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On Tuesday, Pepperdine University livestreamed a conversation between billionaire weapons merchant Palmer Luckey and university president Jim Gash. It began with a trailer for Anduril, Luckey’s defense firm, and ended with Luckey declining the gift of a leather-bound set of Lord of the Rings books. Between those two moments, Luckey talked about war.
Dressed in a Neon Genesis Evangelion jacket draped over a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, Luckey explained why wars happen. “War only starts between nation states when one or both sides misunderstand who is going to win the conflict,” he said. “If both sides understand who is going to win, it’s very rare for things to proceed to violence. Because the weaker nation, knowing full well that they’re going to lose says ‘OK, I’m going to capitulate, I’m going to give you what you want.’”
“And that’s why, by the way, it’s important to have peace through strength,” he said as an aside.
Luckey is preaching Game Theory here, a mathematical and logical view of the universe that underpins a lot of modern defense thinking. Game Theory is, in part, the reason America will spend almost two trillion dollars over the next decade installing nuclear missiles into silos in the Dakotas.
There are a lot of problems with Game Theory as a defense strategy. Luckey acknowledged one immediately: ideological actors like Jihadists. “It’s very hard to engage in Game Theory with people who pursue the non-Game Theory optimal strategy,” he said. Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.
American Historian and retired U.S. Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich has called out this kind of thinking before too. “Belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. ‘Peace through strength’ easily enough becomes ‘peace through war,’” he wrote in a 2010 essay.
Game Theory and “peace through strength” are great ways of thinking if you want to sell weapons. Luckey is a defense contractor, after all. The conversation with Gash covered a variety of topics including VR and the state of journalism but eventually wound its way to war.
While explaining the Tolkien origins of his company’s name, Luckey pushed back on people who criticize him for celebrating the building of weapons of war. “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims. I think that it’s reasonable for philosophers to degrade those people and whine about how they’re sick in the head.”
“But society needs them,” he continued. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence.”
Luckey also endorsed the use of AI in weapons systems. “There is a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations by many of our adversaries to trick Western countries that fancy themselves morally aligned into not applying AI for weapons or defense,” he said. “What is the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs with more collateral damage because we are not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past Russian or Chinese jamming systems and strike precisely.”
Luckey called out these critics who say that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and who dies. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?”
In his younger days in college, Luckey studied journalism. Luckey told Gash someone had recently asked him if he still thought like a journalist. “Absolutely not, I’m a propagandist,” Luckey said.
“I’ll twist the truth. I’ll put forward only my version if I think that that’s going to propagandize people to what I need them to believe.”
