China has some of the most advanced drone tech in the world, but Anduril founder Palmer Luckey believes that they won’t use drones as much in warfare as some other nations.
In a recent interview, Luckey—the virtual reality pioneer who sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion before founding defense tech company Anduril Industries—offered a stark and provocative assessment of how future conflicts will unfold. His reasoning centers on a demographic reality: China’s massive population surplus, particularly of single men, fundamentally changes the strategic calculus around automation and human life in warfare.
“A lot of things that we’re seeing in Ukraine I think would be different in a conflict with, let’s say China,” Luckey explained when asked about the future of warfare, given the drone-heavy nature of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “I don’t think China is going to adopt drones the same way that you’ve seen heavy adoption in Russia and Ukraine, because they have so many people, such an enormous surplus of single men who are never going to get a wife. Their calculus is just completely different.”
The Anduril founder’s comments highlight a controversial dimension of military strategy rarely discussed openly. “Why would they spend a bunch of money trying to automate a fighter jet when I can just put a person in it?” Luckey asked. “People will say, oh, you know, they don’t want to lose those pilots. Well, what if I have a war machine that can churn out enormous numbers of pilots?”
According to Luckey, this creates a fundamental divide in how nations will approach warfare. “You’re going to see this huge divide in how wars are fought between countries that highly value human life, and ones that do not value it so highly,” he said.
Luckey drew a distinction between China’s strategic objectives and those of other major powers. “China is trying to build a war machine that can cross the strait of Taiwan, invade Taiwan, and move massive amounts of war material across the sea and the sky into Taiwan so they can occupy it for years and years until things stabilize,” he noted. “That is a very different war machine than what Russia has built, which was designed really to fight Europe, and that’s very different than what the United States is trying to build for our strategic interests.”
The defense entrepreneur characterized America’s military exports in notably defensive terms. “Most of the systems the United States is building are not tools of conquest, they’re tools of protection,” Luckey said. “We are trying to build stuff that turns all of our allies into prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. What is our hottest export? It’s Patriot missile batteries. People are not begging us for our most powerful offensive weapons. For the most part, they want these extremely powerful defensive tools.”
As for what the battlefield will actually look like in the coming decade, Luckey painted a picture of heterogeneity rather than uniformity. “To answer your question, what does the world look like? Everyone’s going to be using different things. It’s going to be a total mishmash of human, robot, automated and not, and it’s going to be a bit of a mess if any of these wars actually start. We have to stop them from existing.”
Luckey’s assessment arrives at a pivotal moment in defense technology and geopolitical tensions. The Ukraine conflict has indeed become a testing ground for drone warfare, with both sides deploying thousands of unmanned systems ranging from small reconnaissance quadcopters to kamikaze drones and sophisticated loitering munitions. Meanwhile, China’s demographic challenges are well-documented—the country faces a severe gender imbalance due to decades of the one-child policy and cultural preference for male children, with estimates suggesting tens of millions more men than women in the population. This surplus, combined with China’s declining birth rate and aging population, creates unique strategic considerations that differ sharply from Western nations facing recruitment challenges.
The broader implications of Luckey’s thesis suggest that the nature of 21st-century conflict may be defined less by technological capability and more by how different societies value human life and manage demographic pressures. As tensions continue to simmer around Taiwan and defense budgets worldwide shift toward autonomous systems, the question of whether nations will choose automation or abundant manpower may become one of the defining strategic divides of our era.