A version of this speech was delivered by Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, at National Taiwan University on August 4, 2025.
Just a few weeks after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in 2022, I went to the front lines. I’m not a soldier. I’m not used to setting foot in a war zone. I was there to train Ukrainian soldiers on advanced military technology that I had developed. I wanted to understand the future of war, in practice.
And what I saw was remarkable.
Ukraine wielded technology in a devastating fashion against the enemy. In doing so, they’ve upended decades of conventional wisdom in how wars are fought and won. Today, victory on the battlefield does not depend on who has the shiniest, most capable weapons system. Success relies on the ability to apply new technologies in the largest numbers.
With drones costing just a few thousand dollars each, a handful of Ukrainian pilots remotely carpeted airstrips with explosives thousands of miles into Russia. Ukraine does not even have a navy. But a few years later, Vladimir Putin would need to pull back his Black Sea Fleet because of the constant threat of maritime drones. These and so many other examples demonstrate battlefield dominance through high technology at the appropriate scale.
You, the bright students of National Taiwan University, have the opportunity to indeed answer the call to build and innovate in service of your country.
Ukraine’s defenses have persisted for more than three years—far longer than the three days that U.S. planners expected. Despite the devastation in Ukraine, Putin has been forced to trade the equivalent in casualties of a large Russian city to capture less than 20 percent of the country’s territory.
Deterrence has now gone digital. A stockpile of decades-old munitions collecting cobwebs in a depot is no longer enough to keep the enemy from acting. But developing and manufacturing these new weapons and defense systems cannot happen overnight.
