The Ledger
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Schimpf: China possesses 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US
“Where there's something like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity you know, massively, massively, probably thousands of times on the weapon side. You know, it is just on drones. It's massive. Like, you just, kind of look category by category, massively outpacin…”
Schimpf: Wargames show key U.S. munition stockpiles run out in eight days
“You know, one of the areas where we see it is showing up with weapons, so when you look at these wargaming sort of scenarios, and you know, all these wargames are sort of questionable in their own ways but pretty consistently the stockpile of key U.S. Munition…”
Schimpf: Pentagon oversight bureaucrats outnumber accountable leaders 10 to 1
“It's just there are 10 times as many people who say no as there are to people who are accountable for doing it.”
Schimpf: Russia outproduces NATO in 155mm artillery munitions after two-year ramp
“Russia today is outproducing NATO on one five five munitions and took about two years.”
Schimpf: The US lacks a strategic plan for supply preservation
“We have no strategic plan as a country for how we preserve supply in a catastrophic situation.”
Schimpf: China has legally banned the export of magnet-making technology
“China has strategically kind of strangleholded that, you know, not only did they have the processing of those rare earths, but now they've exported, controlled, so they don't allow the export of magnet-making technology. That is now a restricted national techn…”
Schimpf: EPA non-attainment zone designations kill local manufacturing growth
“An area can be designated a non attainment zone that is over polluted on a certain pollutant. And so then going forward, the EPA says that any new construction requires to remediate that pollutant by any means available, not cost benefit, not that there is any…”
Schimpf: Next 30 years of defense tech relies on cheap autonomous systems
“So number one, the tech for the next 20 or 30 years was going to be like primarily how do you just have more cheap autonomous systems on the battlefield, just more sensors, just more information flowing in.”
Schimpf: Military surveillance and strikes will soon achieve high automation levels
“Yeah, I, look, I think the mechanics of, okay, there's this airfield, and you want to go surveil it, and, like, take it you can do some strike, you can do some surveillance, you can do all these things. That, there will be a large degree of automation in that,…”
Schimpf: Sam Altman publicly committed OpenAI to supporting US national defense
“Sam especially has been very clear that he supports our war fighters and he cares about having the best minds in AI working on national security and like who better exists to work through these hard problems.”
Schimpf: Anduril doesn't need government procurement reform to succeed
“Do I think it's necessary to change for us to be successful? Not really. Like, we're just going to play the game that they present.”
Schimpf: SpaceX received one-third of Boeing's Starliner funding
“I think SpaceX had a third the amount of money that Boeing was given to make Starliner work.”
Schimpf: China conducts hundreds of hypersonic weapon tests annually versus US's four
“The single best stat for this is they are running hundreds of tests a year of hypersonic weapons. The US is running, like, four.”
Schimpf: Russia retooled defense production and outproduces all of NATO on munitions
“Empirically, Russia, You know, about same duration, about two years to retool their industry against defense production. They are now out producing all of NATO on munitions.”
Schimpf: Traditional defense weapons face four-year lead times from bespoke components
“Most of these traditional weapons where it's like overly bespoke components, you're like, it's like, we got to get the dude that knows how to solder this one thing out of retirement. Like in the supply chains are super deep. Like four year lead times on these …”
Schimpf: Traditional defense primes refuse firm fixed-price contracts after heavy losses
“Actually a lot of the primes right now are saying they will not do firm fixed price. Contracts anymore because they've often taken a significant loss on most of the programs that they're doing with this.”
China is actively investing in and will deploy autonomous weapons
“We know that China is, you know, investing in similar technologies. We know they're going to move out on it,”
Drone attacks on U.S. military bases will increase in frequency
“The attack in Tower 22 is very tragic, and it's the type of thing that I think is going to, frankly, increase in frequency.”
Nearly every country now possesses cruise missile-equivalent drone technology
“Nearly every country has what is the equivalent of cruise missiles.”
The U.S. military fires $2 million missiles at $100,000 aerial threats
“As a result, we're shooting Patriot missiles and, you know, advanced air-to-air missiles at these 100,000 dollars threats, shooting two million dollar missiles at them.”
Defense manufacturing capacity constraints will be eliminated within five years
“So our belief is this is a solvable problem. You could take advantage of commercial innovation on this, and there should be no capacity constraints you know, over any sort of five-year period to actually be able to produce these systems.”
Schimpf: US government guaranteed price floor for MP Materials
“I think the way they're structuring some of these is actually really clever, right? Like they basically, with one of these, this empty materials company, they basically guaranteed a minimum offtake and a price floor.”
Anduril CEO: Rebuilding domestic manufacturing competitiveness will take years
“This is where I think tariffs applied on more of like, you know, kind of a national security industrial policy basis can be really advantageous. Create the time for, you know, American and allied industry to be able to get price competitive. It's just going to…”
Schimpf: Rebuilding unplanned defense supply chains takes five years in a crisis
“But if we are looking at, you know, we've got to add a crisis work all the way back to the raw materials that we didn't plan for. Now you're looking at five years of lack of being able to reconstitute that supply chain.”
Palantir streamlined Ukraine military targeting workflows from satellite imagery to approval
“You know, I think a lot of the things that were starting to happen in Ukraine, a lot of the great work Palantir did was on things like this, where it was like the targeting process of going from satellite imagery through to, hey, this looks like a tank, throug…”
Schimpf: Defense budget allocates under 0.2% to modern autonomous systems
“The amount of money that's actually spent on capabilities like the types of things we're working on is somewhere like between .1 and .2% of the defense budget.”
Defense tech will not produce hundreds of major startup success stories
“I think the hard reality with this is it's just like venture. It's just like any sort of industry where there isn't going to be 500 success stories. That is unlikely to be the case, right?”
Anduril fielded its first weapon system in under two years
“It was just like under two years from when we started from Never having done a weapons program to having a fielded weapon capability”
Schimpf: Standard drone communication links fail under electronic jamming in Ukraine
“Nearly every drone company that's been deployed into there has had the same reaction. Very little works on that communication link. You gotta actually very quickly innovate on it and solve these problems.”
Schimpf: US manufacturing rebuild will start in defense and aerospace
“I don't think it's gonna start with, you know, making low cost iPhones, but I think starting in defense production, starting in aerospace, Areas where there's like a national interest in keeping this on the U.S., and then looking at mass-producibility there.”
Schimpf: U.S. government lacks data on deep defense supply chain dependencies
“Number one, I think you need data, right? Like there's very little data on like what two, three levels down into the supply chain is actually on that bill of materials and what are the, you know, kind of critical components.”
Schimpf: Recruiting hardware and manufacturing talent to California is extremely difficult
“Particularly as you get to more hardware skill sets, manufacturing skill sets, getting them to come to California is a huge problem.”
Schimpf: AI's primary defense role is managing massive sensor scale
“So when I think about, like, where AI is going to drive The most value for warfare. It is dealing with the scale problem, which is really like the amount of information that is the number of sensors, like the sheer volume of systems that are going to be fielde…”
Schimpf: Manually piloted military drones cannot scale due to jamming limits
“It's all like manually piloted, but that doesn't really scale. And there presents a lot of limitations on communication, jamming, all these things.”
Schimpf: US defense posture requires human accountability in warfare
“And so the US posture on this is very much, we want to have humans accountable for what happens in war.”
Schimpf: Commercial vehicle development takes 2-3 years while military timelines skyrocket
“There's this awesome chart, which shows how long it takes to get commercial aircraft or autos from kickoff to fielding. And it's been flat to slightly better for all of those things, on the order of two to three years. The military aircraft side just went lite…”
Schimpf: New defense missiles take 12 years from concept to deployment
“New missile takes about 12 years to go from concept through to fielding, like, 12 years.”
Lower costs allow the Air Force to fund multiple autonomous aircraft vendors
“Unlike, you know, something like an F-thirty-five, where it's only feasible to afford one provider of this you can start to look at for this, for weapon systems, for a variety of these things, Carrying multiple people to be able to really incentivize the indus…”
The U.S. military under-invested in air defense for 30 years
“And the U.S. Has under-invested in air, air defense capabilities for the last 20 or 30 years, right? We've had full air superiority. We didn't need to invest. It wasn't a critical problem set we had.”
The U.S. defense industrial base faces a critical generational retirement gap
“The traditional industrial base in the U.S. For defense is often at the point of retirement. You have people who are largely you know, built this up during the Cold War, they're retiring, their kids don't want to run these facilities, and it's become a critica…”
Schimpf: DoD spends far less on software than commercial tech firms
“When you look at, like, how these things play out in terms of, like, what do modern technology companies spend? Take a Tesla, take any of these companies that are building, you know, kind of modern hardware, software enabled systems. You know, what's the perce…”
Anduril liquid-cooled desktop GPUs for early solar-powered desert Sentry towers
“We were literally taking desktop GPUs GPUs and liquid cooling them to get these things to work in a hot desert under solar power.”
Anduril built Sentry prototype in three months and scaled in 2.5 years
“We were able to go and get a prototype up in about three months and then move into like a pilot in about six months and then a full scale in about two and a half years.”