Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says economic warfare is the ‘new normal’ for military conflicts—and the U.S. needs to get serious

Brian Schimpf, CEO of defense tech company Anduril, says that the nature of modern armed conflict has fundamentally shifted—and that the U.S. military’s supply chain is dangerously unprepared for it. “The U.S. and Israel did something like ten times as many strikes in the first month of the war as they did in the entire Gulf War,” Schimpf said at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Monday. “This is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like.” Schimpf’s remarks opened on a pointed note: back in March, when he was interviewed for a profile of Anduril in Fortune, he predicted that the Strait of Hormuz could still be blocked by the time the Brainstorm Tech conference rolled around. It was. For Schimpf, that’s not an anomaly, it’s the new blueprint. Modern conflicts, he argued, are no longer primarily about destroying military assets; they’re about strangling economies. Data centers, oil refineries, and shipping lanes are the targets now, and low-cost drones have made striking them cheaper than ever. “The economic warfare that is effectively the Strait of Hormuz, this is the new normal of what these conflicts are going to look like,” he said. More from Fortune’s 25th Brainstorm Tech: Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, says there are days he manages tens of thousands of AI agents at once Twitch CEO: Social media has become ‘anti-social’ and can’t match the shared, human connection of live streaming Your career needs a ‘gym membership’ to keep up with continuous AI advancements, says Campus founder Tade Oyerinde For the U.S. he said, the new reality is a particularly tricky problem. It’s “essentially impossible to inflict economic pain on China without catastrophic economic pain on the U.S.,” Schimpf said. That logic flows directly into how he thinks about Anduril’s business. Schimpf was especially candid about supply chain fragility. He noted that t