril has the funding, the contracts, and a government client that is deeply motivated to see an alternative to the traditional defense primes. Whether it can bridge the gap between what it has demonstrated in prototypes and what it needs to deliver at volume is the central question for the company. The test engineer in Mississippi, who went back to work after six weeks, was working on one small part of that answer. Whether Anduril can scale the rest is what its customers, investors, and competitors are watching.