THE NEW FACE OF WARFARE

HOW BRIAN SCHIMPF AND ANDURIL, THE $61 BILLION DEFENSE-TECH STARTUP, ARE BUILDING TOMORROW'S MILITARY ARSENAL.

- ALLIE GARFINKLE

SOMEWHERE IN WEST TEXAS, Brian Schimpf hands me a warhead.

It’s small, this explosive-carrying tungsten lump, for something built to be so destructive. This warhead is a dense three pounds and fits completely in my hand. It’s designed to be attached to Anduril’s Bolt drone, the munitions-carrying version of which is currently being built on a $23.9 million contract for the U.S. Marine Corps to blow up far-off targets.

Schimpf—the cofounder and CEO of $61 billion defense-tech startup Anduril—looks at my warhead and its drone with an engineer's eyes, weighing capacity for damage against aerodynamics. “Every bit of math matters,” says Schimpf. “You have a physics problem... With what you want to carry, can we do that with three pounds? Four?”

We're at Anduril’s secretive Texas test site, and we watch the Bolt take flight. It shoots up vertically and careens off toward a collection of dusty hills, some of which Fortune's photographer isn’t allowed to shoot; those hills could, to intelligence analysts somewhere in China or Russia, reveal where we are. The Bolt winds back and dives like a roller coaster, shooting downward at a vertiginous 85 degrees. I'm completely safe, but my heart rate speeds up in a reasonable physiological response to a deadly weapon's presence.

TRY, TRY AGAIN An Altius leaves its launcher. Anduril is tweaking its drones after they underperformed in Ukraine.

Wherever we are, there's not much here. There's a sprawling cattle ranch nearby, and a dust devil moves in the distance. Anduril’s presence is clear enough: There's a sequence of trailers, a hangar for visiting planes. But mostly, it’s space. Seemingly the most important thing about a weapons test site is vastness: a full universe of sandbox space where things can be blown apart, put back together, and started anew.