Deterrence depends on the ability to produce weapons

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:21:48

   Yeah, I love, I mean, I think it was a great bet by Joe very early on to take an entirely different approach to this gallium-based semiconductor material to generate walls of energy that actually almost act like cyber effects. So it's not one-to-one where you're firing a munition against a single drone. You're really putting a wall of energy. So it doesn't matter if it's one drone or a thousand drones it's going to have the efficacy of being able to stop them and block them oh so it's one wave i thought these i thought it was like simultaneously shooting out emt pulses or whatever it is no yeah it's putting up an entire wall of energy And that is, you know, it's a very clever approach to solve the problem.

2. 1:22:31

   I think we're going to need defense in depth with an approach like this. When you think about the UAS problem, it is a massive offset that our adversaries have against us. You know, how many million dollar missiles can you shoot at $200 drones, even $2,000 drones? You're going to lose that equation. And so, you know, we're going to need entirely different ways of thinking about this. Now, this challenges, so there's a question of like, how quickly can the force adapt these things?

3. 1:22:54

   and recognizing that you're not going to have just one answer, that you're going to actually have to have a series of answers that mean that you're not afraid of putting your destroyers into a position to be relevant anymore. And that's the greatest threat. So like when I look at Ukraine, there are really three lessons I take away. And this is one of them. Like the Ukrainians, people often look and say, wow, isn't it amazing that they sunk half the Russian Black sea fleet, even though they don't have a Navy. And I say, no, no, no, it's because they didn't have a Navy. That's how they could conceive of an entirely different force structure that had sea dews, essentially, you know, these cheap explosive munition drones that were guideable with a Starlink. It's an entirely different conception of the problem that I think a big

4. 1:23:40

   surface Navy would have, could get there eventually, but it's not going to get there as quickly or as dynamically. That's one lesson. The second one is we should have realized we had a five-alarm fire when we went through 10 years of 155 production in 10 weeks. And I think in World War II, we used to make like 500,000 shells a month. And now we're struggling to make roughly one-tenth that, 65,000 or so. And we've had some time. Ukraine didn't happen last week.

5. 1:24:10

   We've had some time. So what lessons can we take about what it's going to take to actually ramp up the industrial base as a consequence. And the lesson from that is that we got it wrong. We thought the stockpile was the deterrent. If we could go to our adversaries and say, look at how much stuff we have sitting on the stock, they'd be scared. It's not. The deterrent is your ability to produce the stockpile.

6. 1:24:33

   How fast you can make them. Yeah. And so we should never have cut down to minimum rate production. All these ideas that were really born out of an economic fantasy that we could spend way less and still have as much security. Look, I think it's reasonable for democracy to debate, like how much do we want to spend, but to believe you're not trading off security. Like we have to just account for all the trade-offs appropriately. And I think if we all understood like actually we're gonna change our spending profile and it's gonna mean that we're much less secure, we may have made different decisions along the way.

7. 1:25:04

   So we shouldn't, you know, that is a hard earned lesson that the production, not the stockpiles deterrent, we shouldn't forget it. And it should shape everything. That's why you need something like a Nandrill. You need to be able to make 10,000 of these things, not a hundred.