Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says economic warfare is the ‘new normal’ for military conflicts

“The 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,” Schimpf said at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. “This is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like.”

Schimpf’s remarks opened on a pointed note: back in March, when he was interviewed for a profile of Anduril in Fortune, he predicted that the Strait of Hormuz could still be blocked by the time the Brainstorm Tech conference rolled around. It was.  

For Schimpf, that’s not an anomaly, it’s the new blueprint. Modern conflicts, he argued, are no longer primarily about destroying military assets; they’re 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. “The economic warfare that is effectively the Strait of Hormuz, this is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like,” he said.

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For the U.S. he said, the new reality is a particularly tricky problem. It’s “essentially impossible to inflict economic pain on China without catastrophic economic pain on the U.S.,” Schimpf said.

That logic flows directly into how he thinks about Anduril’s 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—burning through a stockpile that the Pentagon had been replenishing at a rate of about 90 per year. 

His proposed solution is not just redesigning weapons to be more manufacturable—it’s moving upstream into raw materials. “We’re looking at how do we secure supply of germanium years out,” he said, pointing to China’s 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.

The CEO was equally as candid speaking about the current defense tech valuation frenzy—where some companies are raising at 50x or even 100x forward revenue. “I do think there is a bit of a bubble.” 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.

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 he saw the company ideally going public in the next couple of years. 

Schimpf, however, made an argument for the advantage of remaining private. “Right now, we’re in a hype-y time. We’re growing like crazy. Why would we go out right now? We don’t need to, he said.” Schimpf laid out a simple 3-point framework for contemplating an IPO: If you go public in the middle of a “hype cycle,” when growth is slowing, or when you’re more than two years from profitability, and you’ll 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.