The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 51 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Harrison: Conflict with China would invalidate a huge swath of US naval assets
“The problem with that is that if we get into any conflict with China, there's suddenly a huge swath of our naval assets that we don't want to put anywhere near China, Because they could just demolish it. And so it invalidate even a lot of the exquisite assets …”
Harrison: $1M in Ukrainian Drones Destroyed a Third of Russia's Bomber Fleet
“So in Ukraine, there was this, I think it was called Operation Spiderweb, where, ah, Ukraine snuck basically like under false floorboards of a truck. They snuck a million dollars of worth of drones into Russian territory. And then the drones basically took fli…”
Harrison: Modern Warfare Demands Mass Low-Cost Assets, Which the US Lacks
“That is modern conflict. It's like, you have to be capable of spitting out a high volume of these low cost assets to be able to engage, and we are not, we, like, we as a nation are not good at that.”
Harrison: In practical terms, the US is not top dog militarily
“In practical terms, we are not the biggest dog at the party, and so we have to acknowledge that there's some strategic changes we have to make to stay relevant.”
US would run out of munitions in 11 days in China conflict
“If we were to engage in a large scale conflict, I think it's something like 11 days. Like, we would run out of munitions in 11 days.”
Harrison: U.S. Has Consistently Lost Wargames Against China Since 2015
“We have been effectively losing war games when they model the scenario of US versus China since, I think like, 2015. We have been, the US loses those war games.”
Harrison: Rebuilding Fleet Lost in China Conflict Would Take 25 Years
“Half of our naval fleet could be destroyed within the first couple months of a large-scale conflict with China, and it would take us 25 years to rebuild just to get back to where we were. So our shipbuilding capacity doesn't exist.”
Harrison: Pacifism Is a Privilege of the Protected
“Pacifism really is a privilege of the protected. Like, there is somebody else who is willing to do those things and build those capabilities to protect our right to say, I don't want to be involved in that, and that's fine.”
Harrison: Conflict over Taiwan could cause a $10T global economic hit
“You look at a conflict over Taiwan, I think people say could be a 10 trillion dollar hit to the global economy. Like bigger than the financial crisis, COVID, anything. I think in some cases combined.”
Harrison: Index Ventures bars weapons investments and militarizing portfolio drones
“Index, as far as I know, still to this day, has a clause where they can't invest in anything that is a weapon or could be used as a weapon, and I remember they had investments in, in companies like a drone company, where they uniquely could have contracted a p…”
The vast majority of important tech companies will be built in SF
“Statistically, there are more people in the Bay Area building companies in a specific, within a specific playbook that have specific expectations and shorthands and heuristics that are more likely to lead to success for a company. And so I can simultaneously b…”
Harrison: McNamara's Bureaucracy Strangled America's Industrial Capacity
“Basically McNamara has strangled the golden goose that we had of industrial capacity, where he's made it so high friction to build anything, that now every single individual project Is dramatically delayed, significantly over budget.”
Harrison: China developed $15M to $20M missiles capable of destroying US carriers
“The Chinese have developed missiles that they affectionately refer to as carrier killers, that literally it's, I mean, these still might be fairly expensive missiles, right, these are 15, twenty million dollar missiles, But they can destroy a multi-billion dol…”
Harrison: The DoD represents sub-1% of global R&D spending today
“Today it is sub one percent of global R&D.”
Cost-plus contracts incentivize defense primes to maximize costs and avoid commercial components
“If the incentive is, no matter what it costs you, I will give you 10% on top of that, that's your profit. Well, 10% of three billion is a much bigger number than 10% of a hundred and fifty million. And so, as a traditional prime, you are deeply incentivized to…”
Harrison: Anduril took over Microsoft's $22B IVAS contract for EagleEye
“And then a year ago Microsoft basically admitted defeat to some extent, and the government said, we're going to recompete the contract, and Anduril first as a potential partner to Microsoft, and then eventually took over a twenty-two billion dollar IVAS contra…”
Harrison: Autonomy delivers higher-quality military outcomes with fewer human casualties
“And so autonomy introduces this incredible capability where we are going to do the things we have to do, whether we like it or not. We need to do those things. This way ensures that the outcome is very likely higher quality and puts significantly fewer people …”
Harrison: Anduril is actively working on subterranean warfare technology
“Like several people are working on that, including Anduril, much to the surprise, I don't know if you have heard this story, but there was a story of Palmer talking about subterranean warfare, and the marketing person at Anduril was there, it was like, to the …”
Harrison: The ocean is often harder to build hardware for than space
“Candidly, in some cases, the ocean is actually harder to build for than space, because space has a lot of just, like, neutralizing effects, right? It's just there. And as long as it's maintained, it can be maintained. I mean, you have satellites that have been…”
Harrison: Only a small handful of new defense primes will emerge
“There's not going to be 30 new defense primes. There's probably going to be a very small handful of companies that can check all the boxes you need to be able to do that. Obviously, I think Android can be one of them, and there's maybe a few others”
Harrison: The combative divide between hustle culture and work-life balance is unhealthy
“Now there has become this like this combative divide where like people who work hard, think less of, you know, lazy snowflakes that don't want to work hard and people that have a healthy work life balance, look at people who are ambitious and are working and t…”
Narrative storytelling actively constructs reality rather than objective reality winning out
“When I started writing, I had this really strong perspective that, you know, storytelling is really powerful, but at the end of the day, reality wins out. And increasingly over the last two years, as I've written more and kind of unpacked other people's storie…”
Harrison: Anduril has nailed all five core concepts from its original pitch deck
“In their first pitch deck there, if I can remember all of them, they basically had five things, and they had all these weird ways to describe things like, you know, VR for war fighters and perimeter security on a stick and all these things that were, like, the…”
Harrison: Bureaucracy Imposes a Million Taxes of Friction on Defense R&D
“It's like, if I ask you to build something that you don't know how to build, it requires a ton of experimentation. But if you have a bean counter along the way, where every time you try and run an experiment, they're introducing three to five to 12 weeks of pr…”
Harrison: F-35 Program Costs Could Reach $1T Versus Projected $13B–$15B
“And like you have projects that should have cost 13, fifteen billion dollars that are upwards could cost a trillion dollars, like the F-thirty-five program, right? It's like dramatic overages.”
Harrison: Ukraine is live testing and fielding military tech faster than the US or China
“Ukraine was like the military industrial complex in production where it's like they're live testing stuff. Way more rapidly, even than, like, even the US at its best, even China or wherever. In Ukraine, it's just, we try something and we immediately field it, …”
Harrison: Anduril risks private capital on internal R&D instead of government funds
“Where the military, you know, where the military is trying to acquire things built to spec, the goal of Anduril is to acquire things built to mission, right, so they fund their own R&D, they put their own money up, rather than asking the government for R&D dol…”
Harrison: Anduril is shifting from augmenting defense assets to replacing them
“And now increasingly, what is most impressive is that what started as very much a sort of, like, product suite of adjacencies of, like, these are all things that will augment a lot of existing assets. We're now getting into potentially, like, asset replacement…”
Harrison: Autonomous aircraft like Fury extend pilot reach while eliminating pilot risk
“So like you look at, so Fury as an example, it's not only replacing in some cases, because there are some missions that we no longer need to send pilots into danger, we can do it autonomously, but there are some cases where you still want human judgment and sp…”
Harrison: Anduril has had products deployed in Ukraine since day one
“Palmer says that Anduril has had products on the ground in Ukraine basically since day one. They were over there pretty quickly, you know, deploying assets and stuff like that.”
Harrison: U.S. defense innovation requires pairing technical builders with military mavericks
“This sort of like one-to-one pairing of people who are doing hard things and military mavericks who are protecting and enabling their ability to execute that has been a very important capability throughout the history of sort of military innovation in the U.S.”
Harrison: America's main existential threat is self-inflicted capability failure
“None of them could have an impact on the U.S. Because the U.S. Has such a unique in history and in geography and nation states, such a unique capability. That it is very diff, the US is a, has a lot of unfair advantages, and so what Lincoln says is, if we are …”
Harrison: Military superiority is always front-run by industrial superiority
“Every single time military superiority is front run by industrial superiority. We did that in World War II. The problem is now that China is doing that today.”
Harrison: Anduril started on day one where Palantir was in year 10
“Anduril on day one got to start where Palantir was in year 10. Like, that, that level of experience and knowledge that is the kind of, like, specialty that they had and resonated with”
Harrison: 12 of 16 Thucydides Trap historical cases led to war
“Any time a rising power threatens a established power, it ends in large conflict, great power conflict, and when you look throughout history, there are 16 instances where that happened. Of those 16, 12 of them resulted in mass scale conflict”
Harrison: VCs chase market size while ignoring ethical consequences of investments
“Like, everybody should be having more philosophical debates about the things that they are investing in. We don't have nearly enough philosophical debates about the implications. We just say, Hey, this is a hot technology and it looks like it's ripping and peo…”
Harrison: Investors overlook defense supply chain opportunities chasing the next Anduril
“People are under-appreciating a lot of the, like, second and third order effects from, like, a supply chain perspective around defense, because they're so focused on, well, who's gonna be the next andurl, and it's like, you can make a lot of money investing in…”
Identifying top talent early gives venture investors an unfair advantage
“If you can identify the smartest people as early as possible and then support them relentlessly throughout their career, you have this sort of unfair advantage when those people eventually do start companies.”
Contrary Research intentionally avoids functioning as promotional content marketing
“And we have very deliberately set up contrary research to be like antithetical to content marketing. Like we actively don't want this to be like pumping our own book, which is why we don't exclusively write about our portfolio companies. And even when we do wr…”
Deglobalization and global conflict are creating real market opportunities
“Even if you abstract away from like the hype, you still feel like there is a moment in time where, you know, de-globalization is real. Increased global conflict is real. Like those things create market opportunities.”
Science fiction should serve as a guide for building reality
“Fiction, like science fiction should be a guide for how we think about building reality.”
Startup failure is necessary to recycle capital into better companies
“Startups are supposed to fail. Like that's like, there are ideas. It is literally a mechanism of iteration and experimentation. Like startups are supposed to go out, try something, experiment. And if it fails, then the capital and the, like the, both the like …”
Periodic hype deflation in tech is necessary to flush out opportunistic hucksters
“Every once in a while that hype needs to deflate and flush out the hucksters. And candidly, the more that that hype ebbs and flows, the less likely it is that hucksters are going to come in because they've gotten hurt too many times.”
Anduril's first pitch deck promised making billions by saving the government billions
“In their very first pitch deck, he said, we are going to make billions of dollars by saving the government tens of billions of dollars of revenue and of costs.”
Harrison: DoD Accounted for 36% of Global R&D in the 1950s and 1960s
“During the cold war in the fifties and sixties, the DoD alone represented 36% of global R&D.”
Harrison: Anduril's first Sentry Tower customer was a private ranch owner
“And like their first customer, if I remember correctly, it wasn't even the government. It was a private like ranch owner who wanted to monitor because there was like drug traffickers coming across his land.”