The recent Bloomberg Defense Tech Special Live inside Anduril’s headquarters brought together leaders from Anduril, Palantir, True Anomaly, Vannevar Labs, and Venrock, who outlined a shared vision for transforming U.S. defense strategy.
The participants agreed that the battlefield is shifting from hardware dominance to decision superiority—where outcomes hinge less on platform size and more on the speed and precision of the systems behind them. American advantage increasingly depends on more than just steel. In the 21st century, strategic deterrence requires data, information, influence, and alliances.
Evolving Faster Than the Threat
At the center of this transformation is the need for technologies that can evolve faster than the threats they face. Brian Schimpf, CEO of Anduril, defined this new procurement mindset:
“We’re moving out of an era where we need to make relatively few of very, very expensive high-end things, and into an era that’s much more about how we have things at scale — smarter, more autonomous.”
His remarks underscored the sector’s broader transition toward adaptation as a strategic imperative. The new defense architecture is not static—it is characterized by systems that can learn, self-correct, and scale in near real time.
Shyam Sankar, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Palantir, connected that transformation to lessons from modern conflict.
“The fundamental lesson of Ukraine is that it’s not what your system does today — it’s how quickly it adapts to what it needs to do tomorrow.”
Sankar emphasized that contemporary warfare rewards the velocity of learning rather than the weight of legacy infrastructure. In this emerging paradigm, operational advantage comes from the ability to interpret and respond faster than any adversary.
Vannevar Labs: Constructing the Digital Backbone
Amid this evolution, Vannevar Labs is building the digital backbone that enables rapid decision-making at scale. The company has developed a technology stack for decision advantage, supported by a proprietary national-security dataset exceeding one petabyte and growing by roughly 10 terabytes of data every week. This process converts unstructured intelligence into structured, actionable insight, including hard to access data from adversarial environments such as China. By incorporating these sources, Vannevar Labs builds artificial intelligence models that are adversary-aware and enhance strategic deterrence. The result is an infrastructure designed not only to inform decisions, but to anticipate them—turning information flow into operational foresight.
China has a vision for this century, and we’re here to make sure the United States has more leverage in the competition.
Biggers’ statement captured the essence of the emerging defense-tech ecosystem: narrowing the gap between sensing, deciding, and acting. By accelerating that cycle, the United States strengthens its tempo advantage in an increasingly data-driven world.
Conclusion: The New Measure of Power
The discussion by Bloomberg Defense Tech Live highlighted a defining reality: the future effectiveness of U.S. defense will hinge on the quality of its awareness and the speed of its adaptation, not the cost of its assets. In this new era, the true measure of power lies in how quickly insight becomes execution.
