Former DoD Advisor on Iran, China and AI Warfare

Dictators are enormously strong and enormously weak at the same time. A dictatorship can be enormously weak because they're illegitimate, right? And at the same time, they're strong because they control the apparatus of the state. When you have power and you ascend to power in a fundamentally illegitimate structure, who do you trust? The answer is no one.

High trust comes through esprit de corps and believing in the mission and the legitimacy of what you're doing. That is one of our enormous strengths. We are fundamentally legitimate.

1. Theaters of War

I think to begin, you have to define what it might mean for us to win in some of these open theaters of war in the world right now. We came through this period where anyone who was a macro-type person that I would have in that seat would talk about how the US, in this multipolar world, is retreating from the global stage and is not going to be the world police any longer. We don't need the interaction with the rest of the world.

It seems like we're in a very different world now, and everyone's wondering what winning would even mean in a theater like Iran. I'm curious for you to just riff on that.

Winning is politically defined. The Strait of Hormuz was open before this contingency. At the end of the day, if all we get is the Strait of Hormuz back open, strategically, maybe it was the juice worth the squeeze, for lack of a better term. I would argue that we've degraded an enormous amount of Iranian military capability, which is what the Department's internal FRAGO—their order—was to do.

You've degraded that, but the Strait of Hormuz, as an economic choke point, has to open back up in order for commerce to work. We're sitting here today, and the Strait is functionally closed. The economy is still ripping here in the United States. Markets are high. You have high inflation.

I think the conventional wisdom is that America can withstand less pain than the counterparty. There's this hybridization that happened in certain parts of the Shia Muslim world through the works of Shariati, which is a hybridization of Marxism and martyrdom together. It's an absolute control of an environment: if you martyr yourself, you're winning; you're ascending.

It's such a satanic philosophy because it promotes internal destruction and sacrifice to the limit as evidence that you're winning. We were talking right before we sat down about how Gaza has been leveled, by any stretch of the imagination, and there are still elements of Hamas operating. But have they won?

Well, in their mind, in that Shariati form of Red Shi'ism, they're winning. You can bring people to the precipice of their own destruction, and in that ideology, that form of religious ideology, they're winning. You're going to have to bring an enormous quantum of hurt.

2. Flexible Power vs. Massive Retaliation

The problem, or the challenge, with democracies is: how much of our moral rectitude will we compromise in order to achieve the political goal if we don't feel the existential threat sitting here today in New York?

Yeah.

There is the Taylor view of flexible power, this kind of proportional response to threats, and then there's the Eisenhower school of massive retaliation. I love Kotkin because he talks about how, if you don't know history, everything is unprecedented.

The Japanese had a martyrdom culture that they memorialized into their force structure through kamikaze. They would chain people up in trees in Okinawa. So why did we drop 2 bombs on them? We dropped the first bomb—enormous mass destruction—and they refused to surrender. They were prepared to fight to the death. We dropped the second bomb, and it was only Emperor Hirohito who broke the tie. If he hadn't broken that tie, if he had said, “Continue,” they would have sacrificed themselves.

It's extremely hard with a martyrdom culture to have regime change. Then the question is, what are you going to defect to? You need an alternative power structure there to defect to. You can defect from it, which means you leave, right? But to defect to, to get regime change—even if 85% or 90% want the regime to change—you need an alternative force structure to do it.

The IRGC controls half of the economy, and they have all the guns. They have all of these elements of power, so they're very hard to replace. Can you co-opt them successfully? They own an enormous quantum of assets in Western Europe.

What kind of assets?

3. The Dual Nature of Dictatorships

Homes in London, villas, billions of dollars that they've exfiltrated from the country. Abbas Milani has documented this in voluminous detail. He's a wonderful scholar on the topic.

Think of the average Iranian. The limit at the ATM is $7. That's how much you can pull out. And you had the second-largest bank fail about 2 months before this recent contingency. Milani calls it a mafia-style regime, and it's true. The quantum of corruption is absolutely enormous.

Dictators are enormously strong and enormously weak at the same time. This is actually a good frame for our entire conversation: we have to be able to hold 2 competing ideas in the same vessel, and both can be true. A dictatorship can be enormously weak because they're illegitimate, right? They haven't been tested. They only have to be stronger than their strongest opposition, and opposition is outlawed, so they're weak. At the same time, they're strong because they control the apparatus of the state.

This is the cauldron that you have in the people that you're fighting. I believe there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that the Ayatollah, likely Khamenei, may have deliberately allowed himself to be aboveground and targeted to die to solve a whole series of problems: that he had killed potentially 30,000 or 40,000 of his own people, that he was sick, and that succession was unclear at the end of the day. Maybe there would be some infighting.

Martyrdom in the Shariati school of Red Shi'ism is a beautiful solution, right? He was sick and ill, and so there's a growing body of evidence that suggests he wanted to be killed. These are the adversaries here.

4. Eisenhower and Taylor's Theories of Escalation

I think winning at the limit, in the way we think of it—almost like a documentary of World War II—is really hard. We experienced that in World War II as well, right? The bombing of Dresden. There was this horror that we would firebomb a city and kill 30,000 people under the premise that they have to know that they lost. This is what happens when you deal with fanaticism. It makes you question the kernel of your moral fiber as a democracy, and you have to go really far.

5. Positive Propaganda

I think the analogy with Israel, Hamas, and Gaza is a perfect example. Israel has annihilated Gaza. It has been leveled. You can't say that Hamas, from a technological standpoint, has any kind of military capability compared to the Israelis. It's like comparing a toaster oven to the sun, right? That's the analogy I like to use.

But in order to win, look how far they've had to go. I don't know if Netanyahu has the support in the Knesset for the purposes of doing this last leg in the ground war, but it's what's necessary for his condition of winning.

You have to have a design on a concept of positive propaganda, right? Propaganda has a bad connotation to it, but it's just your marketing. It's marketing; it's your political worldview. Israel has just not spent the calories on it, right? The question is, should they? I believe the answer is yes. In a finite pie, how much of the pie should they spend on it? It's not immaterial.

Their adversaries are spending enormously on it because it's working. The martyrdom culture has also been hybridized with religion to create a higher form of fanaticism. It allows you to run for so long.

The design to co-opt American universities can be traced to a single hotel room in Philadelphia, where the FBI was listening with laser microphones. After the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority, with Arafat, is brought in, and Hamas is considered left out in the cold. They go to Hamas and say, “Guess what? You're not in this deal.”

Now this is a political organization with no home. In the single conversation that the FBI has transcripts of, they laid out their plan to co-opt universities and co-opt university teaching and institutions for the express purpose of changing Western opinion over the course of 20 years.

6. The Strait of Hormuz

I think Bezos has attributed the quote that if you have a 7-year plan, you win because most people give up. These guys had a 20-year plan, and it totally worked. But to make it seem like it was this natural formation out of the ether through moral will is to downplay the sophistication of what these people in the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas set out to do. They set out to do this. They were so committed to it, and they saw it through.

We're talking about people advocating for a society that brutalizes their own people and denies rights to the people they're advocating for. You have a series of people advocating for them who would be denied those same rights there, right? It was done with intent. It was by design.

I would say this administration is moving the goalposts, in the popular vernacular, of what winning means. But my view is, if you have the Strait open and you have degraded Iranian military capability that can't reconstitute itself very quickly through oil profits, then that will be a win. If it can quickly reconstitute its export network of terror and the Strait is closed, then strategically it will be a failure.

What do you think will happen in the Strait? How would you describe the state of things today and the options that the rest of the world has—or we have—going forward? What do you think will happen in practical terms?

The rest of the world—we’re there, right? And then we have the Iranians, and there are foreign-flagged commercial vessels there, but no one else is there in practical terms. It’s just us. Yeah.

The rest of the world is really, to a large extent, watching, save for the Gulf Arab states. The amazing thing is the Gulf Arab states have a much stronger will to fight. The UAE has left OPEC, right? That’s kind of big. And then they said they will participate in projecting force with their own forces at the end of the day. That’s pretty big, too. They are very concerned that we will lose our will to fight by virtue of whatever economic pain in the interim that it generates.

But the concept of overcoming the blockade is going to need more magazine depth and more forces in the region. We’re going to need an amphibious force on the shore, for sure. That is a major escalation. And so that’s where Taylor’s theory and Eisenhower’s theory begin to merge.

Can you describe those two? It’s such an interesting history. Maxwell Taylor was a four-star general and Kennedy’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was a great military leader, but he could also be blamed for the escalation of the Vietnam War. Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex really came out of this concern: We now have this new superweapon, and so that should really work as the maximal deterrent for any of these things breaking out.

Why spend all the calories on building all of these proportional capabilities when, through a chain of escalation, it’s ultimately going to lead to the big red button, right? Those are kind of the competing theories.

Eisenhower’s theory was kind of maximal deterrence: If you do anything, we’re going to use the really special stuff. Taylor’s was, we’re going to use proportional force. He had viewed it as a deterrence gap, because are we really going to go nuclear for small incursions, small footfalls? And I think to an extent that was right, but all of it leads toward escalation, right?

If you don’t embark with this very clear directive internally of what you want to accomplish from a political standpoint, and you’re not crisp about it, then you lose political will and then you lose the ability to do it. You lose Congress, you lose the budget, right? You ultimately lose the executive. So that becomes more and more important. But you have to paint the target of what you want to accomplish. And so all these things are political.

Who is more right, do you think, between Eisenhower and Taylor? Apply those 2 lenses to today’s stance for the US. What is the US doing—not just in the Iranian theater, but in general with its military, with the Department of War? What are they doing? What should they be doing that they’re not doing, and what are they doing that they shouldn’t be doing?

I think it’s fair to say you need both, right? Otherwise, if you took an exclusive, maximalist view of Eisenhower—of having this nuclear deterrent at the end of the day—your only response is nuclear deterrence. Can you imagine the world that we’d be living in?

You’d say there are some people that say, “Well, great. That would mean we wouldn’t get involved in any of these contingencies, and we wouldn’t have gotten involved in Vietnam. We wouldn’t have gotten involved in Iraq. We probably wouldn’t have gotten involved in Afghanistan because we wouldn’t have this flexible projection of force to correspondingly respond, and maybe we wouldn’t have the temperament to drop a bomb on someone at the end of the day. Maybe we would.” But the binary choice would be so stark, right?

7. Grading the U.S. Military's Capabilities

Flexible power has all these gradations of capability that Taylor outlined and that have been modernized for the new concepts of warfare. And that’s how we build magazine depth in all of these things. A Tomahawk missile is not a nuclear weapon. HIMARS is not a nuclear weapon. It’s the concept of being able to enforce the smaller infringements, if you will. And so you probably need both. I just think it would be a very scary world if all we had was a nuclear button in order to prevent a full-scale contingency.

How would you compare the state of our military capability and prowess today to when you were in the Pentagon?

We’re the best, man. Someone asked me earlier today—they said, “What’s the grade that you give it?” And I said, “It’s not fair to do this huge compound grade because, one, this is a government organ, right? So how great can a government organ be?”

Our ability to train and equip the forces, and what they deliver—it’s the best fighting force in the world that the world has ever known. And you have to do some relative comparison to the rest of the militaries around the world. We are number 1, but it is a body of government. And so because it’s a body of government, it gets what? 1-year money from Congress. You have deck chairs that constantly change. You have these features of government that make it suboptimal at the end of the day.

8. Assessing China's Illegitimacy

But as a grade—as a military, right, and its capability—I give it a super-high grade. Is the bureaucracy a problem? Yes. Do we have to modernize it? Yes. Do we go through it every 20 years? Yes, because we recognize how important it is. But our ability to project force is so good. And I think having a pacing threat unto itself is valuable to make sure that we are serious about maintaining capabilities.

I love the works of Dikötter [?] because he’s so clear about how strong and weak China is at the same time. Who’s Dikötter [?]?

Dikötter [?] is a well-regarded historian on China and has a theory about how China is not a superpower just by virtue of how illegitimate and how weak it is, and how tense the plenary in the party is. He has good points.

The Chinese equivalent of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has disappeared. He went to kindergarten with Xi Jinping. These guys are close. And so when you have power and you ascend to power in a fundamentally illegitimate structure, who do you trust? The answer is no one. You are constantly worried that someone’s going to put a bullet in the back of your head.

9. Magazine Depth

That form of illegitimacy cascades down through the immediate organs of that government to include its military. And we’ve talked about their lack of jointness, the corruption internally within the force, the corruption in the missile corps. I mean, they have turned over their senior military leadership 3 or 4 times in the last 3 years. That is not a high-trust environment. High trust comes through esprit de corps and believing in the mission and legitimacy of what you’re doing. That is one of our enormous strengths.

But their magazine depth, industrially, is so enormous. So the calculus becomes: Can the magazine depth overcome their institutional weakness at the end of the day? And it’s a good question, and that’s why we, as a country, are embarking on this enormous effort to industrialize in order to add magazine depth to the capabilities we have. You wouldn’t add magazine depth if you had the maximalist view of nuclear deterrence. You have magazine depth when you believe in the concept of flexible power.

I talked to Shyam Sankar from Palantir about this. He had just come out with this book about—I think it was called Mobilize—the book about this exact thing of increasing magazine depth. I don’t think he used those words, but it’s what he meant. How would you grade us on that specific thing, and what is the state of it today? Are we doing a good job? Who is doing it? How’s that going to unfold?

We’re in a democracy, and so in a dictatorship, if you don’t build magazine depth and that’s your job, you’re dead.

And so that mechanism of enforcement is pretty compelling. Here we balance things like, will it be profitable, right? Will it have duration? Congress is giving one-year money, and so there are new efforts to create multiyear contracts for ordnance, which we’ve never done before. We really need it. It’s great.

So we’re changing the architecture to allow us to do more, to add to magazine depth. We need to go faster for the purposes of also filling the deterrence gap, right? So we can stop small incursions on the margins, especially with the Southeast Asian nations that we have cooperative peacekeeping agreements with.

These bilateral agreements require us to protect them, and they’re being violated right now, like the Philippines, for example. So we have to do more there. It’s getting better. Compared to anyone else in the West, we’re still the best, right? It’s just that your adversary has a political structure that allows them to bring people to the precipice.

But the illegitimacy of the Chinese—fundamentally an illegitimate power—is also our advantage. And we are making enormous strides in the clandestine services of co-opting that environment.

Say more about that.

Xi doesn’t know who’s on our side in his Standing Committee or on his side. Every day he wakes up with the thought of, “Maybe I need to kill someone off.” That is our edge. Our edge is that he is fundamentally illegitimate.

The monopoly of power that is communism—their form of Marxism, of communism—is extremely powerful because the apparatus of an enormous economy can pay off all these kinds of people. But they are illegitimate, and our ability to recruit, retain, and train had really degraded. We had lost a lot of capability through a series of assets that were caught, but we have rebuilt that in a very meaningful way. I don’t think Xi sleeps well at night.

Is that change very recent?

No. These things are built brick by brick, right? We have these government agencies where everyone goes into work every day, Monday to Sunday, and their job is, “How am I going to infiltrate this illegitimate political structure for the purposes of making it weak?”

10. The Inevitable Fall of Totalitarian Regimes

We have people who drive their car in, bring their sack lunch, and this is what they do every day. Ultimately, we break through. Why? Because every Chinese person in the Standing Committee has a relative somewhere in the United States, however many degrees removed, who owns a small business that is doing well and is able to fundamentally live free. We can’t forget what makes us special.

Yeah.

And that we are the bug-out point for the world. Even for the people in the Standing Committee who are worried about being on the outs, they have a plan to get here.

So we have weaknesses, but we also have enormous strengths. Their weaknesses are also enormous. It doesn’t mean that they can’t bring us to the precipice. Their mass is so much greater than ours, right? Their population size and what they can do industrially.

Look, it is a dictatorship, right? It is a totalitarian regime. I don’t even know how this is up for debate. I just think the threat of that is lost. That’s what we’re talking about here. They are fundamentally strong and weak at the same time. We can hold both of those in the same vessel.

But look, I believe in our lifetime China will fall. I believe in our lifetime Iran will fall.

What does it mean for China to fall? I know what it means for Iran to fall.

I believe it will be run like Taiwan. I believe it will fall. The Soviet Union—we grew up with this concept of the Soviet Union. It had this enormous technical capability. It was this monolith. It lasted several generations, and then all of a sudden it fell. It looked super strong right up until the last moment.

There were planning documents circulating at the Pentagon about how strong they were 2 weeks before they fell, because their constitution, their concept of the constitution, is fundamentally corrupt. That monopoly of power says that these people are going to be permanently in charge. You know it to be wrong.

So the question is, does it last 50 years? Does it last 100 years? It does fall, right? Because it’s fundamentally illegitimate. The Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate. They are an illegitimate dictatorship.

I believe in the natural order of humanity and freedom, that freedom is the natural state and that ultimately it prevails. But our enemies use our freedoms so successfully against us. I think the real issue of our time will be, as they use these freedoms against us, how will we have to fence them in to prevent them from being completely polluted?

The scope of social media on us, what they do against us in that, is enormous. We’re allowing it under the rubric of our freedoms. So are we going to have to degrade a portion of our freedoms in order to protect ourselves? This is going to be the real hard part against a very motivated and sociopathic adversary that’s illegitimate.

What’s an example of a degradation of our freedom for protection?

This concept that when you’re within the four walls of the country, there’s a general expectation of freedom of speech. So that creates the freedom for disinformation. Now that you can amplify disinformation through the concept of freedom of speech, do you create this alternative world where people are disconnected from reality?

11. Peacetime Mobilization

Think about where people get their news from. There are no gates on any of this anymore. It’s not something the founders could have ever contemplated, but they were true geniuses in that they made our gridlock. The gridlock is super intentional, right?

Compare us to every other parliamentary democracy in the West. Every parliamentary democracy, pretty much, in the West has a ceremonial Senate. In the UK, it’s the House of Lords. They don’t have real power. At the end of the day, the House of Commons has power, and when the party of power is in power, it is a monopoly of power because they also choose the prime minister.

You don’t vote for the prime minister in a parliamentary democracy. So in the United States, our upper body is completely separate, with a different term that’s longer by design. Right there, you have a separation of powers, and then the executive is technically voted on by the people. It is the purest expression of democracy. You vote for the president directly, and the vice president is put—you put them down.

So you have an executive branch that is separated from the party, and this president and previous presidents do things that the parties don’t like. You do not get that in parliamentary democracies. Parliamentary democracies are more susceptible to being overtaken in these mass-hysteria moments into things like fascism, these directions where the gridlock was designed to prevent someone from co-opting the activity. It makes us slow to respond, right?

But the overarching architecture is that we are fundamentally legitimate and these guys are not legitimate. When people talk about some of these things—“Oh, their society is eclipsing ours”—dude, are you high? You are not free there. You can’t say what you want.

12. Takeaways from Ukraine

A very popular book these days, and justifiably so—it’s a great book—is Freedom’s Forge, about the mobilization around World War II and the story of how our industrial base moved so fast to arm, with companies retooling themselves. It’s a great book. The history of peacetime mobilizations in democratic societies is mixed or bad.

Yes.

I guess we’re not in peacetime right now, but we’re not in some global-scale war. What are the things that you hope happen from here for the US to be the best overall positioned in the world?

We clearly need a change in how we fund the Department of Defense so we can have longer visibility for capitalism to answer the call and build the stockpiles we need for that depth of whatever instrument of projecting force. One-year money, or a 10-year contract subject to the availability of funds, is scary.

We have, on average, 4 or 5 continuing resolutions a year. The peculiarity of a continuing resolution is that no new starts are allowed. So if you think the iteration of new technology is going faster and faster, technically, if you have a new start, you can’t do it.

We’re going to have to change some of the laws and the rules of procurement, and we’re going to need these multiyear authorities in order to be able to build this stuff. There are things that happen when we design the joint structure where we say, “Okay, we’re going to make a Joint Strike Fighter between these branches of service.” We elevate it to this catalog of joint weapons, and so the manufacturer has a reasonable expectation that you’re going to keep ordering, even if it’s one-year money.

13. The True Risk of a Taiwan Invasion

You know there’s going to be a multiyear authority here at some point. We need to do it for the stockpiles that we believe are critical for projecting force. We need to do it across the board to include ordnance and all these other things—the Tomahawks, the 155s, all of these kinetic articles of warfare.

It’s politics. We need a fundamental change in how we appropriate, and then we need to create billets that lessen the political influence over the things that we all agree on as a country are nonnegotiable.

If you look back at the entire Ukraine story now, what are the main things that you’ve observed or learned—your main takeaways from watching the whole thing unfold?

The rate of technological change in the commercial world becomes a direct input into the capabilities that you can project for mass.

Drones have been used since the Vietnam War, right? But you wouldn't think that, right? It's just that drones became commercially viable and cheap and, by virtue of that, became a new article of war because they were so inexpensive. The cost of losing one is low. They gave you a lot of signals intelligence at the end of the day. You could deliver some lethality through the weakness of some of these systems.

14. The Rise of Neo-Primes

But it was the commercial viability and the commercial pervasiveness of that product that made it a great input into a military for mass. The commercial world has so much influence on the rate of change that will happen in warfare because it's about your ability to produce and your ability to sustain and withstand. I just think these wars actually work faster than markets sometimes. The evolution of a Ukrainian drone from 3 years ago to today is unbelievable. There are like 50 iterations. There are all these new capabilities.

That's because you can sit in your garage through commercial supply chains and build the capabilities. We think of war in this Top Gun-style way, and you don't think about something that you could buy at Best Buy as being important to the projection of force. But things that become permissive and inexpensive in a commercial world have these enormously valuable inputs into fighting asymmetric war, clearly.

What does this whole last six months do to the likelihood or impact of something happening in Taiwan, do you think?

So the likes of Kevin Rudd and the real scholars of the area—Kevin Rudd used to be the Australian prime minister, is fluent in Mandarin, by the way, has a PhD in Mandarin, and is really a Xi watcher—he said that Xi's a risk taker. I think, you know, if you've gotten to a certain age and you view it as the apotheosis of your life's achievement, in order to complete the journey—which is to say, Imperial China is what Taiwan is—the takeover by the CCP is not complete until Taiwan falls, until that counter-narrative of how a Chinese society can be run is gone.

I don't think Xi needs to go if the KMT wins the election coming up. The KMT almost won last time, and that is a rapprochement party with the CCP. Clearly, they're like, “We don't want war; we want peace.” It's an accommodation party, and I believe a bullet may never need to be fired in order for China to get what they want. I think that's the more likely outcome.

It keeps with their strategy. Why go? That terrain is hard. It will ostracize them in the world. I just don't see it strategically. If they were running out of options and they felt they had to do it and Xi was near the end of his life, I think the likelihood would increase. But the appetite grows with the eating. If Taiwan is overtaken in a military exercise, is there any doubt that these other countries that have a real historical beef will be next?

I mean, that's why Japan has been so vociferous in advocating for strong defense now under this new prime minister. She's a tough lady. She knows what happens. There's just a real historical beef between China and Japan, and I think that would be exacerbated. It would not stop at Taiwan, most likely.

There's been this “thousand flowers blooming” thing happening on the entrepreneurial side of defense companies here in the US. Lots of appetite after a long drought—basically no new companies—and Anduril is, of course, the most famous. But there are tons of companies doing something: drone-specific companies, submarine boats, missiles, basically everything. It's 10 years from now, right?

A whole bevy of neoprimes have been hugely successful. Their stuff is great in the sense that it's used and it's the thing we rely on, you know, more so than the old primes, which, from my understanding, is still the vast, vast, vast majority of what gets used in war.

So these new companies have won, and that's a good thing. What do you think has to happen for that to be true?

We have to exercise so much of this. There's a part here where you only really know what's good until you go to war with it. That's why the Warthog keeps on being reused. It's just so mission capable. We were supposed to kill this thing like 30 separate times, and we remobilized it for the Iranian contingency.

Theaters of war are the laboratories for these products, and to a certain extent, we don't really know how good these things are until we have the contingent environment in order to exercise the capability. We run exercises with the training equipment, but the proof in the pudding is when we actually fight. That's why drones have had this huge iteration, because they're being used in an actual contested environment.

15. The Challenge of Political Will and Civil War

That's why we've had so much iteration, so much improvement, and now they will clearly be an important part of the fulcrum of war. These other things are going to have to be used to really know the limit of the capability in the cat-and-mouse game. But my advice for Congress is that we have a $1.5 trillion defense FY27 budget, right? I don't think we're going to get all that money.

But in that enormous surface area of a budget, you can continually allocate a lot more toward the concept of risk in order to maintain technological superiority. I think a portion of the FFRDC budget needs to be repointed toward industry, so we can encourage the iteration of these commercial developments, see how good they can get, and exercise them in our own way to simulate war and see how good we can get them.

So we need to allocate a portion of the budget. It needs to be exclusive, and it needs to be more coordinated. It can't be spread out as much as it is. We federate the research and development portion of the budget in so many different ways. We're going to have to take a concerted effort here for these legs of future power, and we're going to have to continually reinvest in them even if we don't get a great business out of it, because we may not get a war in order to test all this stuff.

Obviously, you don't want the tail to wag the dog for the purposes of just exercising the equipment. So we need to allocate a more meaningful amount to try. Then Congress needs to create multi-year authorities across the stack. These continuing resolutions kill industry, and that is something I consistently worry about, because we are going to lose these companies through CRs and through the absence of multi-year authority.

Right now, the capital markets are working for these businesses, and they are able to outpace the innovation of the department and Congress in order to move faster. But capital markets aren't things that—

Yeah, trees don't grow to the sky.

And so there has to be return and exit at some point. If you get that and you get that flywheel, then great. Maybe capitalism can be the exclusive solution. But we're going to need Congress to make more multi-year authority money available.

Then we're going to have to allocate the budget as a percentage for higher risk and reward. The Manhattan Project was 1% of GDP. That project—we're going to have to have our own couple hundred bips of GDP levels of effort in these certain areas. We're going to have to make those kinds of investments and have a multi-year worldview as to how we get there.

How long have some of these companies been around? Is any of the stuff produced by these places being used? And if not, why not? If we only know if it works in actual battle, we're in a bunch of battles. There's a lot of battles in the world right now and a lot of military equipment being used. Is the neoprime stuff being used? If so, how? If not, why not?

Some of these companies are relatively new and haven't fielded systems of record. Look, the way we build our military and the promise we make to our GIs—soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—is that we are going to train and equip you on these things at the end of the day for the express purpose of giving you the chance to win.

It's part of our moral code and the way we train and equip the forces. Then we have to simulate it in the joint doctrine of warfare. Just because I make a new widget doesn't mean I can ingest it so easily. We have to exercise it and integrate it into this joint concept of warfare with all these other things.

So it’s not easy. And look, clearly on the targeting side, these technologies are being used. Signals intelligence—clearly, that stuff is being used. The elements of projection of force outside of drones haven’t really gotten there yet. But targeting is pretty important, right?

You think of World War II: we would carpet-bomb an entire environment. And so people are like, “Well, we produced so much mass in World War II.” But look at the efficacy of the mass. It was super low, right? And so what we have now is highly precise, but we don’t have the quantum of mass because of the precision and the sophistication.

And so now we’re going to need to bring it back a little bit more to the center to increase the mass. And maybe these targeting networks, and some of the software and the knowledge that we’ve built in signals intelligence, can augment the cost of the precision that we have to have on board in order to make them cheaper at the end of the day. So it’s not a fair criticism to say, “Oh, the Neoprimes stuff isn’t being used at the limit in war.” It’s because we have to integrate it into the joint concept of warfare, back to where we started, of what it means to win.

Right? The war in Iran is extremely unpopular in polls or whatever among U.S. citizens. You said we live in a democracy, so the will of the people matters. What can be done to win? I think the percentage of the Iranian population that’s loyal to the existing regime is like 10 out of 90 million or something. Is there anything short of actual regime change that can cause a win to happen, and how do we do that, if so? Or how do we affect that outcome?

Well, I mean, if I knew the answer, the red phone over there would be ringing pretty quickly. These regimes can last for a very long time, so how do we muster the political will to have staying power that outlasts the political cycle? It’s so hard, right, against a Red Shia culture of martyrdom.

16. Process vs. Outcome in U.S. Politics

But at some point, we have to agree as a society that the value system of some of these cultures has been hijacked and that they are fundamentally incompatible with modernity. This is a clash of civilizations. And who wants to tackle it when you don’t have to? But there’s always a risk in going, and then there’s a risk in not going.

And the prophylactic always feels worse because the clarity of when to go wasn’t decided for you. America didn’t enter World War II because of the concern we had over Germany. We ultimately entered World War II because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. They made it crystal clear.

But with the benefit of hindsight, obviously the prophylactic probably would have been better to prevent the adversary from accumulating all this power, because they had a value system that clashed with our worldview of modernity. And I would argue the Red Shia martyrdom cult—the fanaticism—is incompatible with humanity preserving itself. Can you imagine if that fanaticism got its hands on the ability to project nuclear weaponry? And so I get why it’s unpopular. Doing something in advance of something becoming existential is not fun, because you can always second-guess when to go.

What have we not talked about that you have your mind on these days?

A well-known ambassador to the United States said something to me that I thought was so profound. He said, “Democrats are obsessed with process, and Republicans are obsessed with outcome.” And that’s the challenge between these 2 sides of the aisle right now. It’s a very good mix, right? Because if you have someone that spends a lot of calories on form and someone that’s very outcome-focused, too, and you can bring the concept together, you should get the optimal outcome.

Presidents have declared or have functionally created contingencies without the consent of Congress since Truman. So it’s just that when the opposite side of the aisle is doing something, it’s an affront. And so I think that statement is actually very profound, because you can kind of see it in the current contingency right now.

17. The Dangers of AI in Military Systems

We’re not following a process that’s conventional. What would be conventional, right? Conventional would be: you go to the U.N., a Security Council resolution, a buildup to the war, this kind of diplomacy, shots fired. That would be the conventional way that it would happen. But obviously, if it’s devoid of the outcome at the end of the day, what was the purpose of it? Think of the Iraq contingency. And so here, there hasn’t been any of that process. Could you get the outcome that you wanted, and then history would forgive you at the end of the day?

And so I think you’re seeing the strengths and the weaknesses of both of those worldviews play out over the last 25 years, right? Gulf War II—it was this: we tried to remake the environment in our image instead of remaking it in our interest, right? And then now we’re operating almost exclusively to try and remake these environments in our interest and not in our image.

Venezuela is a perfect example of that. That environment is functionally remade in our interest. I know a whole series of members of Congress that just went to Venezuela for a trip—former members of Congress.

Yeah. A lot of people are gone.

Yeah, for like a business trip, right? I mean, can you imagine that 4 months ago? It’s kind of amazing. But the power structure there hasn’t changed, right? We’ve just chopped off the head, and we’ve remade the environment in our interests, not in our image.

I think that’s probably a good natural evolution of where we’ve been. The question is, will it be enough to change the behaviors of these martyrdom cultures that point toward their suffering as a test of faith that they’re winning? I’m like, how do you win that? Pretty tough.

I realize I didn’t ask you about AI. What wrench does that throw in the works of all of this stuff?

I’m so fascinated by how it can be co-opted. I don’t know if you’ve read these stories about people producing fake academic papers and leaving them out there on established sites. The established sites say, “This isn’t peer-reviewed, but it exists in the ether, and we’re going to get to it,” and here’s access to the paper, and then the models pick it up.

One particular test of this was someone who invented a phenomenon—or I think they invented a medical condition—and left it out on an academic website, posted for about 3 months, and then asked a large language model about it. And then it said, “Oh, you have this disease, and you made it up.”

And so we’re talking right now about the power of AI and its ability to do all this computation, and it’s smarter than us. But the danger of co-opting these models when they become part of the loop of decision-making in these important military systems—can you imagine if you could create a foundation of fact that’s wrong for a model?

I could see an alternative universe where the models become complete Towers of Babel. We’ve lost them, right? Because of what they’ve ingested from the junk that we’ve posted.

Interesting place to leave it off. Darren, thanks for your time.

Of course, Patrick.