The Ledger, every show

“Versus the traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee. That's a disaster. Like everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.”

“A low number of really exquisite weapons is not gonna win a conflict, and I think Ukraine kind of definitively showed that to the world, that that is not a winning strategy.”

“Looking for a great head of manufacturing. There's basically no like tier one execs we could find that were American born. We ended up finding someone who was from Canada, but everyone I found who was like great thinking about this differently, like really nov…”

“Grants are, in my opinion, the worst possible form of this. It's like, you know, giving Intel an outrageous amount of money to build a facility that they didn't believe they had demand for. It's like, why would they not take the money to build a facility? They…”

“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…”

“Is like, to me, it is unethical to not apply these technologies to these problems.”

“This is one of the areas we're partnering with OpenAI on”

“So you have a relatively small cartel of these companies who sort of all say we won't do fixed price programs anymore. They won't do things on a fixed cost basis.”

“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…”

“It's just there are 10 times as many people who say no as there are to people who are accountable for doing it.”

“A lot of the areas that You know, are going to succeed are often the ones that are less popular. It's areas working on weapons. Like, this is not an area that a lot of companies are interested in doing, but I think to succeed in the defense space, you have to …”

“The ability to use autonomous systems is, in effect, like a new way of operating, whereas, you know, F-thirty-five and all these were sort of Incremental improvements to, like, a conventional way we've been fighting for quite a long time.”

“China has been able to modernize and build new technologies and sort of like they're pretty decisive advantage in countering the way that U S fights the longer range of their missiles. Like all of these things are pretty substantial. So there was a degree of l…”

“We've been clear. We work on weapons. We believe that's important. We believe you can do it ethically. We believe it's necessary. And we're not shy about that.”

“I tend to think we can get a lot more bang for our buck on weapons, on aircraft, you know, probably two X from where we are. By just looking at a different mix of these things.”

“I don't see a world where, like, the defense budgets could magically shrink, and we still have the military that we need to have, but I do think these things can be done wildly more efficiently than they ever have in the past.”

“Europe is going to spend something like Four times the amount of procurement that the U S is over the next five years.”

“Is there enough composites capacity or printed circuit board capacity in the U S or CNC shops? The answer is absolutely yes. There is definitely enough capacity”

“You have to solve this at a commercially viable level, not at a defense specific level. It will always then be too expensive and unproducible. If you just have a defense exquisite magnet factory, like that doesn't work. You need a commercially viable magnet fa…”

“Europe is going to spend something like four times the amount of procurement that the U.S. Is over the next five years.”

“Russia today is outproducing NATO on one five five munitions and took about two years.”

“We have no strategic plan as a country for how we preserve supply in a catastrophic situation.”

“Industrial production has a deterrence factor all itself, and that it is critical for winning a conflict.”

“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…”

“China has definitively more industrial independence and the ability to continue production absent, you know, kind of like their choke points are quite a bit more, more mineral minimal, right?”

“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…”

“And that, that I think is where the US policy is, is landed on, where it's like, let's give grants to these industrial giants that everyone agrees are no longer Competitive, and we'll try to save them. And you're like, it is obviously not gonna work.”

“The, he has demonstrated that he does not care if he harms the economy, if he believes it is in the interest of national security and preservation.”

“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.”

“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,…”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think SpaceX had a third the amount of money that Boeing was given to make Starliner work.”

“The single best stat for this is they are running hundreds of tests a year of hypersonic weapons. The US is running, like, four.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“The innovation Is much more coming from the commercial world. So it becomes being the best adopter. It is no longer these 10 year tech roadmaps the department controls.”

“And on top of that, when you get into production, there's no incentive to reduce your costs because that you list literally will make less money if you reduce your costs and they're going to buy a fixed quantity.”

“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.”

“We know that China is, you know, investing in similar technologies. We know they're going to move out on it,”

“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 has what is the equivalent of cruise missiles.”

“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.”

“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.”

“So we're not going to outbuild China. That's not an option. On these large, you know, very expensive platforms. It's just, it's not going to work. It's a bad strategy.”

“It actually really favors the defender. Now, if you can operate in this new way it would be immensely hard for any sort of successful invasion of, you know, Taiwan to actually play out because of You know, what we've learned and what we've seen and how the US …”

“The U S is not going to adopt systems that have autonomous robots going out and making sort of lethal decisions about, you know, what to attack or not. That's not really how the U S works. We assign accountability to the person that employed a weapon system. T…”

“There are multiple companies doing very credible things on, you know, hypersonic air vehicles, hypersonic rockets and missiles that will be wildly cheaper than the state of the art defense. And it's something that, you know, historically you would have said th…”