US firm gets $2.9bn sub deal after boss joins war study with Musk Share US firm gets $2.9bn sub deal after boss joins war study with Musk on social media Defence technology firm Anduril said it will invest $3.7bn to develop a new shipyard in the US state of Maryland and will build critical components for the United States Navy's Virginia-class submarines, as Washington seeks to bolster its maritime defence capabilities. California-based Anduril Industries confirmed on Tuesday it would invest in the submarine production plant, dubbed Arsenal-2, and will receive a $2.9bn US navy contract to manufacture submarine parts. Anduril is a defence technology firm whose co-founder, Palmer Luckey, is heading a new Defense Department project alongside technology billionaire and former top Trump adviser Elon Musk. Luckey and Musk were tapped by the Pentagon to lead Project Meridian, a newly-disclosed initiative focused on the future of warfare, including autonomous, AI-powered and maritime military capabilities. Valued at nearly $117bn, Anduril specialises in uncrewed underwater vehicles and ocean vessels - or naval drones - designed for the US military and its allies.

This Game Boy clone is an uncompromising approach to the ultimate gamer nostalgia. But there are better options out there. A tad pricey for an old game console. There are better options for tinkerers. Buying it puts money in the pocket of the killer chatbots guy.

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched--fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. "The government said to me, 'We need you to make drones,' " Yakovenko told me.

Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft's Military Headset The founder of Oculus VR is returning to headsets--this time for the battlefield. When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses. That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a US Army head-mounted display developed by Microsoft. "The idea is to enhance soldiers," Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. "Their visual perception, audible perception--basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal."

When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build fighter jets, tanks, and warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years on, Luckey is showing that Anduril can not only compete with those contractors--it can win. Last month, Anduril was one of two companies, along with the established defense contractor General Atomics, chosen to prototype a new kind of autonomous fighter jet called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, for the US Air Force and Navy. Anduril was chosen ahead of a pack of what Beltway lingo dubs "defense primes"--Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grummond. "Anduril is proving that with the right team and business model, a seven-year-old company can go toe-to-toe with players that have been around for 70," Luckey wrote on social media platform X shortly after the contract was announced.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. joins'Fox News Sunday' to discuss a new survey that revealed 74% of Americans are concerned about a war between the U.S. and China. This is a rush transcript of'Fox News Sunday' on December 3, 2023. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. A special hour on the state of defense, a report card on America's military readiness to meet the challenges of an increasingly dangerous world. Israel's war with Hamas, the latest conflict to ignite instability, turbo- charging attacks on our forces in the region from Iranian proxies. We'll get reaction from National Security Council Communications Coordinator John Kirby about the restart of the war and the headwinds the Biden White House faces from Democrats over conditioning future aid to Israel. GENERAL C.Q. BROWN, JOINT CHIEFS CHAIRMAN: We want to be so good at what we do that our adversaries go, not today, not tomorrow, not ever. General C.Q. Brown joins me here at the Reagan Library. And before serving in Congress, they served several tours of duty on the ground in two of America's longest wars. We sit down with Congressman Michael Waltz and Seth Moulton, veterans for both sides of the aisle, as the fight over defense spending is coming up against the stark deadline. Plus -- JENNIFER GRIFFIN, FOX NEWS NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT: Is it cool to be patriotic now? UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's always been cool to be contrarian and I think right now, it's -- it's been a little contrarian to be very patriotic. BREAM: Our inside look at how cutting-edge technology is shaping the future of warfare and battlefields worldwide. Here are the top headlines making news today. Israel is widening its evacuation orders for Palestinians in southern Gaza, including in and around the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah, which both reported heavy bombardment overnight. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling for a total victory against Hamas and pushing back against White House calls to allow the Palestinian Authority to ultimately govern Gaza, claiming the group also calls for Israel's destruction. Meanwhile, in Paris, French authorities are looking into whether terrorism was to blame for a knife and hammer attack on tourists near the Eiffel Tower, leaving a German man dead and two others injured. A 26-year-old French national has been arrested. Let's turn now to Trey Yingst in southern Israel with the very latest on the war in Gaza. After a week-long ceasefire saw more than 100 hostages freed from Gaza, fighting has resumed for a third day. Israeli officials say the ground and air campaign in the second phase of this war against the strip could last for months. New airstrikes overnight targeted tunnel shafts and weapon storage facilities.

Who needs the metaverse when your life can be as weird as Palmer Luckey's? In 2016, the founder of the virtual reality startup Oculus was unceremoniously pushed out of the company that acquired it--Facebook. Zuckerberg and his minions had soured on Luckey's Trump-embracing politics. At the time, few would have guessed that the fanciful technologist, gamer, and cosplayer who once posed on a virtual beach on the cover of Time Magazine would become a major figure in defense technology. But Luckey quickly cofounded Anduril, a Founders Fund-backed startup devoted to cutting-edge military tech. Lucky is now winning billion-dollar Pentagon contracts.

Rep. August Pfluger joins'Fox & Friends First' and calls out Biden's handling of border crisis The feds have turned to cutting-edge cameras developed by a virtual reality wunderkind to help them monitor the southern border -- by creating an invisible border wall. The high-tech watch poles known as Autonomous Surveillance Towers are powered by solar energy and use artificial intelligence to detect movement along a two-mile radius, sending the information in real-time to agents patrolling the area. And they're now being installed at different points along the nearly 2,000 miles of the US-Mexico border. "The ASTs are in remote locations that are difficult to reach," Border Patrol agent Joel Freeland recently told The Post. "They operate 24-hours a day and are environmentally friendly because they rely entirely on solar power." The ASTs were developed by Palmer Luckey, the 28-year-old founder and designer of Oculus VR and Oculus Rift.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Luckey, dressed as if ready for the beach in a Hawaiian-like shirt, shorts and flip-flops, joined other Anduril employees at the company's testing site near Camp Pendleton, a Marine training facility. As the drone took off and swooped between the hills, Mr. Luckey said it could track an object and capture detailed images from seven football fields away. Using many of the artificial intelligence technologies that underpin self-driving cars, Anduril's drones can identify and track vehicles, people and other objects largely on their own. The drones are not armed, but could be useful for guarding bases or reconnaissance. The same sensor technologies that allow the drones to fly on their own could also be used to identify targets on a battlefield.

They spent hours circling the sky, seeking, among other things, surface-to-air missile launchers lurking in the brush. The missiles they found weren't enemy ones. They were props for early test flights of a prototype military drone stuffed with artificial intelligence--the latest product from Anduril, a defense-tech startup founded by Palmer Luckey, the creator of Oculus Rift. The new drone, the Ghost 4, shows the potential for AI in military systems. Luckey says it is the first generation that can perform various reconnaissance missions, including searching an area for enemy hardware or soldiers, under the control of a single person on the ground.