{"id":6339,"date":"2026-06-09T01:05:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T01:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=6339"},"modified":"2026-06-09T01:05:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T01:05:43","slug":"anduril-ceo-brian-schimpf-says-economic-warfare-is-the-new-normal-for-military-conflicts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/?p=6339","title":{"rendered":"Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says economic warfare is the ‘new normal’ for military conflicts"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Brian Schimpf, CEO of defense tech company Anduril, says that the nature of modern armed conflict has fundamentally shifted\u2014and that the U.S. military\u2019s supply chain is dangerously unprepared for it.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe U.S. and Israel did something like ten times as many strikes in the first month of the war as they did in the entire Gulf War,\u201d Schimpf said at Fortune<\/em>\u2018s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. \u201cThis is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schimpf\u2019s remarks opened on a pointed note: back in March, when he was interviewed for a profile of Anduril in Fortune<\/em>, he predicted that the Strait of Hormuz could still be blocked by the time the Brainstorm Tech conference rolled around. It was.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Schimpf, that\u2019s not an anomaly, it\u2019s the new blueprint. Modern conflicts, he argued, are no longer primarily about destroying military assets; they\u2019re about strangling economies. Data centers, oil refineries, and shipping lanes are the targets now, and low-cost drones have made striking them cheaper than ever. \u201cThe economic warfare that is effectively the Strait of Hormuz, this is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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More from Fortune\u2019s 25th Brainstorm Tech:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once<\/em><\/p>\n

Twitch CEO: Social media has become \u2018anti-social\u2019 and can\u2019t match the shared, human connection of live streaming<\/em><\/p>\n

Your career needs a \u2018gym membership\u2019 to keep up with continuous AI advancements, says Campus founder Tade Oyerinde<\/em><\/p>\n

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For the U.S. he said, the new reality is a particularly tricky problem. It\u2019s \u201cessentially impossible to inflict economic pain on China without catastrophic economic pain on the U.S.,\u201d Schimpf said.<\/p>\n

That logic flows directly into how he thinks about Anduril\u2019s business. Schimpf was especially candid about supply chain fragility. He noted that the U.S. fired through roughly 850 Tomahawk missiles in four weeks of conflict with Iran\u2014burning through a stockpile that the Pentagon had been replenishing at a rate of about 90 per year.\u00a0<\/p>\n

His proposed solution is not just redesigning weapons to be more manufacturable\u2014it\u2019s moving upstream into raw materials. \u201cWe\u2019re looking at how do we secure supply of germanium years out,\u201d he said, pointing to China\u2019s systematic acquisition of critical minerals, including rare earth magnets and copper film suppliers, as a strategic stranglehold the U.S. has been slow to counter.<\/p>\n

The CEO was equally as candid speaking about the current defense tech valuation frenzy\u2014where some companies are raising at 50x or even 100x forward revenue. \u201cI do think there is a bit of a bubble.\u201d He invoked the Uber-and-Lyft dynamic, arguing that in any hot category, roughly 90% of returns accrue to the top two players, and that companies chasing stratospheric valuations are setting themselves up for an impossible growth bar. Anduril has been deliberate about its own pricing, he said, but acknowledged the temptation is real.<\/p>\n

An Anduril listing on the public markets is a long-running subject of speculation. Schimpf, when pressed on the IPO question, declined to give a timeline. In March, the company raised a $5 billion Series H raise at a $61 billion valuation, led by venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Last week, Anduril cofounder Trae Stephens told Fortune<\/em> he saw the company ideally going public in the next couple of years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Schimpf, however, made an argument for the advantage of remaining private. \u201cRight now, we\u2019re in a hype-y time. We\u2019re growing like crazy. Why would we go out right now? We don\u2019t need to, he said.\u201d Schimpf laid out a simple 3-point framework for contemplating an IPO: If you go public in the middle of a \u201chype cycle,\u201d when growth is slowing, or when you\u2019re more than two years from profitability, and you\u2019ll have a bad three-year stock return. Anduril checks at least one of those boxes, he said, citing the current industry-wide hype cycle, and therefore sees no rush.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

#Anduril #CEO #Brian #Schimpf #economic #warfare #normal #military #conflicts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Schimpf, CEO of defense tech company Anduril, says that the nature of modern armed conflict has fundamentally shifted\u2014and that the U.S. military\u2019s supply chain is dangerously unprepared for it.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6340,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3296,3849,2829,369,173,2112,3059,4414,411,2400,445,808,1655,8770,4057,1527,446,8771],"class_list":["post-6339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-anduril","tag-brainstorm-tech","tag-brian","tag-ceo","tag-china","tag-conflicts","tag-defense","tag-drones","tag-economic","tag-ipos","tag-iran","tag-military","tag-normal","tag-palmer-luckey","tag-schimpf","tag-supply-chains","tag-war","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6339\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}