On the southeast side of Columbus, Ohio, there is a stretch of flat, unassuming land in Pickaway County, about forty minutes from our office. Drive past it on Route 23, and you probably wouldn’t look twice. There are no skyscrapers. No gleaming corporate campuses. Just open acreage butting up against warehouses and the runways of Rickenbacker International Airport, where cargo planes lumber in and out.
But something is happening on that land that has nothing to do with logistics. Two massive buildings have risen from the dirt in the span of twelve months. The first, roughly 800,000 square feet, was built out from an existing spec warehouse. The second, a 900,000-square-foot behemoth, is close behind. Inside building one, twenty-two production stations line the floor in a deliberate loop, each one designed to bolt a different piece onto a machine that, until very recently, existed only in the imagination of a thirty-three-year-old college dropout in a Hawaiian shirt.
The manufacturing facility is named Arsenal-1. The machine is called the Fury. Its formal designation is the YFQ-44A. It is an autonomous fighter jet, a combat aircraft that flies without a pilot, built for the United States Air Force. And in a matter of weeks, it will begin rolling off the production line here in central Ohio.
The man behind it is Palmer Luckey. And whether you find him brilliant, eccentric, or some combination of both, there is no denying that he is building something this region has never seen.
The Prototypical Founder
Luckey’s origin story reads like a Silicon Valley movie script, with a second act nobody saw coming. Raised in Long Beach, California, he was the kind of teenager who spent weekends tinkering with electronics in his parents’ garage rather than surfing. By nineteen, he had dropped out of college and founded Oculus VR, a company built on the audacious idea that virtual reality headsets could go mainstream. Two years later, Meta (then Facebook) bought it for $2 billion. He was only twenty-two at the time.
Then things got complicated. A modest political donation sparked a media firestorm, and Luckey was pushed out of the company he founded. For most people, that kind of public exit would be the final chapter. For Luckey, it was just the intermission. In 2017, he co-founded Anduril Industries, a defense technology company named after a sword from The Lord of the Rings (Luckey is a self-described super fan).
If Oculus was about building worlds people could escape into, Anduril is about protecting the one they actually live in. The company designs autonomous drones, AI-powered surveillance systems, undersea vehicles, and now, fighter jets. As of this month, Anduril is valued at roughly $60 billion, has secured a 10-year Army contract worth up to $20 billion, and is widely expected to go public in the near future. That’s a long way from a garage in Long Beach.
Five Million Square Feet of Conviction
Arsenal-1 represents the largest single job-creation project in Ohio history. Anduril has committed roughly $1 billion of its own capital and has promised to create 4,000 jobs over the next decade. The state, for its part, offered significant tax incentives and economic development funds, the kind of package you roll out when you believe a company is planting roots, not just visiting.
When fully built out, Arsenal-1 will encompass 5 million square feet. For context, that is roughly the size of ninety football fields. But what makes it genuinely different from a traditional defense plant is not the square footage; it’s the philosophy underneath it.
Luckey describes the facility as having no “monuments,” meaning no permanent concrete-and-steel infrastructure welded to the floor. Everything is modular. If the Air Force changes its order, or a new threat emerges that requires a different platform, the factory can be reconfigured. Gantry cranes move. Stations rotate. It is designed to be as adaptable as the software that controls the machines it produces.
And then there is the operating model. Anduril bills itself not as a defense contractor, but as a defense product company. The distinction matters. Traditional contractors wait for the government to issue requirements, bid on programs, and then spend years (and billions of taxpayer dollars) building to spec. Anduril invests its own money upfront, builds a product it believes in, and then sells it. If the product fails, Anduril loses its own capital. As Luckey puts it, “It’s good to live in fear, not just lounge on the taxpayer dime.”
If you read last week’s piece on Trevor Milton and the Nikola saga, the contrast here is hard to miss. Both men are charismatic founders who promised to revolutionize an industry. The difference is that one sold renderings and press conferences while the other sold a VR company for two billion dollars, got knocked down, and came back to build a fighter jet from a blank sheet of paper. It should be easy to pick which one to follow.
Twinkies and Chess Pieces?
The philosophical core of Anduril’s mission is not about winning wars. It is about making wars too expensive to start. Luckey frames it in the language of game theory. If your adversary knows that attacking you will be ruinously costly, they are far less likely to try. The goal of Arsenal-1 is not to build weapons that will destroy an enemy; it is to build so many credible, capable systems that no rational actor would ever want to test them.
Autonomous systems are central to that math. A manned fighter jet requires a pilot, years of training, a support crew, and continuous operational readiness. An autonomous one can be manufactured at scale, stored indefinitely, and deployed when needed. Luckey has compared them to Twinkies in a wrapper: build them, shelve them, and they’re ready in fifty years with a new sensor or an upgraded engine. It is an imperfect analogy, and he knows it, but the underlying economics are real. You can scale an unmanned navy to a thousand ships without hiring tens of thousands of additional sailors.
He also invokes chess. Imagine trying to play without pawns, he says. You need pieces you can put in harm’s way without the moral weight of a human life. An autonomous jet can fly the most dangerous missions, serve as the tip of the spear, and absorb losses that would be unconscionable with a crewed aircraft. That calculus, uncomfortable as it is, reshapes the entire strategic board.
The Economic Impacts
Switching from Anduril specifically to the broader economics, there are three main items at play.
First, there is the theme of reindustrialization. For decades, American manufacturing moved offshore. The prevailing logic was that cheaper labor abroad meant better margins at home. That calculus is now reversing, driven by supply chain vulnerabilities exposed during the pandemic, escalating geopolitical tensions, and a bipartisan political consensus that certain capabilities, especially in defense, semiconductors, and energy, need to come back to domestic soil. Arsenal-1 sits squarely at the intersection of those forces. So does Intel’s chip plant in Licking County (also just outside Columbus). And don’t forget about the dozens of Amazon and Meta data warehouses scattered around. Central Ohio is quietly becoming one of the country’s major manufacturing/tech corridors, without much national fanfare.
Second, there is the question of how innovation disrupts entrenched incumbents. The traditional defense primes, your Lockheed Martins and Northrop Grummans, have operated for decades under a cost-plus contracting model that rewarded slow, expensive development. Anduril’s approach, building fast with private capital and iterating like a software company, is a direct challenge to that model. The pattern is familiar with a well-funded insurgent with a technology advantage and a willingness to absorb risk, eventually forcing the established players to adapt or cede ground (think Netflix or Tesla).
Third, and perhaps most importantly for long-term investors, is the sheer scale of the addressable market. Global defense spending continues to climb as nations recalibrate their postures in response to conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as tensions in the Indo-Pacific. Autonomous systems, AI-driven command and control, and next-generation manufacturing are not niche bets. They are becoming foundational infrastructure for national security, much the way the internet became foundational infrastructure for commerce. The companies that build that infrastructure tend to compound value for a very long time.
Forty Minutes from Home
There is something grounding about the fact that this particular story is unfolding in our backyard. It is not a press release from a company three time zones away. It is a physical place, being built by people who live here. The steel is real, the jobs are real, and the implications, both economic and strategic, are real.
Palmer Luckey is not an easy figure to categorize, and he would probably tell you that is the point. He is a billionaire who wears flip-flops to congressional meetings, a defense mogul who moonlights at his retro-gaming company, and a college dropout who is now building fighter jets for the Air Force. But beneath the eccentricity is a builder with a track record of doing exactly what he says he will do, and right now he is saying that five million square feet of production capacity in Pickaway County is just the starting point.
Markets / Economy
- Markets took it on the chin this week as conflicting news on the situation in the Middle East kept volatility high. The S&P finished the week down -2.1%, the Nasdaq down -3.2%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 up 0.5%.
- The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.43% for the week ending March 20, 2026, its highest level since early October and the third straight weekly increase.
- The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell sharply to 53.3 in March, down from the preliminary estimate of 55.5 and below February’s 56.6. This places sentiment near record lows observed at the end of 2025.
Stocks
- U.S. equities were in negative territory. Communication Services and Technology led the decline, while Energy and Materials outperformed. Value stocks led growth stocks, and small caps beat large caps.
- International equities closed higher for the week. Developed markets fared better than emerging markets.
Bonds
- The 10-year Treasury bond yield increased five basis points to 4.44% during the week.
- Global bond markets were in negative territory this week.
- Government bonds led for the week, followed by corporate bonds and high-yield bonds.
