Anduril Announces Pulsar Family of AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems | Hacker News Reader

Anduril Announces Pulsar Family of AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems

anduril.com

24 pointshubraumhugo23 comments

Quite interesting to see how effective a supplier for the US military can be. Assuming that each of their technologies is actually able to deliver, this is extremely impressive, especially compared to what the usual suspects put out.

It’s smoke and mirrors.

They’re promising literally everything under the EW sun, which is easy to do when you’re not under contract to prove it or deliver anything.

So you think it is a ponzi scheme on investors? If they have no product to sell to the US/NATO military then obviously the company is worthless.

The defense contractor space is entirely made of players who make big promises, then get under contract to deliver something just functional enough to get follow-on funding to “make it operational this time.”

With the right connections, it’s extremely possible to fail upward on this track.

They have other products that are very real AFAICT. Reusable loitering munitions and air combat drones.

This is not the case. From Palmer's Twitter:

"Pulsar is one of several Anduril products that has been undercover for years. It has already been deployed to multiple AORs across continents at fixed sites, on ground vehicles, and in aircraft.

RFML (Radio Frequency Machine Learning) is a game-changer for electronic warfare."

Oh well if the CEO says so

Edit: To be clear, you have read what’s not being said: no agency is funding this or taking delivery of anything. With internal R&D you can make any outlandish claims and no one can call you out on it. (Under contract R&D, your outlandish claims are tied to a statement of work.)

You are simply wrong. Multiple US military customers have been taking delivery of Pulsar for years now. Why make things up?

Multiple, you say? Do these customers have names? Contract vehicles? You know, the normal stuff you put in a press release when there’s a new delivered capability?

As I told you hours ago in response to your other false claims, some of Pulsar's contracts are publicly disclosed and go back years. This isn't a "new delivered capability", that is just another instance of you making something up that has nothing to do with reality.

Doubling down on this is really dumb, Anduril obviously wouldn't be publicly stating that Pulsar has deployed to combat if it wasn't true. Your critique isn't just wrong, it doesn't even make sense.

The press release certainly implies new. Announcement! Dateline: yesterday! First of kind! Doesn’t sound mature or established. Not “USAF selects for phase 3 follow-on USD300MM IDIQ“.

And they don’t actually state it’s been deployed to combat. Did you notice the careful wording? They’ve been “developing it to support operational combat” etc. Not that a DoD customer actually bought and deployed it in combat.

Pulsar has been procured under public contracts for years now, and is currently deployed in multiple combat roles. Of all the critiques you could make, this is not a good one.

Anduril seems to be on a tear lately. It'll be awkward if nerdy Palmer Luckey builds the next Lockheed Martin. I also can't believe this guy was 21 when he sold Oculus for $3 billion, damn.

"Seems to be on a tear" is the result of good marketing and well-timed releases. Obviously these kinds of things don't just appear one day.

4 years apparently. That seems quite short for the claimed capabilities. Especially given how frequent cost/time overruns are for military suppliers.

There's been quite a bit of reputation laundering going on for Palmer after his 2016 election shenanigans

DARPA has been working this problem for decades. I’m fairly skeptical anything will come of “AI-enabled EW” on the battlefield. The fundamental problems are still of physics and hardware engineering - can I sense and retune my transmitter quickly enough to keep up with a frequency agile adversary (you can’t), can I broadcast loudly enough over a broad enough spectrum to drown out my adversary without also committing fratricide (also no), can I classify wartime reserve modes and respond appropriately (you think you can, but any reasonably clever adversary — which is to say anyone already playing in the space — will exploit your naive AI to their advantage.)

Unrelated to the article, but did Andruril pay the Tolkien estate for their name? “Flame of the west…”

Their website is beautiful.

Wonder who their concept artists / industrial designers are.

Anduril vs Palantir - fight!

According to Wikipedia, at least two of the five founders of Anduril came from Palantir and several of the investors are the same across both companies (probably including Peter Thiel? It's not exactly clear from skimming the wiki). So I suspect that the correct f-verb is not "fight."

Press releases from arms dealers are certainly not political.

I love this news by and for hackers.

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