Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Darren Farber - The Business of Defense - [Invest Like the Best, EP.417]

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Starting point is 00:00:26 To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out Ramp.com slash Invercors. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions.

Starting point is 00:01:02 expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is Darren Farber. Darren is the managing partner of Albion River, a private direct investment firm focused on acquiring companies that produce highly technical defense products and services. He is a former special advisor to the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, a former member of U.S. Department of Defense Task Force for Business and Stability Operation, and the list goes on and on.

Starting point is 00:01:49 Darren is a wealth of knowledge in this space and someone I am grateful to have in the U.S. corner. He shares his perspective on the changing role of the U.S. in global defense and how recent conflicts have shaped military technology and strategy. Darren explains his investment approach at Albion, focusing on. finding one-of-one suppliers and getting as close to what he calls the fundamental molecules as possible in defense technology. We discuss insights on evaluating the Taiwan situation, lessons from Ukraine, how the defense budget is allocated, what investors can learn from defense primes, and why technological superiority remains America's greatest advantage. Please enjoy this incredible

Starting point is 00:02:25 discussion with Darren Farber. Maybe the fun place to begin is for you to describe with defense investing being so incredibly popular, your state of the union of defense in general. You've been in and around this world for a long time. There's some active wars in the world right now in a way there wasn't many years ago. Just describe how you see the landscape overall. And then we're going to dig into each element of it. We're at a very topical moment right now, just by virtue of what appears to be this decoupling from this ultra longstanding relationship that's existed, immediately after World War II, which is to say borders did not change in the Western world through force for the last 80 years. And we're seeing that paradigm change. And so that's a pretty

Starting point is 00:03:20 big change. But I completely understand why we're going through it. And so let's say you and I have a contract. I'm going to mow your lawn for the next 80 years and you're never going to pay me. or you're going to pay me sporadically. So if you don't pay into the system, then who's invalidated the contract? Should I have the reasonable expectation that you're going to honor your obligations if I refuse to pay into the system? And you have an administration that views that kind of contractual compact as meaningful. These are deal people fundamentally. They come from business.

Starting point is 00:04:00 And so they view themselves as completely justified. you're breaking the contract. And so what's my general obligation to you? And I don't think they're incorrect. And so it leads to this real, very serious moment that we're experiencing right now. And so now the question becomes the Europeans' defense capability is extremely limited. Their nuclear capability is limited to ICBMs, which is really end of the world nuclear weaponry. There's nothing tactical in that. That's only good when whatever video game scenario, it's the end of the world. In terms of the project. of force. Europe really doesn't have a lot. It exclusively relied in the United States. And now I think

Starting point is 00:04:38 they're having this moment where they realize, okay, maybe we exhausted the good offices here, and we need to power up and have our own capability. And it's going to take them a while. It's not going to happen overnight. Maybe another perspective to offer you spend a lot of time in the Pentagon. There's the whatever, 870 some odd billion dollar annual defense budget. Talk about the shifting nature of that thing, that dollar amount that gets outlaid, what it's gone to historically that's been most important, how what is most important is shifting, and whether or not the Pentagon is good at keeping up with a shifting landscape in the way it spends its money. I think a good frame for me to understand the building has been there are two parts.

Starting point is 00:05:20 They're the front office and the back office. This is the best way to think about it in my mind. What's the front office? It's warfighting. That is lethality. It's projecting force. The back office is called the business mission area. It's everything except warfighting.

Starting point is 00:05:35 And so in the business mission area, the ball has moved forward, but not nearly enough in terms of where it needs to go in terms of the general efficiency of how we run the back office of the building. And in the front office, we have very pristine exquisite weapon systems. But some of the massing on the battlefield is going to be this very inexpensive very permissive, autonomous capability that we're watching unfold in a live contingency in the Ukrainian theater. It's ironic because I had a whole series of dinners with Baltic ministers of defense, and they weren't asking me for drone technology from America. I was at the National

Starting point is 00:06:15 Security Council looking at a Ukrainian drone that was printed in their AOR, in their theater war, and they're doing it for 150 bucks. And so I view a lot of what's happening in drone warfare as the arc of flat panel TVs is like they're very expensive and they just keep on dropping in price. And the low cost manufacturer is the leader today. It's why Walmart bought Vizio. And so I see a lot of that in the drone into the back end will be more important, like the software that coordinates it. The shape charge will be more important. Just like modifying a grenade. But it's not clear to me that making the drone will be this fabulous profit center. And so I think the department does best when it lets dual-use commercial technology advance so it can adapt it and pull it internally,

Starting point is 00:07:04 as opposed to trying to develop a technology exclusively for defense if there's an adjacent commercial development. What's like a quintessential example of that playing out commercial to modified? I mean, I was part of a program in Afghanistan. We were trying to create handheld computing for the purposes of contracting officers, being able to go outside the wire to be able to conduct commerce on the economy and do our counterinsurgency mission. So that's, we use this little parking ticket. It's called a standard form 44. It's like a parking ticket. It's like in, in triplicate and there's a carbon copy.

Starting point is 00:07:42 It's exactly what you grew up with a parking ticket. And that's how we give money. We procure resources on the economy in a theater of war. And so there's a special limit that we raised to a few million dollars. And one of my jobs was to clear these tickets into the accounting system in Kandahar. And I remember looking at one that's a $2 million to cash. And I remember the field ordering officer, I said, what's this? So our general lack of visibility financially, I love to have some compute because for them to trace this route back to base, it's crazy, dangerous. And they're only coming back to meet the general obligation of how we need to clear these tickets in order to give them more cash. So maybe I can.

Starting point is 00:08:21 can do it digitally over the air. And so we built this huge thing. It hung off your belt. It had a huge expensive battery on it. And a thermal printer. It lasted two hours. It was horrible. And then over a weekend, the first version of the iPhone comes out. A Marine builds an entire app over the weekend. You know, why don't we use this? Of course, it's so much better. But you have to remember, the department is the largest organization of its kind on Earth. And for many years, it was the largest organization. The Army is still the largest operator of golf courses in the world. So the U.S. Army, everything it does is at the limit of size. And so it always thought that its internal requirements would drive the best solution because it could bring so much demand.

Starting point is 00:09:03 I'm 47. I never contemplated trillion dollar balance sheet corporations that had in the iPhone 90% global market share or something crazy for a phone above a thousand bucks. And so the technology in it, we do so much better doing adaptation of something commercial. And I happen to think that's what's going to happen in a lot of these new emerging technologies. The department didn't come up with its own flat panel TV. It bought it commercially. And if you go on the high side for all the cleared information, it's showing it on a set of Dell screen. Yeah, it's not a custom screen that we made for ourselves. So then there are instances where, in the Palantir's where they've crossed into the commercial domain, and this is wonderful for the department because you're getting more reps. So I happen to think

Starting point is 00:09:46 a lot of the autonomy in the commercial world will ultimately be adapted. into the defense department. What am I talking about? Joby and Waymo and Tesla. That commercial adaptation is going to be very helpful for a defense application. So I think there's a huge benefit where we should be cutting off of the commercial side of industry. By the way, there's legislation to this. And so I was intimately involved in it because we owned the business that benefited from the real legislation and we advocated for it. But Palantir, it really turbocharged Palantir as a business. And so this was the National Defense Appropriation Act where there was a a line put in at a bunch of our behest to say commercial off the shelf first if it already

Starting point is 00:10:26 exists. That was a new feature law and it said, look, if the capability exists off the shelf, then you must try that first. And at a minimum, if you decide not to use it or if you use it in some capacity, you can't treat it like a military system and demand P and visibility into cost and pricing and all these other things because it's commercially available. And I believe that piece of legislation was enormously helpful to Palantir because it was commercially available, although it didn't have the size of commercial business today. And the Army was creating a program at 5x the funding of Palantir to do it their own way. And they were attempting to literally just turn off Palantir, which would have been a huge cost to the government.

Starting point is 00:11:11 And I'm sure the system wouldn't have as been as effective. If I think about our armed forces as a stock of stuff of assets of soldiers, of current capability and as a flow of new dollars being spent on stuff which adds assets to that stock, changes the stocker, whatever. Where do you think if you were doing like a 3G zero-based budgeting style approach? I'm sure there's just tremendous amounts of inertia and a lot of the spending that happens this year is just the same as the spending that happens the year before. But if you were starting from scratch, how differently do you think you would spend the $870 billion if you were in charge versus how it's being spent?

Starting point is 00:11:50 It's so tough. This is a very tough question because in your mind's eye, you can say, I think this is where the world's going to go. But the department functions off of these plans, these operational views of how we integrate the force. So they're called OV-1s. And it's a visual concept of planning of how we plan the force. We haven't come to grips with what we do or don't really need for next generation warfare. The kind of nonlinear warfare may still require a lot of the old stuff. John Spencer at West Point talks about war is really a combination of old and new. It's never all new and it's never all old. And if you think about the Ukrainian contingency, there are many World War II-esque like components of this, 155 millimeter shells, small caliber munitions, bicycle bombs, mines. The minefield in Ukraine is about twice the size of the state of Florida now landmines. We're talking about old technology. And so my concern is, I think we're all. over indexing to a near peer threat maybe and not thinking about some of the capabilities we may

Starting point is 00:12:56 need in, let's say, a nonlinear kind of threat. Like, what do I worry about? I worry about the ability for people to make thistle material now with lasers and they don't require centerfuges. And a non-state actor can actually build a nuclear capability. That's pretty concerning. It was usually, oh, you needed these pristine alloys. You needed access to the molecule. That just made it so hard. and it was exclusively the pro-nonce nation states. Now, you can have someone that's sufficiently capitalized with an alternative form of technology actually building a small tactical nuclear weapon. I'm not saying it's super easy, but the march of technology makes things easier.

Starting point is 00:13:35 And so what's going to happen when a non-state actor choose your flavor of the month gets access to these kinds of things? And we've been building a force exclusively to fight a near peer in China or something like that. And so it's just a big world with a lot of different kinds of threats. And I'm not as convinced that I need to just get rid of every enterprise class carrier, every submarine, every frigate. There are true failures like the littoral combat ship. And we should turn it off and they're doing it.

Starting point is 00:14:08 These enterprise carriers are $11 billion and they take forever to build. And so we're going to need a better paradigm there. So to be responsive to your question, one is process of how we get the stuff out. That needs to be improved. And then the other thing is curating the portfolio. It's both. But I wouldn't say exclusively, it may sound like I'm dodging the question to a certain extent, but do we still need enterprise carriers? I would suggest we do. What the Israelis did with five F-35s was pretty much knock out 100% of Iran's aerial defense. That was five pilots. That's a pretty mission capable plane. And I know that,

Starting point is 00:14:47 the autonomous logistics and the cost of the aircraft hasn't been great, but also the way the tractors have marketed that, it's not totally fair. It's a joint strike fighter by definition. So what does it mean joint is that if you're the Navy and I'm the Air Force, we all have one strike fighter now. It's joint, it's this F-35. And so it's taking away many other programs. That's why the program volume is so high. But we have it to sub 110 million a copy. And when a Gulfstream made 100 is 85 million of copies, say to yourself, okay, this is getting. There's some convergence here, but the cost of logistics and these things need to get better over time. But these are actually very well-run businesses. And if we work to change the incentives for these companies, which I think

Starting point is 00:15:32 is very important, then you'll see fundamentally a change. The CEO of Lockheed Martin is a world-class capital allocator. I don't know if we've ever talked about it before, but Jim was a CEO of American Tower. It had like $2 billion market cap. When he left, it was. It was a CEO of, it was a $2 billion market cap. When he left, it was $100 billion. So 10 years, 50X. This is not someone who doesn't understand capital allocation or return. But when the incentive structure is to let the department figure out what they want and then give you a very complicated requirements document. And then in the requirements document, they're asking you to push the limits of engineering.

Starting point is 00:16:06 Then what's the most appropriate way to compensate someone that's pushing the envelope of physics or technology? historically, you had businesses that would leave the ecosystem because they're like, this is too tough. I don't want to take the risk on balance sheet. And so that's how we came up with cost plus. We said, look, you're going to take this kind of risk and I'm going to find a way to make a good enough business for you that you don't want to abandon the effort. Cost plus.

Starting point is 00:16:33 And cost plus by contract volume is only 15% of the department. It's about 30% of the budget now because we have programs moving into something called LRIP. That's when a program like grows up and pushes out. And then as it crosses into this mainstream production line, we go to firm fix. Sometimes the artifact stays too long because we're constantly pushing the envelope of the technology. And so you leave cost plus in to make it meritorious for a business. But I think a lot of people think the budget's 100% cost plus.

Starting point is 00:17:04 This is not true. And the super majority of contract volume is lowest price technically acceptable. And so I work for a lot of people who drilled it into my brain. of every contract that I would sign would be LPTA, lowest price technically acceptable. So in a budget's so big. When the buffet is so big, it's very easy to point to these sides and say how inefficient it is. And there's a ton of inefficiency. And this effort by Doge is extremely meritorious and it happens in defense about every 20 years. So for people to say this is unprecedented, it's bunk. There's precedent everywhere in the department. It's a necessary extinction event.

Starting point is 00:17:41 we also have to be able to manage these other contingent activities and we need to modernize and this happens over and over again. And so it's just more exposed this time. There are tweet storms about it. The form is unusual, but the substance is not at all. I want to come back to like seven things you said cost plus process, portfolio, all these things. Probably the question I should have asked even before this last one was all of this to what end? For the last 80 years, when borders haven't changed, very famously, the U.S. has been world police. We've police shipping lanes. We've been the big bat at the table. And I think that the world is obviously changing more multipolar, maybe describe how you view the end that justifies all of this, everything else that we're going to

Starting point is 00:18:27 talk about, the portfolio, the process, the team, the assets, everything else. How would you describe what the U.S.'s North Star was in defense for the last 80 years, what it is today and how fast it's changing. Well, doctrine would say it was our ability to fight two continuous wars at the same time of near Pierce all over the globe and maintain world order. And look, it largely worked. It's an amazing run. Add enormous expense to the U.S. taxpayer. enormous expense. If you look at the rest of the G20, and you add up their contributions. And then you look at what the United States spent in order to protect the free world,

Starting point is 00:19:08 which is really what it did. And the G20 got a huge peace dividend. What's the peace dividend? Well, outside of the United States, in the G19, education is largely free and health care is largely free. And you can do that when you don't have to protect the free world. And I believe the American taxpayer funded all of that peace dividend to enormous effect for these countries.

Starting point is 00:19:32 And look, they didn't live up to the contract that they signed. At what point is it no longer the U.S. is obligation in order to maintain stability? Now, there's a classical thinking in Washington that if we don't lead what fills the void could be complete chaos. And it's totally possible. But we've reached a guns and butter moment in terms of how big the deficit is. And so you have this perfect storm of you have an exact storm of you have an exhumable. executive that's tired of freeloading, plus a balance sheet that can't afford to do it in the same way anymore, and a technological shift, which is actually the perfect opportunity for these people to go ahead and give it a try and take responsibility for their own backyard. I mean, the aid that the Europeans have provided the Ukraine, don't get me wrong, is very important. It is peer or near peer to the United States. The United States Defense Complex has gotten a huge benefit from it because they've been buying mostly American gear. But the Europeans gave a loan gamers.

Starting point is 00:20:32 They expect to get paid back. We gave the money no strings attached. So large S is expected at infinitum. And it's a very difficult moment. And I viewed as a very necessary moment. And I think a lot of people have problems with the form, but the substance is absolutely meritorious. You just can't argue with it. Because I live in suburban Washington. I'm blown away how the narrative of government's inefficient has totally captured the zeitgeist of the entire beltway. And six months ago, no one was talking about it. No one. No one was talking about the general inefficiency of government. And now both sides of the aisle agree that the broader government's extremely inefficient. And so that's amazing to me how the social zeit guys can just change and

Starting point is 00:21:19 move in this direction. But I think these are very necessary events. I think it's a good thing. I want to come back to the Doge thing that's happened before, just less visibly so. But if you think about the U.S.'s new set of priorities, or at least its new orientation where it wants to be compensated for its help and its risk. How do you think the portfolio needs to change based on that changing role in the world? That's a really wonderful question. It's really a function of what our allies will be able to construct and build. We have a line of sight to this in the Ocas partnership that we have with Australia and New Zealand. We're going to maintain an entire nuclear capability in Australia,

Starting point is 00:22:02 and it's clear that that's the bugout point for a war with China. It's not going to be Guam. I was in an unclass briefing the other day in the Pentagon. The stockpiles that China has, Guam is not a, it's insufficient standoff in order to be protected. We can't project enough force from there. And so Australia becomes the new jump-off point. The battle plans have been set, and we've given the Australians this huge capability.

Starting point is 00:22:25 and we expect them to start spending, and we're sending our subs there, and they're going to maintain them. And so part of it can be maintenance of a capability we already have, and then they contribute to that activity. And the other part is de novo capability. So look, aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, the three-prong nuclear deterrent,

Starting point is 00:22:45 those things take a long time. I suspect we're going to keep a lot of that capability. But smaller stuff, like anything autonomous in the water, hypersonics, these kinds of things, things that have a new development tail where the per unit cost for development is lower, I see the Europeans doing a lot there because they can manage the full life cycle of that. Nuclear subs is a huge effort. But look, the Brits have nuclear capability.

Starting point is 00:23:10 The French have nuclear capability. But until they actually have a cooperative agreement for how they're going to run a joint military, I think it's hard to pinpoint. They can build tanks, small caliber ammunition. And look, all the sidearms for the U.S. Army historically were European guns, Beretta, Sig Sauer, they weren't even American guns. So the Europeans on a per unit basis will do a lot. I just think when the system becomes very pristine and big, it's clear that if it's still needed in the doctrine of force structure, that we're probably going to have to do it. If you go back to the old doctrine of two wars at once and maintaining global order, how close do we skirt to that line of being able to fulfill the. that capability. Like, if we had two near-peer battles today. We can't do that anymore because I think what would break? Well, it's just massing. Describe that. That's the key concept. Yeah, massing is just the

Starting point is 00:24:04 quantum you can produce in order to win the war. And so America won World War II by virtue of its enormous industrial capacity. And so I always say if America galvanizes on something, it's unbelievable to me what it can produce. But China has built a stockpile of conventional weapons. that it would take us decades of production in order to build. They have 250 times our naval capability in construction. Today, you're not possibly going to catch up in any legitimate time frame. And so I think we're going to win through technology. I also think that capitalism is this huge advantage that we have here in America

Starting point is 00:24:46 because we call on the capitalistic system in order to deliver the goods to the department. the department really doesn't make anything. It's buying it from companies. And so the dynamism in the American capitalistic system is the edge and that we can tap into private markets and a commercial market in order to do adaptation of these technologies. And then also we're creating a profit incentive for people. Look at all the Chinese generals that have gone to jail over and over again because they check the ICBMs and they're filled with water because no one in that industrial complex has a financial incentive in this. the same way. And what's interesting is I was with a prominent Chinese businessman a few weeks ago and I asked him, I said, there's been this shift here in the U.S. where young people want to go

Starting point is 00:25:31 into defense technology outside of the five-sided building, as we call it. Is there an analog in China? He goes, oh, no. He goes, Chinese entrepreneurs want to tap into the American market. They want to be able to sell their product. It's so funny, the young people there are just as capitalistic, but the incentive structure in the PLA is not there. And so, So I think that's a huge edge for us. I also think our ability to fight joint warfare is a huge edge for us for now. Describe what that means. Everywhere we fight is joint and that it's all the services together integrated working together.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And it's widely regarded that the PLA and their setup, there's an enormous lack of trust up and down the chain of command. There's a worry about corruption. And so even in the vertical of the individual chain of command, let's say, in their army or in their air force, it becomes, even harder when you have to have a joint operation. And we went through this here in the United States. We had this thing called Goldwater Nichols, which said, if you're going to be a commander in the military, 06 or above, you're going to get a joint assignment. We're going to make this service joint so we can fully project the power of each branch of the service and we work in concert together. We're not competing with each other. The Chinese have never fought a joint war. They have these

Starting point is 00:26:45 branches of services. They've built all this technological capability. But their ability, to exercise in this joint concept is very unclear, especially when there's low trust in command and control. So the flip side to that is I could see a scenario where the Chinese hand over command and control to an AI to overcome the institutional resistance and the lack of trust up and down and across the branches of services because that thing would be dispassionate and would start tasking it. And I actually think that they have a much stronger incentive to push the bleeding edge there of adaptation, of planning the war with AI because they're fundamentally less joint. They're not trained in a joint way because they have to rely on it more. That adaptation may happen faster, whereas we have a very successful joint capability.

Starting point is 00:27:39 And so maybe we'll be less inclined to change. That's what I worry about now is this new capability of a thinking machine. but maybe it can overcome the institutional weakness of their military. If I again zoom to the so what of all of this stuff, two big ones seem to be able to defend ourselves. Seems like we can do that. Have deterrence. Seems like we've got that. And then there's the ability to do things in faraway theaters that matter to us.

Starting point is 00:28:05 So, of course, Taiwan comes to mind. In that last category, what are the most sensitive so what's in your mind? I think it's going to be extremely hard for us. to stop the Chinese from a Taiwanese invasion. And I asked a former secretary of defense, probably two or three months ago, I said, do we have a moral obligation to defend Taiwan? Not can we do it tactically? Because that's always an engineering problem and a massing problem and a planning problem.

Starting point is 00:28:34 And ultimately, we can run the simulations. And maybe there are these outcomes where we can make a dent in it. And I believe that the moral will of the country actually drives all that other activity. I'm not giving it away because it's only been male secretary defenses, but his answer was, I don't know. And I was flabbergasted by it because I thought I understood his politics. What it tells me is, is that I think the vast majority of both sides of the aisle don't view it as the moral obligation of the United States to protect Taiwan. It's interesting because I wonder if it's the case because people think we can't win. We can't win in a conventional sense.

Starting point is 00:29:12 And if it was a cakewalk for us to win, would we just do it? I happen to believe the latter. If everyone believed that we had the ability to stop the PLA from crossing the Taiwanese straight, it was a nothing burger for us, we'd do it. Of course, we'd have the will because it's an easy win. And it's the tough win. It would just be too hard for us relative to the quantum of capability that they've been stockpiling through the express purpose. But we've learned a lot in counterinsurgency over the years.

Starting point is 00:29:38 How long did the Afghan contingency take for us to win the war part? Two weeks? What was the Iraq part? One week. Supply chain. Yeah, it was a nation state activity after. China can bomb Taiwan into oblivion. But if they want to take it over and they want the vast majority of people to stay alive,

Starting point is 00:29:57 well, the terrain of Taiwan is spectacular for insurgency. And one of the most compelling plans I saw was the Taiwanese look at America and go, America can never be overtaken because there's anywhere from three to 600 million guns in the country. How would you take over the country functionally? And the Taiwanese have a very good health care system and safety net to prevent derange people from getting firearms. And my view is that a firearm culture there may be already taking hold. And if every adult had a long rifle, I don't know how the Chinese would take over that island. But it wouldn't be warfare like you and I are thinking of generals sitting at tables.

Starting point is 00:30:35 It would be insurgency, small groups, exactly how the Taliban ground us down. hiding in plain sight. And that terrain, by the way, is just as hard. It's very mountainous, it's very lush. So if the Chinese are committed to killing everyone on the island, well, then there's something to defend. They can liquefy the island and they can roll in after the nuclear fallout and they can figure it out. But if they want to take it over and the Taiwanese are prepared to fight, I think it's a perfect setup for insurgency. We spent 20 years getting ground down with enormous military capability against a completely underfunded insurgency. And so if the population is prepared, how are you going to separate someone that's for the PRC from someone that isn't in Taiwan?

Starting point is 00:31:21 Forget it. And if the population supports the activity, I think you could see something very interesting. Obviously, supply lines would become a big challenge and there's a ring that you can create around the island over time or starve it out. What's your expectation for how that whole situation evolves? I don't think in terms of binary outcomes. Obviously, there's the one outcome where it's some combination of a false flag activity. It's saying, oh, Taiwan through an inadvertent exercise, sunk a frigate of ours, and we're bringing in a cooperative peacekeeping force to ensure that this doesn't get out of hand.

Starting point is 00:31:58 And then surreptitiously take over the government or something like that. I think they're much more inclined for an activity like this where it's ambiguous as to what's happening. I think that really works in their favor. I think something that's just overt command of conunded, control war wouldn't be in keeping with their strategy. I mean, they could do that probability distribution as well. I don't think it's as likely. And then there's one theory that's gaining more traction is that the Taiwanese government can be co-opted successfully. And so a bullet doesn't need to be fired. A lot of Taiwanese have second passports and places to go. So the question is,

Starting point is 00:32:34 what's left, has it gets hotter and hotter? And could the political structure be co-opted with a combination of a carrot in a stick. And that branch of thinking seems to be gaining more popularity. It may not even be shot fired. It may be Hong Kong-esque. They've agreed we're a separate system. It's no problem. And then it's a slow degradation of whatever system that was previously there. And so it ultimately comports with Beijing. What have we learned about the future of warfare from the war on Ukraine? Well, that war is always a combination of old and new. John's clearly right in that token in that. I think the Ukrainian contingency is a love letter to the American defense industrial base for all of its faults. When we make something, it works well. I mentioned to you

Starting point is 00:33:24 some of those. I'm going to be in the Baltics in about two weeks. And I know what those meetings are going to be. Get me more javelins. Can you get me more javelins? And every time I sit down, how come I can't get more javelins? So javelin's an anti-tank missile at the end of fire, forget, anti-tank missile. And why do the Baltic swan it so badly? Because they have this vision of Russian T.U tanks storming across their border and taking positive control. And places like Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia in particular really feel that sensation. And so for them, it's giving me javelins. The transcripts that have been captured in signal intelligence of the Russians talking to each other on the battlefield is they have American stuff down there.

Starting point is 00:34:06 Be careful. They have the American stuff. And the Taiwanese just got a delivery of High Mars, which is our mobile rocket launching system in. So A-Tacombs goes inside of it, Gimler's goes inside of it. And these are medium and long range, ground to air or surface-to-surface medium-range missile systems. These things work, man. I get it. They're expensive.

Starting point is 00:34:25 Let's get some more mass into it so we can drive the cost down. Let's sell a whole bunch more to everyone that wants them. Run out the production. Let's create a series of incentives for these primes with these industrial bases to blow at production. They'll respond to the incentives. change the incentives. I think that's part of it. I think, too, I see this parallel to a deep seek

Starting point is 00:34:45 and what's happened there in the Ukrainian contingency. There's a lot of new, fangled drones that we introduced into those theaters that were completely unsuccessful. And they were coming from next generation companies. But they didn't work because the nature of that theater was evolving so fast. And of course, now the fact of Ukrainian drones

Starting point is 00:35:02 is this little printed thing that they do themselves and they're running the software and they just need the shape charge and they're printing it. I think what it shows is that when you're on the bleeding or bleeding edge, the franchise isn't that secure, even if you're the first there or even if you've done something new and novel. And that's the analog to Deepseek, is that I think that was a shot across the bow. Hey, maybe there's a different way to do this thing is that new technologies. The phase shift or the signal could be really, really quick in a war.

Starting point is 00:35:31 It can be much faster than a commercial environment. And so we're seeing that, too. I also think that it's a love letter to some of the old stuff. And these missile systems get cooperatively upgraded. It's not like the Patriot missile from 91 is not the Patriot missile of today. And we've cooperatively upgraded it with the manufacturers a hundred times. So I think there's lots of technological capability. You have to remember, before the wall fell, two-thirds of the world scientists worked in defense.

Starting point is 00:35:59 Everyone was working on these problems. Jim Simons at Renaissance worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis, which is around the corner of the Pentagon. So it was actually pretty difficult to have a huge preponderance of scientists working in these technologies capabilities. Wall comes down, last supper at the Pentagon merging all these defense businesses. And it's no coincidence that you get an internet revolution on the back end of this, a biotech revolution on the back end of this, because we let loose this technical ability all over the country and really all over the world. And so now there's a little bit of, we're going to suck some of this capability back in here and it's going to manifest itself

Starting point is 00:36:34 and some new businesses, which is wonderful. But I think the lesson learned is going forward, it's going to be a combination of old and new. When I talk to lots of the leaders of new companies, especially those building lots of drones and software systems to control and coordinate those drones, they imagine a future battlefield where there's not a lot of soldiers because a soldier can't survive.

Starting point is 00:36:56 Let's just picture a border to start or something. A soldier cannot cross a border where there's just infinity, $150 well-coordinated drones. with charges attached to them, and therefore the future of warfare is drone swarms fighting each other. Where does that future fall down? Where is that not accurate? I think it could be accurate and fall down. I actually think it's a false choice. So in the opening skirmish of the drone swarms fighting each other, okay, one drone swarms wins. Let's just say the casualties are 75%. What's next? Do you want to kill everyone in that theater of operation? Should everyone be dead? Or do you need to take it over?

Starting point is 00:37:33 The second you need to take over an environment with people, well, guess what? Old stuff. Here comes the old stuff. We're going to need some of the old stuff. We're not thinking much about the Gaza contingency as a place to learn stuff. There's tons of stuff to learn of what's happening there. One, is how to hide from a vastly superior force is clearly go subterranean. There's a whole tactic there. And the other thing is some of the most capable things, The Israelis have in that theater are uparmored bulldozers, bulletproof bulldozers. These are the unsung hero of the Gaza contingency in tanks falling right behind it. So I think when you're clearly outmatched, you're going to revert to this form of insurgent behavior.

Starting point is 00:38:14 Where you're going to bed in the population, if they want to take over the population or not kill the population, we're going to need to move to some hybrid of old and new. Look, the Israelis have tons of technology. And don't get me wrong, the drones and the technology were very important. I don't know if you saw the Cynwar video of that drone just hovering is super important. But tanks and bulldozers and troops and gauze were pretty damn important too. And so I just think the phase of the warfare will ultimately lead to using some old stuff at some point. I just don't think it'll kick off in the same way anymore. Can you describe your view on the dynamic at play today where there's been in the same way that now we have a lot less people in defense technology?

Starting point is 00:38:55 There's a resurgence of interest in that space from an entrepreneur. and investing perspective. There are venture investors and private equity investors wholly dedicated to backing these kinds of companies. There are interesting new technologies being developed, subs, drones, everything you can imagine. Andril is one of the most popular private companies and most valuable. It's a wonderful thing for the country. For the U.S. Yes. The fact that there's this interest going back to that conversation with the Chinese industrialists, oh, no, no one would go into this thing. Well, I remember no one wanted to go into this. I remember protests in Mountain View at Google's campus that they shouldn't be doing work for the Department of Defense.

Starting point is 00:39:32 And I feel like that is wholesale gone. Yeah, that wasn't that long ago. Yeah, it wasn't that long ago. So that's pretty good, man. I'm pretty happy about that. I'm interested in your perspective, I guess, from two sides. The first you sort of already addressed, which is set aside returns on capital and returns that investors will earn on the deployment of these dollars. It sounds like a huge thing.

Starting point is 00:39:51 This is just a net good for the system. and it's great. What about on the pure investing side? What are the dynamics that will drive returns? What sorts of returns do you expect if you add all this up into some sort of index? I get to just put dollars at work at the market prices in private rounds in defense-only companies. Do you expect good returns? You would call next generation defense. I think it's going to be very challenging. And I worry about that too. I worry about capital leaving the system. I'm old enough. 99, 2000 is not. an ancient memory for me. And so the technologies that came out of that push were absolutely meritorious. And the capital structure for a lot of these businesses didn't work. I think at the

Starting point is 00:40:31 limit, maybe a global crossing or something like that. But a global crossing built was so important, and we still use it every day. And the recognition by capital markets that this was extremely important and that it would fundamentally change our life was right. It was a good directional view. It was a very bad weighing machine in terms of rate of return of capital. capital, how much you needed to be deployed, how much you would get back. There was a lot of carnage on the back end of that. So I worry about that in these next generation defense rounds, because you have to understand how the budget is built. The budget is not built 3G style in zero-paced budgeting. We look at the previous requirements for the year. We look at these

Starting point is 00:41:11 different colors of money that Congress appropriates to the Pentagon. So in a synthetic attempt to control the way the Pentagon spends, we give it types of money, operations and maintenance, research development and technological evaluation. For many years, there was something called GWAT, Global War on Terror Money, Commander's Emergency Response Program, which Dave Petraeus was very important in creating a form of money that allowed him a more permissive environment for a theater of war. He co-authored a manual called Money as a Weapon System, how they would use it in a theater. So those colors of money drive to dictate spending to a certain extent. And so when you set up the budget, it's largely allocated. You know who's going to get the money. It's not like people look at the last year's

Starting point is 00:41:57 MDAA and say $8.58 billion without any black ops or special appropriations in it. And that's my damn. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, these programs are accounted for. It goes on this multi-year contract or this or this or this. And so to grab market share takes much longer than a conventional market. And I think the investors in this ecosystem have to understand that. You're not going to take over a market in 24 months, unless it's fundamental. a brand new requirement and we haven't run the competition yet. So that's where I think these next generation defense businesses are uniquely set up because if the requirements new, there's no incumbency advantage, you don't have to dislodge an existing program, it's not a

Starting point is 00:42:36 gerrymandered into a district, all these kinds of things. So if it's fundamentally new and novel, then there's a much greater opportunity, obviously. But if it's trying to displace something existing and the Pentagon's built the requirement, they're saying this is what I need, Well, it's going to be an enormous capital lift for someone to spend investors' dollars to say you're wrong, and my taste is better than your requirement. By the way, I don't view that as necessarily a bad setup. I think this is a whole separate line of a conversation, this concept of a responsible party. And we have that in the nuclear navy, and we should talk about that.

Starting point is 00:43:13 But the net net is in terms of capital allocation, the manner in which the market behaves and the fact that we have these pre-existing capabilities that we're still connected to is going to require a major change in acquisition, a major change in requirement activity. And I believe the big change that should happen should be, quote, unquote, the responsible party, who gets to own all the fame and the blame for an activity in order to move it forward. And to loop it back to the first part of your question. So I think there'll be lots of pain in the investing side of it where the revenues won't show up. until we do wholesale reform of who gets to own what and how responsible they are.

Starting point is 00:43:53 And that's because what we call Riptoa and the transfer authority, you're typically a job for 24 months when you wear a uniform. You don't get to see the fruition. The guy that started on Joint Strike Fighter didn't deliver Joint Strike Fighter. We've gone through a slew of flag officers. And so Admiral Rickover, who invented the nuclear Navy, this is a guy from World War II and is the longest serving flag officer in American military history, served until his late 70s or even his 80s. And never wore a uniform, by the way, was total iconoclast, is that he's like, we have to

Starting point is 00:44:26 have a responsible party. And so the job is going to be eight years for the guy running the nuclear Navy. We don't have that anywhere else in the service. And by the way, the Navy declined to promote this guy over and over again. Rick over. Yes. And the Senate and Scoop Jackson said, no, you're going to make him an Adderall. Now you're going to make him a two star. You make him a three star? You make him a four star. And so the institution fought back tooth and nail to stop this. But that's a wonderful gift he gave the Navy to create. We've never had an incident in our nuclear navy running reactors that move with tons of kinetic stuff around it all over the world. It's an amazing statement of we have to create responsible parties.

Starting point is 00:45:05 These billets have to be responsible for the delivery of the program. If we take someone and say, you're responsible for drones, 10-year job, well, I think we'll see some major change. And so if it's a way station along the way, then the current system will crowd out ability for these new businesses to be successful. What's in the way of having that pervade the entire armed forces, the responsible party for major programs? Part of it is so much of this is history of the way we've set up the rotation of how we train people. all of these things come from good places, by the way. I should say that there are very intelligent and motivated people in the armed services, and everyone goes into that building wanting to do the right thing.

Starting point is 00:45:49 And so this came from the concept of a well-rounded leader is going to do a lot of jobs. Think about it in a corporation. Okay, you can do finance, can do operations, you're going to be in marketing. You're going to understand the enterprise that you manage. And so in a limited life, can't leave someone in the gig for eight years or ten years or something like that. But in these engineering disciplines where the hybrid of science and engineering is extremely important to build technological superiority, it's clear we need more responsible parties in the nuclear navy shows it. It absolutely shows it. So I think we're going to have to recognize that our only chance of technological superiority are going to have to change the paradigm of the way we've done it in the past.

Starting point is 00:46:31 And we can do that. We've changed it before. We'll change it again. We were talking before hitting record about this funny circumstance where, you might have more investing firms than you do assets that will be good to invest in. Maybe say just a little bit more about that. And then I want to ask, where is the money actually to be made in defense investing? In the venture side is that if you were to draw it as a tree diagram, it's like we were talking about a large institutional LP that we both know. And I thought,

Starting point is 00:46:57 I bet they have more GP relationships and defense venture than they actually have defense venture investments because they're all flowing back into the same deals. And so, I actually believe that to be true. It seems like the capital aggregators, the ones that are getting the enormous capital, will probably be able to live out any design or economic cycle here to be able to ultimately come out the other end and be okay. And so I think resources really matters. And I think that's what you see happen in these valuations is that accumulating more

Starting point is 00:47:32 resources is a form of industrial power. I don't think it's surprise that after Andrews' latest raise, they announced a million square foot facility. They're building industrial capacity. That's part of aggregating lots of resources is becoming so important from an industrial standpoint that we got to keep it alive. And there's a lot of businesses like that that have existed for 50, 75, 100 years within the country that support the department. So you can see those guys win. and the ones that aren't well capitalized, irrespective of their technology, won't survive. Because it's not about making one new widget.

Starting point is 00:48:12 It's about making millions of widgets at scale. And so I see what Andrew's doing. I'm like, okay, I think they're thinking about this correctly. You've aggregated these resources. You must build the industrial capacity. Because when push comes to shove, it's going to be the ability to produce X number of whatever at scale. And ergo, the investors who themselves have more access to capital, which means they can win the rounds to invest more capital and the companies also probably have an advantage. This is not a place for the lean mentality.

Starting point is 00:48:43 I never say never because maybe there's someone so brilliant that's figured out how to turn apple juice into rocket fuel or something like that. There's a huge technological phase shift. But if I'm betting defense venture dollars, I'm going to the largest rounds, the largest raises, the largest balance sheets, almost separate from the technology. technology. I think the balance sheet of these businesses is so important how big they get, because they will be able to survive and then hopefully some of them will be able to thrive. That's it. There's a ballooning effect to the big firms that can write these big checks and be there to support them. What else can we learn from the U.S. defense primes? What can venture-backed younger defense companies learn from the primes? So much of the narrative in support of the new

Starting point is 00:49:28 class of companies is how sclerotic and terrible all the primes are. Some of these primes are very impressive to me. Northrop Crummanet's business is remarkably impressive and the executives know their business. So I don't the nations only make her a missile fuel for a number of years. It's the only maker of the intermediate chemicals too, which is actually very important. I've seen some business plans that they're going to make. I'm like, yeah, but where are you getting the derivative chemical in India here? So it's like the concept falls down. It's the whole concept of Fortress America is that yourself contained. And so the counterparty sitting across from me in these negotiations knew 100% of what my margin was, knew exactly the technology. These were brutal negotiations

Starting point is 00:50:07 of them managing costs. Because they're managed almost in a public markets way quarter to quarter, and their incentive structure right now is to make sure that they are passing on costs that they bump into in the development of a program. They really can't take this multi-quarter bet without the government showing up. And what you see these next generation guys doing is they're taking huge bets based on their taste. They're betting that their taste is greater than the requirements process of the Benegon. And in some cases, that's true. And in some cases, it isn't. And I would say the second there's an incentive for these primes to comport with just give me your best. Someone says, go ahead and give me your best, whatever you think it is. Screw the requirement. I think they can produce enormous

Starting point is 00:50:52 technological stuff. Look, Lockheed is like a top five patent owner on Earth, on the whole Earth. There's enormous technology in these businesses. And we have 50 years of the world's best scientists working in these businesses. And there's still a tradition of that engineering talent and capability. These guys can do a lot, man. I remember when I was focused on public markets and capital allocation as a quantitative study, that North of Grumman was one of the great stories to study. The acquisitions up through the 90s and then the share buybacks all the way through the present. They've been compounding at 15% for 25 years. It's really nuts. Cody Kittle told me to ask you in this theme about the lessons of Transdine versus HICO and what you've learned from those two businesses.

Starting point is 00:51:37 These are broadly diversified conglomerates and there are things inside of both of them that I want to own. And I think highly of those management teams. The margin tells the story a lot in these businesses and that Transnine probably has what a $3 billion of EBITDA, give or take right now. now and it's 50% even the margins. Very sporty. And so when you look at it and say yourself, good grief, how do they do this? And if you talk downstream,

Starting point is 00:52:04 not to all their customers, but let's say some of their big customers, they hate these guys. And so that's a very tough paradigm to grow from. And actually, I think it's evidenced by the kinds of businesses they're buying today. Like they bought CalSman, which It's not really an aftermarket product.

Starting point is 00:52:24 It's like a wind tunnel testing activity. Boeing an Airbus. Boeing was so big at one point. It moved 2% of GDP by itself. And so if you're the elephant walking around the jungle and there's a bunch of peanuts on your back and some birds are eating it, okay, it's fine. It's de minimis relative to my share.

Starting point is 00:52:43 I think the challenge now is the law of large numbers that they're getting big enough. And think about their business. Who owns the type certificate of these aircraft? It's the designers. It's the boeings and the airbuses. They own the design. And so if it becomes so expensive to move through the supply chain, then it's going to incentivize a verticalization in certain areas. And by the way, before Dennis Mullenberg was fired, that was his plan. He had two things. He had Boeing business services, which was to control some of the activity in the aftermarket. And then also what he called partnering for success, which was you're not. not going to make this margin on me anymore, the supply chain. I'm not going to design you into the next generation. You're going to be off the list if the toilet sea goes to $800. You're not going to be in that fulcrum. I think the business model works beautifully when the downstream customer is so immense.

Starting point is 00:53:37 They almost don't notice the difference. I always joke, the optimal business for Transdime is owning the cup holder in the Joint Strike Fighter. It's like, that would be amazing for them. You're not going to requalify that thing. It's craziness. So I just think there's a limit to how big you can do that. And look, the institutional shareholders in the primes, like the bowings of the world and the T-Rows that own Boeing and stuff like that or capital or whoever, they're going to management at these primes and going, you guys do all the design. And these guys make all the money, two and a half times the margin. Tell me how that works. And so look, at some point, you kick the bear long enough, pick the elephant's food off long enough, and the paradigm will change. And so what's that number?

Starting point is 00:54:22 Is it $5 billion of EBITDA? I don't know, but you're seeing competitors already. And so that quantum of profit is also attracting competitors into the system. And that's meaningful. And so when you make that much money for that long, and look, Laura went public, obviously, in a pretty spectacular way, that used to sit inside of JLL, it's a private equity firm. And so it went up public at about 130 some odd million of EBITDA, and it trades it 50 times because there's a general expectation that off of a smaller basis, it's easier to run the Transign Playbook over again. And just I think it's going to be harder at a certain size.

Starting point is 00:55:03 But when you're Pluto and the market is Jupiter, it works. I just don't know how long it works for. And if Boeing continues to get smaller, and that quantum of profit gets more and more meaningful, I think it's going to be harder. When you and I first met the very first conversation that we were in together many years ago was a conversation around the most undervalued assets in the entire world. I remember this conversation. I think yours was firearms and uncut pink diamonds.

Starting point is 00:55:31 This was at an amazing Graham Duncan East Rock event. And it struck me at the time that the way that you thought about both of those things was that the money to be made was understood through the lens of simple supply and demand. Yes. And that your frame on investing is kind of that. Can you describe that in some more detail however you'd like? It just struck me as so elemental to the way you think about things. I wish it was more complicated than maybe it could justify my existence a little bit better.

Starting point is 00:56:01 So what I want to see are structural impediments for you getting into my business. Why was I able to buy the nation's only maker and missile? fuel. Think about it. We're like eight people on a house plant in an office park in suburban Washington, D.C. Why do I get to buy that capability? Why does the prime buy it? Why don't they verticalize? On the cover, that business was very low growth. It didn't seem terribly interesting to someone. The margins weren't trans-line margins, let's just say. And so business has imputed growth of 100 basis points. It has huge contingent risk. The largest non-nuclear explosion in U.S. history was the former plant. There's a Discovery Channel episode on this.

Starting point is 00:56:39 the blast threw planes off the tarmac at McCarran. Wow. And the department's like, yeah, we're going to move this factory to the Utah desert. And so our view is we want to own the defense annuities. But when we analyzed the factory and the cost to replace it, we said, oh, it's $2 billion. That was our number. Now, there's a group in Pentagon that does this for a living, cost assessment and program evaluation.

Starting point is 00:57:00 This is a good use of taxpayer money. And those should not cut this because this is an analysis of our industrial capability to produce that scale to fight contingencies globally. So there's a real thinking that happens in the Pentagon there about this thing blows up. How much do we need to invest in order to create another source of supply? And by the way, the defense establishment is littered with monopolies because the defense market is the opposite of a monopoly. It's a monopsony.

Starting point is 00:57:27 It's one customer, many suppliers. And so if you have one customer in a business, how much capital are you going to deploy into your factory? You're going to try and just mirror match it. So there are a lot of natural one-of-one suppliers to the department by virtue of who the customer is. And so our analysis of the factory is there's no alternative. There are ways for us to improve it. Technologically, the business is unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:57:54 It's a national asset because of the quality of what it produces. So if the Pentagon's own number was between two and two an apt, so I'm saying myself, I can be, it for a very small fraction of that value, it is guaranteed to make money as an annuity. It can hold an enormous quantum of leverage because it's a 10-year set of take-or-pay contracts, getting paid no matter what. And, oh, by the way, there's an embedded option value in this in that if all of a sudden it gets more dangerous, consumption goes way up. You can't build a financial model that has a toggle in it called war. Base case, upside war. No one does that. But that's actually a huge benefit to us because, look, the world is dangerous.

Starting point is 00:58:40 We know something like that will happen. And we don't model it in, but we tell ourselves, we're getting an option value in here that we know exists. But you can't logically price it. And so seller can't expect you to pay for it. But you know if you have duration, no, world's pretty dangerous place. It seems like every couple of years something happens. You're going to get paid for that as well. And so that coupled with things like commercial off the shelf.

Starting point is 00:59:04 We made sure when we bought that business, we started selling commercially. To what? To commercial space launch, to next generation suppliers. What happened there? Ultimately, the value was recognized. And we sold it probably too early. We always sell too early, is my refrain. You're going to do really well owning a one-of-one business that costs 20 times your purchase price to replace.

Starting point is 00:59:28 That can, by the way, hold nearly infinite leverage in it. That purchase looked like an LBO. From 1975, it looked like American Greetings LBO. It's like very little equity put up relative to the total quantum of leverage. Yeah. So I think it's really recognizing replacement cost, how important it is to a downstream system, how we train and equip the forces, right? How important is it to the projection of force? And my goal is I want to be a supplier to everyone.

Starting point is 00:59:58 We own a set of businesses right now where Andrew's a customer, Northrop's a customer. I want to get as close to the physics that won't change. That way I'm not choosing size. I'm not making a value judgment on the future because it's hard to change the physics. Ergo, get closer to the molecule. My top of the mountain is to be as close to the molecule as possible. There may be new molecules, but the reality is it's usually engineering. It's usually engineering downstream.

Starting point is 01:00:23 And so if I can be close to the molecule and have some value-added engineering around it, especially if I'm in the front office of the department, There's tons of money that's been made in the back office, in the business mission area. Tons of money. There are private equity firms that focus on that complex that have aggregated $100 billion of AUM. It's amazing to me and that are doing the non-kinetic activities. I understand that if you view yourself as an asset gatherer, you won't do anything that will infringe on your ability to gather assets. And so there's a whole host of pension plans and endowments and all these things all over the world, especially in Europe, that will not give you money if you make anything that ultimately kills.

Starting point is 01:01:00 someone. But we've never been confused about the front office for the back office. And I want to be as close to the front office as possible because the back office at some point always needs to get modernized or changed or automated away. Whether it's the pink diamond example or something else, is there a second supply demand story you can tell to really drive home this way that you look at things as you approach them? I still remain the chairman of the largest manufacturer of firearm accessories to Western militaries based here in the United States. Wonderful business. that business can produce 100,000 magazines for military weapons a day. Its scale is so enormous. So by us reinvesting in the enterprise and taking market share and defending its patents worldwide all over Europe,

Starting point is 01:01:46 all these historical European vendors that would push their products into the U.S. Defense Department, we've taken all that market share from them. And what have we done? We've lowered the price point. So we went from 60% market share to 90% market share. And, We verticalized the business. We're the largest consumer of a certain kind of nylon in the United States for that business now. And what we were able to deliver to the department in Western Allies is this wonderful, very capable product where the previous generation product would jam after 3,000 rounds. Ours went for 300,000 rounds, and they just stopped the test because they ran out of ammo. And so if you can make a series of investments where you can ultimately become the sole source supplier in the activity, then you can actually deliver a better,

Starting point is 01:02:30 value proposition to the government and you can have a wonderful annuity like business. So pink diamonds, why was I even talking about pink diamonds? Well, the only source of pink diamonds was running out. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, that's very interesting to me. There's no other source of pink diamonds. What is the cost of trying to find another resource of pink diamonds? Well, forget it. It's impossibly expensive. And that's the way I think about all these businesses. is can we own a very important business to a market? And can I expand the moat by reinvesting in the enterprise? Can you explain the concept of net-centric warfare?

Starting point is 01:03:04 It's just really everything connected for the purposes of situational awareness. So the drone knows what the ship and the soldier is doing. Everyone has full situational awareness of all these connected devices. Most expensive war game in U.S. history showed that if you knock out the network, everything turns into nothing. I think it was called MCO2. and the actor they had on the opposite side was the retired flag officer who's like,

Starting point is 01:03:29 I'm just going to knock out the network and I'm going to win this war game. I'm going to use smoke signals and I'm going to use all these things. And this guy just won the war game over and over and over again because of the goals, I just knock out the network.

Starting point is 01:03:39 And so in a network denied environment, think about how important connectivity is for all of these systems and how dumb some of them may become in the absence of connectivity. And so get ready. The network denial will be the first fulcrum of a full scale near peer war. I mean, look at the contingency in the Ukraine.

Starting point is 01:04:02 They wouldn't dream of criticizing Elon because what's their network? It's Starlink. Starlink is the unsung hero of the Ukrainian contingency. For whatever you think about the proprietor, that contingency would have been lost already without Starlink. And that's a hard network that they can't crack. It's all their comms. It's all of their ability to navigate all of these different new UASs. So at its simplest form, it's just the ability for all these things to what we would call C4 ISR or C5 ISR.

Starting point is 01:04:29 It's just command to control of these connected things. And we've designed everything to be connected. And I think the next iteration is going to be these things actually have to be autonomous and have to have inertial navigation and these other things that, assuming it's flying in the dark, it's not connected to GPS. It's not connected to something else in the ground. It's not connected to a mesh network. It's going to have to have its own situational awareness.

Starting point is 01:04:52 individually when a network is denied. Say one more click about in an net-centric world where autonomy and AI specifically play important roles in the future of warfare. Just the ability to pump an end goal for something to go prosecute it is kind of spectacular. I view it very similar to the paradigm of when we're going to let the Waymo's drive us 100% kind of thing. Like there's going to be this push and pull of who's going to grab the yoke on all these activities. And I think something that doesn't have well-defined joint doctrine is actually going to do

Starting point is 01:05:28 much better with AI because they're more likely to just give it over to them. Just tell me what to do. As opposed to us where we have well-defined protocol and paradigms and we're not going to give over the steering wheel as easily. That's harder. The fighter pilot union, if you will, is going to fight pretty hard about what they do or don't give up. But I wouldn't give up on human ingenuity to hack a system, to screw up a system, to trick a system. I'm not saying we should exclusively rely on that. We should have every kind of capability. If we think about this whole system and how it's all evolved,

Starting point is 01:06:00 could you draw or give a narrative of the scenario of your greatest hope and the scenario of your greatest fear, two separate ones for the future of kinetic warfare? My greatest hope is that there's symmetry in the development of these technologies that functionally make them moot for adversaries. and us to use is that we end up in a new form of cold war. So it's an arms race. It's mutually assured destruction.

Starting point is 01:06:29 I think the amazing thing about the Ukrainian contingency is Putin has threatened nuclear activity. How many times? And he hasn't used it. And so I say to myself, wow, he has this arsenal of nuclear capability and he is not prepared to cross it, even though he almost went through a coup, which Bellingcat accurately predicted. My hope is that if we can develop symmetrical capabilities over time, and if one person pulls out too far ahead, then there will be this enormous temptation to flex. And so that's the challenge in a race to the future is you just can't be second.

Starting point is 01:07:05 You just can't. You just can't allow it because the human temptation, war is a human endeavor. And by the way, I should say, I trust the United States a democracy to be more measured. than any other end user of something. And my hope is that we pull away and that creates the new opportunity for Dayton because I think in an alternative scenario would be a lot more dangerous.

Starting point is 01:07:28 What about the other path? The worst is the March of Technology puts more and more power in fewer and fewer people's hands. There are a lot of stories of we run these nuclear drills and then the missile will turn the key or something like that. There's a human.

Starting point is 01:07:43 And so technology is removing people in a lot of these steps. And then it's also putting these capabilities and things that were exclusively the provenance of nation states. And now it's like it could be a company of a hundred people. And so there is a very credible path towards something extremely dangerous happening. And it kicks off a chain reaction that brings us to the precipice. Why are some nations that have resources nuclear and some others not? So ultimately, if you have enough smart people and you have every,

Starting point is 01:08:17 resources, you get the capability. So I really worry about something like that. And I almost view something like that to a certain extent with the market technology as inevitable. And so we're going to have to go back to the physics of it and how we govern it. Like the molecule, that's why these things around it will have to be so important and controlled because if the substrates exist in the system, there'll be enough technology in order to build a capability. Is there any part of this world that you're surprised that where you think about it or put a lot more importance on it than the people around you do?

Starting point is 01:08:50 My entire experience is an acquisition. I don't come from the policy and planning world. I don't come from strategy and plans. And there are people in the building that's been their life thinking about these things. I come to it with the merchant's nose of what do you need in order to prosecute the mission? I think about it in terms of the long-term impact

Starting point is 01:09:11 to our business. But what's amazing is how wrong the capabilities we impute into an adversary. Look, no one thought the result of the Ukrainian contingency would be this. No one. I forget who has attributed the quote, but it says something to the effect of surprise attacks are so common, they shouldn't be a surprise. It's kind of like man makes plans and God last. So I feel like there's so much probability distribution in a way a lot of this happens. And the best insurance policy to wrap around all this is technological space.

Starting point is 01:09:42 And that's why I'm so happy to see the level of energy investment that's going into it. I view my job as being a good steward of capital for the inputs into a lot of these systems and that we can continue to leverage the capitalistic system to make good returns and to create continuity of supply for the system. There's a million things and aspects of this. We could pick any part of our conversation and spend another two hours on each part. We'll keep it here for part one. I think you know my traditional closing question for everybody.

Starting point is 01:10:13 What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? On the professional side, there are two people. So one is my former boss at the Pentagon, Paul Brinkley. And I mean, he was Doge part one, this guy. He just wanted to modernize the place and he didn't care about how much China he broke in order to improve it. And there are very few people like that in a bureaucracy. He accumulated energy off of it. And he wrote a book about it.

Starting point is 01:10:35 It was published by Wiley a number years ago. And then also Tom Pritzker, who really put me in business. I'd never bought a company before when I left the Pentagon. I don't have an MBA. I never worked at a private equity firm. I never worked as an investor in any kind of capacity. So here's a guy sitting across from you going, okay, you're smart. You can figure out business.

Starting point is 01:10:54 It's like, we'll help you along. And if it wasn't for meeting him in that environment that he creates, and they're really builders of companies, they've incubated so many businesses. You have to have someone to believe in you before he embark on it. And so I can tell you, when I started asking people for money, many people did not believe it. It's that they have somewhat of that stature say, you can do this. Don't worry about it, whatever, X number of years later.

Starting point is 01:11:16 Well, it's worked out pretty well for the people that did believe in you. I love our conversations. I think they're among the most interesting and different of any that I have with investors. I'm so glad we finally got to do this. Thanks for the time. It's a privilege to the year. If you enjoyed this episode, visit join colossus.com, where you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts.

Starting point is 01:11:36 You can also subscribe to Colossus Review, our quarterly print, digital, and private audio publication featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors, and companies that we admire most. Learn more at join colossus.com slash subscribe.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Darren Farber - The Business of Defense - [Invest Like the Best, EP.417]

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