It started with a single line. Palmer Luckey talks about his company's mission as keeping a war over Taiwan from ever happening. I decided the Chinese-speaking world should know who this person is.

A donation of about $10,000 — Palmer says it was $9,000 — to a pro-Trump meme group, in a Valley that overwhelmingly backed the other side. The chain reaction, as he tells it: media siege, colleagues cutting ties, a forced apology, then termination without cause. Meta denies politics played any role — and Facebook publicly described his departure without ever disclosing he had been fired.

Oculus held everything he had — his friends, his reputation, technology he had been building since his early teens. All of it stayed with the company that pushed him out.

Trae Stephens of Founders Fund, Brian Schimpf of Palantir, Joe Chen of Oculus — plus Matt Grimm soon after. No recruiting process, no waiting for a term sheet. The company they founded is named after the reforged sword in The Lord of the Rings: Anduril, the Flame of the West. A broken blade, forged again.

Anduril does not sell a weapon — it sells a software-plus-hardware ecosystem. The newest member shows the model: Archer builds Thunder's hybrid-electric tiltrotor airframe, Anduril adds the autonomy, and the same platform sells commercially as Halo for search-and-rescue and logistics.

Every drone, boat and sensor reports into the same operating system. Commanders see one battlefield; AI handles target tracking, threat evaluation and weapon pairing. Hardware can be copied. An OS plus years of battlefield telemetry and trained decision models cannot.

In 1993 the Pentagon's "Last Supper" dinner set off a consolidation that took 51 primes down to 5. Cost-plus contracts blunt every incentive to control costs — reinventing the wheel pays better than buying one. Thirty years on, Boeing has publicly sworn off signing new fixed-price development contracts.

Anduril's internal planning assumption is called "China 27" — every product assumes a Taiwan contingency by 2027. Three numbers explain why.

At the 2024 Shangri-La Dialogue, Indo-Pacific Command's Admiral Samuel Paparo told The Washington Post what the US plan for the Strait looks like. That sentence is the strategic starting point of the Replicator program.

That is Palmer's assessment — his shortlist runs the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and Taiwan. The manufacturing base is already here: semiconductors, IC design, PCBs, camera modules, RF. What's missing is not capability. It's the decision to point that capability at defense.

The new US defense stack — SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir — keeps expanding: Anduril's first self-built satellite reached orbit in July, with Lattice commanding it, and the Golden Dome program, estimated at $185B, pulls the stack into space. Taiwan is not watching from the sidelines. It is already plugging in.