Anduril executive chairman and co-founder Trae Stephens describes the shift in military strategy toward mass-produced, low-cost autonomous drones and AI-powered systems on “Mornings with Maria.”
Swarms of cheap ones Iranian drones are rewriting the rules of war, but a US defense contractor says it can mass-produce autonomous military systems to rival them at a fraction of traditional costs.
“Our adversaries are not necessarily coming at us with $10 million-plus fighter planes. They come at us with very, very cheap ammo” Trae Stephens, co-founder and executive chairman of Anduril Industries, told “Mornings with Maria” on Tuesday.
The challenge, he said, is to “significantly” reduce the cost of deployment instead of firing $2 million interceptors, noting that the company is doing this by “building low-cost autonomous systems” that give U.S. forces the ability to “fight the wars of tomorrow, instead of the wars of yesterday.”
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A soldier checks an Anduril Industries Inc. Ghost-X reconnaissance drone at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, on November 7, 2025. (Christopher Lee/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“That has been Anduril’s focus since the beginning…” he said.
Stephens described the company’s autonomous systems that are designed to work together on the battlefield. Some drones act as ‘hunters’ that scout and identify targets, while others serve as ‘killers’ that can attack them.
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“You have drones that go looking for other things, like our Ghost platform. You have loitering munitions that fly around looking for things, and when they find those things they can take kinetic action against them, and then you have platforms like our Barracuda 500 that are… missiles that are intended to go directly after targets,” he explained.
The goal is to replace Cold War technology with cheap technology autonomous systems that can be mass produced.
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“We are taking advantage of advances in production techniques, progress and autonomy in the production system to produce on a large scale at very low costs,” he said.
The company is already scaling up production, with a new manufacturing facility in Ohio set to produce these autonomous military systems at scale as wartime demand increases.
