# Brian Schimpf Co-founder and CEO of [[Anduril]] Industries — the "quiet engineer-CEO" who has run day-to-day operations since the company's earliest days while [[Palmer Luckey]] served as its public face. Schimpf co-founded Anduril in 2017 with Luckey, [[Trae Stephens]], Joe Chen, and Matt Grimm, and as of 2026 leads a company valued in the tens of billions. ## The Munitions-Crisis Thesis Schimpf spent roughly nine years warning that the United States lacked the industrial base to sustain a modern war. The 2026 conflict with Iran — [[Iran War 2026]] — became his proof point. The U.S. fired roughly **850 Tomahawk missiles in about four weeks**, depleting an estimated **30% of its Tomahawk stockpile** against a replenishment rate of only about 90 per year. Schimpf's summary: > [!quote] "We shot a decade of production in about three days." > — Brian Schimpf, on Operation Epic Fury He has framed the broader problem starkly: "Our munitions production rate and our stockpiles are at a dangerous level," and "War is inherently industrial in the modern era, and we are not prepared for that." ## "Economic Warfare Is the New Normal" At Fortune's Brainstorm Tech (June 2026), Schimpf argued that **economic warfare** — control of supply chains, industrial capacity, and production speed — is the "new normal" for military conflict, and that the U.S. needs to treat manufacturing throughput as a strategic weapon. This dovetails with [[Matthew Steckman]]'s "wide not deep" manufacturing strategy and Anduril's pitch that mass-producible, attritable autonomous systems are the answer to a depleted arsenal. ## Significance Schimpf supplies the sober, industrial-policy register of Anduril's argument. Where Luckey performs enthusiasm (see [[The Violence Is the Point]]), Schimpf makes the procurement case in the language of stockpiles and production rates — a framing that conveniently positions Anduril as the solution to the very crisis he diagnoses. The munitions-depletion data is real and widely cited; it is also a sales argument, and Schimpf is the company's CEO. See [[Defense Tech Conflicts of Interest]] and [[Defense Tech as Asset Class]]. ## See Also - [[Anduril]] - [[Palmer Luckey]] - [[Matthew Steckman]] - [[Trae Stephens]] - [[Iran War 2026]] - [[Autonomous Weapons]] - [[Defense Tech as Asset Class]]