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A

My guest Today is Darren Farber, and this is his second appearance on the show. Darren is the managing partner of Albion River, a defense focused investment firm, and he previously served as a special advisor to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense. We recorded this conversation in the middle of the Iranian contingency and we spend most of our time on what winning actually means in a theater like Iran. We discuss why magazine depth matters for the American industrial base, lessons from Ukraine, and what the rise of neoprime defense companies will require from Congress. Please enjoy my second conversation with Darren Farber. I think to begin, you have to define what it might mean for us to win some of these open theaters of war in the world right now. We came through this period where anyone that was a macro type person that I would have in that seat would talk about this multipolar world in the US is retreating from the global stage and is not going to be the world police any longer and we don't need the interaction with the rest of the world. Seems like we're in a very different world now. Everyone's wondering what winning would even mean in a theater like Iran, and I'm curious for you to just riff on that.

C

So winning is politically defined. The Strait of Hormuz was open before this contingency at the end of the day. And so if all we get is, is the Strait of Hormuz back open strategically, maybe was the juice worth the squeeze? For lack of a better term, I would argue that you've degraded an enormous amount of Iranian military capability, which is what the department's internal frago, their order was to do. And so you have degraded that. But the Strait of Hormuza as an economic choke point has to open back up in order for commerce to work. But we're sitting here today, the straits functionally closed, the economy's still ripping here in the United States markets. You have high inflation. But 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 Shiriadi, which is a hybridization of Marxism and martyrdom together, which is kind of like an absolute control of an environment. And to say if you martyr yourself, you're winning, you're ascending. It's such a satanical 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. Gaza has been leveled by any stretch of the imagination. There are still elements of Hamas operating, but have they Won with. Well, in their mind, in that shiriati form of red Shiasm, 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. And the problem or the challenge with democracies are 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? So that is tough. There is the Taylor view of flexible power, of this proportional response to threats. And then there's the Eisenhower school of massive retaliation. I love Kotkin because he talks about, if you don't know history, everything is unprecedented. The Japanese had a martyrdom culture that they memorialized into their force structure right through kamikaze. They would chain people up in trees in Okinawa. Why did we drop two bombs on them? We dropped the first bomb. Enormous mass destruction. They refused to surrender and they were prepared to fight to the death. We dropped the second bomb and it was only Emperor Hirohito that broke the tie. If he didn't break that tie, if he said continue, they would have sacrificed themselves. It's extremely hard with a martyrdom culture to have regime change. And 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, which is you leave. 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. And so the IRGC controls half of the economy and they have all the guns, they have all of these elements of power. They're very hard to replace. Can you co opt them successfully between all the assets that they own in Western Europe? They own an enormous quantum of assets in Western Europe.

A

What kind of assets?

C

Homes in London, villas. Billions of dollars that they've exfiltrated from the country. And Abbas Malani has documented this in voluminous detail. He's a wonderful scholar on the topic. But really think of the average Iranian. The limit at the ATM is $7. That's how much you can pull out. You had the second largest bank fail about two months before this recent contingency. Melanie 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 like a good frame for our entire conversation, which is to say we have to be able to hold two competing ideas in the same vessel. And both can be true. A dictatorship can be enormously weak because they're illegitimate. They haven't been tested. They only have to be stronger than their strongest opposition. And opposition is outlawed. And so they're weak. And 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. And there's a growing body of evidence that suggests that Ayatollah Khamenei martyred himself. He, like, allowed himself to be above ground and to be targeted to die to solve a whole series of problems. He killed potentially 30 or 40,000 of his own people. He was sick and succession was unclear. I think maybe there would be some infighting. And so martyrdom in the Shiriadi school of regism is like this beautiful solution. 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. Winning at the limit in the way we think of it in almost like a documentary for World War II is really hard, but we experienced that in World War II as well, 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. And 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. I just think the analog with Israel and Hamas and Gaza is like a perfect example. Israel has annihilated Gaza. It has been leveled. You can't say that Gaza from a technological standpoint, 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. In order to win it, look how far that they've had to go. And I don't know if Netanyahu has the support in the Knesset for the purposes of doing this last leg in the groundwork, but it's what's necessary for his condition of winning. You have to have a design on a concept of positive propaganda. Propaganda has a bad connotation to it, but it's just marketing. It's marketing. It's your political worldview. Israel has just not spent the calories on it. And so 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. But also the martyrdom culture has because it's 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 by the FBI listening with laser microphones where after the Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority with Arafat is brought in and Hamas is considered left out in the cold. They go to Hamas go guess what? You're not in this deal. And so now this is a political organization with no home. They laid out in this single conversation that the FBI has transcripts of their plan to co opt universities and co op university teaching and institutions for the express purposes of changing Western opinion over the course of 20 years. I think Bezos has attributed the quote that if you have a seven 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 down ban the sophistication of what these people in the Muslim Brotherhood, in 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 the rights. You have a series of people advocating for them that would be denied those same rights there. It was done with intent, it was by design. But this administration is moving the goalposts in the popular vernacular of what winning means. But my view is if you have a straight open and you have a degraded Iranian military capability that can't reconstitute itself very quickly through oil profits, then that will be a win. And if it can quickly reconstitute its export network of terror and the strait is closed, then strategically it will be a failure.

A

What do you think will happen in the straight? 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?

C

The rest of the world were there and then we have the Iranians and there are foreign flagged and commercial vessels there, but no one else is there. In practical terms, it's just us. And 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. UAE has left opec. That's kind of big. And then they said they will participate in, in projecting force with their own forces. That's pretty big too. They are very concerned that we will lose our will to fight by virtue of the fact of whatever economic pain in the interim basis that it generates. But the concept of overcoming the blockade is going to need more magazine depth, 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.

A

Can you describe those two? It's such an interesting history.

C

Maxwell Taylor is a four star general, is Kennedy's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is great military leader, but also could be blamed for the escalation of the Vietnam War. Eisenhower's warning about the military defense industrial complex really came out of this concern of we now have this new superweapon. And so that should really work as the maximal deterrent for any of these things breaking out. And so why spend all the calories on building all of these proportional capabilities when through a chain of escalation it's just ultimately going to lead to the big red button? Those are kind of the competing theories. Eisenhower's theory was 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. And he had viewed it as a deterrence gap because are we really going to go nuclear for small incursions, small foot faults? I think to an extent that was right. But all of it leads towards escalation. 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, 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.

A

So who is more right, do you think, between Eisenhower and Taylor and apply those two lenses to today's stance for the U.S. what is the U.S. 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? What are they doing that they shouldn't be doing?

C

I think it's fair to say you need both. If you took an exclusive maximalist view of Eisenhower of having this nuclear deterrent, your only response is nuclear deterrence. Can you imagine the world that we'd be living in now. You'd say, there are some people. I'd 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, 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. Maybe we would, but the binary choice would be so stark. 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 and all of these things. 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. 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.

A

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C

We're the best man. So someone asked me earlier today, they had 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. So how great can a government organ be but 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. You have to do some relative comparison to the rest of the militaries around the world. We are number one. But it is a body of government. And so because it's a body of government, it gets one year money from Congress. You have deck chairs that constantly change. You have these features of government that make it suboptimal. But as a grade as a military 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. We recognize how important it is. But our ability to project force is so good. I think having a pacing threat unto itself is valuable to make sure that we are serious about maintaining capabilities. But I love the works of Decath because he's so clear about how strong and weak China is at the same time.

A

Who's Decoder.

C

So Decoder is a well regarded historian on China and has a theory on how China is not a super empowered 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 Joint Chiefs of Staff has disappeared. He went to kindergarten with Xi Jinping. These guys are close. When you have power and you ascend 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 and then that form of illegitimacy cascades down through the immediate organs of that government to include its military. We've talked about their lack of jointness, the corruption internally within the force, the corruption in the missileer crew. They have turned over their senior military leadership three or four times in the last three 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? 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 deterrent. You have magazine depth when you believe in the concept of flexible power.

A

I talked to Sham From Palantir about this. He had just come out with his book, I think it was called Mobilize 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? What is the state of it today? Are we doing a good job? Who is doing it? How's that going to unfold?

C

We're in a democracy, in a dictatorship. If you don't build magazine depth and that's your job, you're dead. That mechanism of enforcement is pretty compelling. Here we balance things like will it be profitable, will it have duration? And Congress is giving one year money. And so there are new efforts to create multi year contracts for ordnance, which we've never done before. You 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 filling the deterrence gap 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 where we have 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. And compare it to anyone else in the west, we're still the best. It's just your adversary has a political structure that allows them to bring people to the precipice. But. 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.

A

Say more about that.

C

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 to pay off all these kinds of people, but they are illegitimate. And our ability to recruit and retain and train it had really degraded. And 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 she sleeps well at night.

A

Is that very recent, that change?

C

No, these things are built brick by brick. 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. We have people, they drive their car in and they have their sack lunch, and this is what they do every day. And ultimately we break through. Why? Because every Chinese person in the Standing Committee has a relative somewhere in the United States. How many degrees removed, that owns a small business that is doing well, is able to say and do what they want, is able to fundamentally live free. We can't forget what makes us special and that we are the bugout point for the world. Even for the people in the Standing Committee that are worried, if they're on the outskirts, they have a plan to get here. We have weaknesses, but we also have enormous strengths. And 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 us, their population size and what they can do industrially. But it is a dictatorship. It is a totalitarian regime. I don't even know how this is up for debate. I just think the thread 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. I believe in our lifetime China will fall. I believe in our lifetime Iran will fall.

A

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

C

I believe it will be run like Taiwan. I believe it will fall. We grew up with this concept of the Soviet Union. It had this enormous technical capability. It's this monolith. It lasted several generations, and then all of a sudden it fell. It looked super strong right up until the last moment. It were planning documents circulating at the Pentagon about how strong they were two weeks before they fell because their constitution, their concept of a constitution, is fundamentally corrupt. That monopoly of power. Saying that these people are going to permanently be in charge, you know it to be wrong. And so the question is, does it last 50 years? Does it last 100 years? It does fall 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 at some point it's the natural state that ultimately prevails. But our enemies use our freedoms so successfully against us. And 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 psyop of social media on us, what they do against us in that, it's enormous. We're kind of allowing it under the rubric of our freedoms and 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.

A

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

C

This concept of when you're in the four walls of the country, there's the general expectation of a freedom of speech 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? Think about where people get their news from that there are no gates on any of this anymore. It's not something founders could have ever contemplated. They are true geniuses in that the gridlock is super intentional. So compare us to every other parliamentary democracy in the West. Every parliamentary democracy in the west has a ceremonial Senate. The UK it's the House of Lords. They don't have real power. House of Commons has power. And then when the party of power is in power is a monopoly of power because they also choose the prime minister. You don't vote for the prime minister in a parliamentary democracy in the United States our upper body is completely separate with a different term that's longer by design. So 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. You put them down. 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. And 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. Like these directions where the gridlock was designed to prevent someone from co opting the activity and it makes us slow to respond. But we have the overarching architecture is we are fundamentally legitimate and these guys are not legitimate. When people talk about some of these things of like their society's eclipsing ours, like dude, are you high? You are not free there. You can't say what you want.

A

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. The story of how our industrial base moved so fast to arm companies retooling themselves. It's a great book. The history of peacetime mobilizations in democratic societies is mixed or bad. I guess we're not in peacetime right now, but we're not in some like global scale war. What are the things that you hope happen from here for the US to be the best overall positioned in the

C

world, we clearly need a change in how we fund department 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. A ten year contract, but subject to the availability of funds is scary. We have on average four or five continuing resolutions a year. The peccadillo of CRS is 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 multi year authorities in order to be able to build this stuff. There are these 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 on ordering even if it's one year. We know there's going to be a multi year 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 ordinance and all these other things. The Tomahawks, 150 fives, all of these kinetic articles of warfare. It's politics. You 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 or are non negotiable.

A

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?

C

The rate of technological change in the commercial world becomes this direct input into the capabilities that you can project for mass. Drones have been used since the Vietnam War. But you wouldn't think 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. But it was the commercial viability and the commercial pervasiveness of that product that made it a great input into a military from US 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 with these wars work faster than markets. Sometimes the evolution of a Ukrainian drone from three years ago to today it's unbelievable. There's like 50 iterations. There's all these new capabilities and that's because you can sit in your garage through commercial supply chains and build the capability. 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 into the projection of force. But things that become permissive and inexpensive in a commercial world have these enormously valuable inputs into fighting kind of asymmetric war.

A

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

C

The likes of Kevin Rudd and the scholars of the area. So Kevin Rudd used to be the Australian Prime Minister is fluent in Mandarin by the way as a PhD in Mandarin is really a she watcher. He said that she's a risk taker. I think if you've gotten to a certain age of 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 and the takeover by the CCP is not complete until Taiwan falls. Until that counter narrative of how a Chinese society can be run. I don't think she needs to go. If KMT wins the election coming up. KMT almost won last time and that is a rapprochement party to the CCP is clearly like we don't want war, we want peace. It's an accommodation party. 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 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 real historical beasts will be next? And that's why Japan has been so vociferous at advocating for strong defense now under this new prime minister. She's tough lady. She knows what happens. There's a real historical beef between China and Japan. I think that would be Exercised. It would not stop at Taiwan, most likely.

A

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, long drought. Like basically no new companies. And Roll is of course the most famous, but tons of companies doing something. Drone specific companies, submarine boats, missiles, basically everything. It's ten years from now. A whole bevy of Neo Primes have been hugely successful. Their stuff is great in the sense that it's used and it's the thing we rely on more so than the old Primes, which from my understanding is still the vast, vast, vast majority of gets used in war. These new companies have won and that's a good thing. What do you think has to happen for that to be true?

C

We have to exercise so much of this. There's a part here where you only really know what's really 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. We remobilized it for the Iranian contingency. Theaters of war are the laboratories for these products. 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. So we run exercises in the training, equip mission. But the proof in the pudding is when we actually fight. And that's why drones have had this huge iteration, because they're being used in an actual contingent environment. And so that's why we've had so much iteration, so much improvement, and now they will clearly be this important part of the fulcrum of war. So 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 we have a $1.5 trillion designed FY27 budget. 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 towards the concept of risk in order to maintain technological superiority. I think the FFRDC budget needs to be a portion needs to be repointed towards industry so we can encourage the iteration of these commercial developments to see how good they can get and exercise them in our own way to simulate war, to see how good we can get them. So we need to allocate a portion of the budget and it needs to be more coordinated so it can't be spread out. 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 gonna have to continually reinvest in them. Even if we don't get a great business out of it. 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. And 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. Because right now the capital markets are working for these businesses and they're able to outpace the innovation of the department and the Congress in order to move faster. But capital markets aren't things that trees unlimited.

A

Yeah, yeah.

C

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 and 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. 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 multi year worldview as to how we get there.

A

Some of these companies have 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? There's a lot of battles in the world right now. A lot of military equipment being used is the neoprime stuff being used.

C

Some of these companies are relatively new and haven't fielded systems of record. And then the way we build our military and the promise we make to our GIs, soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines is that we are going to train and equip you on these things for the express purposes of giving you the chance to win. It's part of our moral code and the way we train and equip the forces and 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 impute it into this joint concept of warfare with all these other things. So it's not easy. Clearly, on the targeting side, these technologies are being used. The signals intelligence, clearly that stuff is being used. The elements of projection of force outside of drones hasn'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 produce so much mass in World War II, but look at the efficacy of the mass. It was super low. What we have now is highly precise, but we don't have the quantum of mass because of the precision and the sophistication. 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. It's not a fair criticism to say, oh, the neoprime stuff's not being used at the limit in war. It's because we have to integrate it into the joint concept of warfare.

A

Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes. It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions. Nobody's watching. Ramp puts guardrails on spending before it happens. Real time limits. Automatic rules. Zero firefighting. Try it@ramp.com invest as your business grows, Vanta scales with you, automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more@vanta.com invest Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just a software vendor. They've helped firms 5x and scale, enabling faster growth, smarter operations and a competitive edge. Visit ridgelineapps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. Every investment firm is unique and generic. AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall street, connected to your data, understanding your process and producing real outputs. Check them out at Rogo. AI Invest the best AI and software companies from OpenAI to Cursor to Perplexity. Use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workos.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Back to where we started work. It means to win. The war in Iran is extremely unpopular in polls of US citizens. You said we live in a democracy, like the will of the people matters. What can be done to win the percentage of the Iranian population. It's like 10 out of 90 million or something are loyal to the existing regime. Is there anything short of actual regime change that can cause a win to happen? How do we affect that outcome?

C

If I knew the answer, the red phone over there would be ringing pretty quickly. These regimes can last for a very long time. How do we muster the political will to have staying power that outlasts the political cycle? It's so hard against a red Shia culture of martyrdom. But at some point we have to agree as a society that the value system of some of these cultures has been hijacked and they are fundamentally incompatible with modernity. This is a clash of civilizations. Who wants to tackle it when you don't have to? There's a risk in going always and then there's a risk in not going. The pro velactic 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 pro galactic 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? 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.

A

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

C

A well known ambassador to the United States, he said something to me that I thought was so profound. He said Democrats are obsessed with process and Republicans are obsessed with outcome. That's the challenge between these two sides of the aisle right now. But really it's a very good mix. 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 functionally created contingencies without the consent of Congress since Truman. When the opposite side of the aisle is doing something, it's an effrontery. That statement is actually very profound because you can kind of see it in the current contingency Right now we're not following a process that's conventional. What would be conventional? Conventional would be you go to the un, You Security Council resolution, build up 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, 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? You're seeing the strength and the weaknesses of, of both of those worldviews play out over the last 25 years. Gulf War Two, we tried to remake the environment in our image instead of remaking it in our interest. 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.

A

A lot of people are gone.

C

Yeah. For like a business trip. Can you imagine that four months ago? It's kind of amazing. And so the power structure there hasn't changed. We've just chopped off the head and we've remade the environment in our interest, not in our image. I think that's probably a good natural evolution of where we've been. Question is, will it be enough to change the behaviors of these martyrdom cultures that point towards their suffering as a test of faith that they're winning? How do you win that?

A

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

C

I'm so fascinated by how it can be co opted. So 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 Ethereum and we're going to get to it. And here's the access to the paper and then the models pick it up. And one in particular, one test of this was someone invented a phenomena, or I think they invented a medical condition and left it out on an academic website. Posted for about three months and then asked the large model and then it said, you have this disease and you made it up. We're talking right now about the power of AI and its ability to do all this computing. It's smarter than us. But if we co opt it, 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 can create a foundation of fact that is wrong for a model? I could see an alternative universe where the models become complete towers of Babel. We've lost them because of what they've imputed through the junk that we've posted.

A

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

C

Of course.

A

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