By Fitriyani @Adobe Stock
In “Moneyball Military: An Affordable, Achievable, and Capable Alternative to Deter China,” Christian D. Brose, currently the Chief Strategy Officer of Anduril Industries, advocates for a shift toward affordable, scalable, autonomous systems to counter China’s military advancements. This vision aligns with Anduril Industries’ approach, which focuses on cost-effective, AI-powered, autonomous technologies like the Fury fighter jet, reflecting Brose’s call for a “Moneyball Military” that emphasizes innovation over expensive legacy systems. Brose writes:
The US national defense enterprise—the political-military-industrial complex responsible for generating military power—is systemically broken. Despite trillions of dollars spent over the past two decades, the United States has endured unsatisfactory results in most of the wars it has waged in this century. We have mounted an inadequate and untimely response to the military transformation of a rising peer competitor, the Chinese Communist Party, that seeks to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. And we have become saddled with a defense industrial base that is struggling to generate both present military readiness and future military modernization. The specter of great-power conflict has not been higher since the last century.
Fortunately, a new consensus is emerging that we must make major changes. General Charles Q. Brown, likely the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said: “If we
don’t change—if we fail to adapt—we risk losing . . . a high-end fight.” […]We must instead find a way to win the losing game we are now playing. Just as the Oakland A’s managed to think differently, disrupt themselves, and field winning teams despite having the lowest payroll in Major League Baseball, the United States must rapidly field alternative defense capabilities that are achievable, affordable, and capable of winning—a “Moneyball Military.” […]
These three forms of disruption—operational, industrial, and technological—have put the US defense enterprise in a strategic predicament. Our ability to generate and project military power is overly reliant upon small numbers of exquisite systems that our industrial base cannot build or replace at relevant scales and speeds, that China’s military modernization is increasingly capable of holding at risk, and that the accelerating march of advanced technologies is rapidly disrupting. No matter how much additional money we spend on these traditional capabilities over the coming years, if the United States were to find itself in a conflict with China by 2027, our military would be fighting and seeking to support our allies with little more than what is in our inventory today, depleted as that has been through our critical support to Ukraine. […]
Despite the many strategic disruptions working against the US defense enterprise, there are compelling reasons for optimism. The United States has all of the necessary raw materials to create in the coming years new and growing markets for a Moneyball Military that can get us out of the losing game we have been playing with China. We have talented people in and out of government. We still lead the world in many of the most important technologies. And we have plenty of money in our defense budget and private-capital markets to afford the kinds of changes that we urgently need to make. In short, Americans still definitively control our own destiny, and US leaders are finally speaking more honestly about the urgent need to solve these problems.
Brose, alongside Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, stresses the need for a decentralized, market-driven defense procurement model. By empowering operational forces and rapidly deploying new technologies, the U.S. could build a more agile military. Anduril’s name, inspired by The Lord of the Rings, symbolizes this transformation—just as Anduril was the reforged sword of Elendil, Anduril Industries is reshaping defense technology to meet modern threats. Their innovations offer a path to a more effective and affordable military capable of deterring adversaries like China. The U.S. must adopt a “Moneyball Military” approach, inspired by the Oakland A’s, to quickly develop affordable and effective defense capabilities, focusing on innovation and cost-efficiency to succeed in modern warfare.
In a press release on March 26th, 2025, Anduril reported that USSOCOM has awarded Anduril a contract worth $86 million to develop mission autonomy software for uncrewed multi-domain systems. The project will use Anduril’s Lattice platform to enhance system coordination, enabling faster deployment and improving USSOCOM’s operational effectiveness through collaborative autonomy. They write:
United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has awarded Anduril a three-year, $86,000,000 contract to accelerate the development and deployment of mission autonomy software to multi-domain uncrewed systems in support of USSOCOM missions. […]
Since 2022, Anduril has developed, integrated, and deployed hundreds of Anduril, third-party, and government-owned hardware and software capabilities in support of USSOCOM’s CUxS efforts, enabling operators to quickly adapt to new threat profiles across a range of operational environments. Anduril will build on that relationship as Mission Autonomy SIP by providing the infrastructure that will accelerate USSOCOM’s efforts to field and fight with teams of autonomous systems in a constantly changing battlespace, unlocking new and innovative concepts of operation that enhance the effectiveness, capabilities, and situational awareness of globally-deployed SOF.
Read more here.
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