He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.
Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?
Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.
Let the guy have his little side modding hobby.
Starting a weapon company is different from owning a gun. You have control over that gun. Your weapons company, those weapons will be used to kill innocent people, there is no doubt. Weapons don't only get used for clean operations in war and there is almost always collateral damage.
It is a decision to start producing regardless of how well-intentioned it is. You will be profiting off of people being maimed and killed. Various people thought they solved war through new weapons only to create more effective killing machines. That's what WW1 was.
Palmer does not have to work on weapons nor justify making them. Building tech that will be used to murder people (and yes, it will happen) is a decision. Not funding his other hobby when he's getting money off US military contracts is hardly breaking his bank. He wants to build weapons? I don't want to buy his products. Easy.
Building more efficient weapons does not make us safer. Every dollar saved through "strength" and better weapons matters little to the parents who lost their kid when the most precise weapon in the world kills a bunch of schoolchildren like it did at the start of the Iran war. If you can't gaurantee your weapons won't get used for that, why would you build them? You cannot.
I thought Tony Stark already made this point.
The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them.
If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.
At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.
It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.
Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.
Hey, if your argument is that somebody has to build weapons, then that's your argument. I don't believe that's the situation and building weapons only encourages other countries to do the same. Notice virtually all of Russia's justifications are about US aggression, rightly or wrongly.
Is it more efficient than napalm? Great. It still will be used to kill people which I find to be gross, especially when innocents will die, too. If somebody has to build weapons and somebody has to fund said weapons maker, I'm glad it doesn't have to be me. Doesn't have to be Palmer either.
If killing people is gross (which I agree with), then we should kill the people that kill the people, right? Or should people that kill people run rampant, because nobody should ever kill them?
If they should be killed, then they should be killed with the minimum number of civilian casualties possible.
Countless millions of people died in World War 1 and World War 2. So many people died that we only have estimates, because there were too many to count individually.
If nobody pushed back against Japan, Germany, Russia, North Korea, China, Iraq, Iran and so on, the world would not be a better place. It would be a place where full on global war was legitimized as a viable global domination strategy. And global domination was in fact the goal back then. The problem is, we aren't sure that goal has ever gone away.
As a result, the entire world is a chess board with smaller countries being manipulated or compromised in various ways for some other grand strategy. For many years now we've accepted that there would largely be some sort of equilibrium or status quo. Except these smaller countries also have a mind of their own and their people universally reject being controlled and manipulated.
Russia with Ukraine. China with Taiwan. North Korea with South Korea. Venezuela with Guyana. Iran with Israel, Iraq, Yemen, etc. Now suddenly all of these countries are all the prowl almost simultaneously. If you only look at US action, look at the world we're reacting to. It's not as simple as some political propagandist hitjob soundbite on TV being the complete answer.
In a 2024 speech, Luckey said "Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom." ( https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/01/palmer-luckey-every-countr... ). He's said in a Bloomberg interview that "there are actually things I would like to build that the DoD would not use and would not deploy, that they do think are beyond the pale" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItLFpYha6Wc ), and he's said in an Axios interview that he would be willing to build nuclear weapons, as well as chemical weapons "in a specific vertical". He then elaborates by saying that it's a huge mistake that the US military isn't allowed to use tear gas in combat. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZfW3YTJ5Eg ) I'm having trouble believing that someone like this is inherently peaceful and should be getting multi-billion dollar contracts to manufacture drones that autonomously kill people. Maybe it's better to buy a Nintendo game from someone who doesn't think that the US is being held back by war crime treaties.
I've already seen all those quotes and interviews. You're mischaracterizing them.
He's probably not wrong that you have to be a certain kind of person that can stomach the inherent violence involved, that doesn't mean you want to kill innocent civilians. Yet you do have to be the kind of person who understands that civilian casualties can happen. Life is not kind to the mind that is fragile to the realities of nature. That's accurate.
As for nuclear weapons, he explicitly said he thinks they have done a lot to stabilize the world, which does put some limiters on how extreme war can be, because there is an extra red line that actually matters.
When it comes to chemical weapons, he already stated that no he wouldn't create biological or chemical weapons, but he thinks that there should be a special exception for non-lethal means like tear gas and pepper spray. It's like, a woman can take pepper spray out of her purse and use it against a criminal, but the US military can't use pepper spray to suppress enemies without killing them? Killing people is a more viable option than suppressing them? I think that's the argument he's making.
You should actually watch the stuff you link.
We're talking about a company whose primary customer is the US military. Said military is currently involved in a pointless war of aggression. It has carried out unprovoked attacks on at least two other countries just this year alone. When was the last time the it was used in self defense?
"Peace through strength" is a fine motto, but you can't claim that motto and then turn around and base your business on selling to an entity that routinely starts non-defensive wars.
If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe.
You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?
Come out and say what you want to say. Don't give me this nonsense about how I have no idea what's going on and you won't even deign to explain where you disagree.
It is completely logically unsupportable that the war is pointless, so your claim is so flat and empty that there is no need to do anything other than point out that weakness in your claim.
Go do a couple searches real quick and see what some of the points of the war may be. Many of them will be incorrect or incomplete, but you will come back with at least some reasons that exist.
I was talking about the war with Iran. Is that what you're referring to here? Just making sure, because this is a pretty wild thing to say about that particular war.
Sure, I can do searches and find people giving various reasons for the war. What's your point? Am I not allowed to disagree with people? If I can do a couple searches real quick and find some people saying A, I'm not allowed to claim not-A?
I don't see how logic dictates that there's a point to this war. I understand that some people believe the war is being carried out to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon or whatever, but how does it "logically" follow that there is necessarily a point to it?
Ok, so that's one reason. It's not the only reason, because we don't commit so many assets for simply one reason. It usually requires many simultaneous overlapping reasons for us to do that. It is not a simple careless whimsical thing to send that much military to a place for no reason.
So let's start with the nuclear thing.
Russia is a bad actor. It treats its own people poorly, doesn't have a free press, doesn't allow free speech, it blocks a bunch of the internet so it's harder for people to find the truth. You get thrown in prison because they don't like you. Under the Soviet Union they killed millions of their own people in stupid famines from poor authoritarian decision making. They throw you at the meat grinder of the front lines of poor wars and destroy everything, because they do not value human life. They got nukes to make their bad behavior invulnerable. Ok, so fine, the world is a little worse off, but that's Russia.
Russia spread communism to Korea, since they have had a long-term strategic interest in Korea as a basing for attacking Japan in order to control more warm water ports. Japan and Russia have had conflict around this since the 1800s. It's not new. So Korean war. Now North Korea has nukes. They make their people suffer. The world is a little worse off, but that's North Korea.
Russia spread communism to China for many reasons too. China killed countless millions of people through poor authoritarian decision making too, through yet more famines. They kill any of their own people who don't agree. They took over Tibet by force. They execute more of their own people than the entire world executes, combined. They started building up the largest military mankind has ever seen and now they have nukes. Now that they feel invulnerable, they engage in the largest influence and interference campaign in world history, manipulating countries at scale and spreading extreme propaganda worldwide. It is all pervasive in social media comments, YouTube and elsewhere. I've seen this shift happen personally, slowly. It is not organic. So fine, the world is a little worse off. That's China.
Russia tried to spread communism to Iran and helped the Islamic radicals overthrow the government, thinking the communists could have some control afterwards or exist as an alternative party. Instead the Islamic revolutionaries kill thousands of communists to say, "no, go away." Now we have an Iran that is explicitly friendly with Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela, learning from North Korea's nuclear program, sending its scientists there. It engages in Islamic revolution in a way similar to how the Soviet Union was trying to spread communism before World War 2, with armed activist militant communist groups. They infiltrated Yemen and that caused the war there. They infiltrated Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq. Afghanistan HATES Iran, because of their attempts to infiltrate it with their radicals. Iraq went to war with Iran, because Iran was engaging in revolution inside their country. Now Iran had built up a huge conventional military just like its friends Russia, China and North Korea, and aims to get a nuclear weapon to make their bad behavior invulnerable.
Iran can't be compared the same way as other countries that have nuclear programs, because most countries aren't Russia, China and North Korea which Iran is patterning itself after and buys military hardware from.
We're done with "so fine, the world is a little worse off". This is domino theory. This is salami tactics, slicing little bits of the world one at a time until the steamroll is so strong it has passed the tipping point and physics no longer offers a way for you to push back the tide.
That is only 1 reason for attacking Iran and it is highly abbreviated. There are dozens of other reasons for attacking Iran, defending Ukraine and deterring China from attacking Taiwan. Dozens of other reasons for capturing Maduro and trying to reform Cuba.
The US doesn't want to have to do any of this. We'd rather just be left alone and leave others alone, but that is not the world we live in. There are people that seek global domination and they are not the ones that want you to have freedom of speech or value your life.