School of War - Ep 216: Will Somerindyke on Making Munitions in America

Episode Date: July 22, 2025

Will Somerindyke, Chairman of Regulus Global and CEO of UNION, joins the show to discuss rebuilding the U.S. defense industrial base. ▪️ Times     •      01:36 Introduction    ��•      02:35 A navy family      •      05:51 Regulus      •      08:05 American made      •      10:45 155            •      14:44 Integration          •      16:53 Supply chains     •      23:20 Demand     •      28:27 Flexibility        •      31:40 Forging vs casting     •      33:45 UNION     •      37:27 Customers        •      40:07 Mindset Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Everyone knows that America's defense industrial base is in bad shape. We have trouble making everything from warships all the way down to common munitions, like the 155 millimeter shell for our howitzers. And when you get into what it actually takes to build something as seemingly simple as a single 155 shell, which we are going to do today in the context of talking through some ideas for revolutionizing how our munitions factories in America actually work, I think you'll better appreciate the complexity of the problem. Let's get into it.

for war there's a rocky invasion of the war. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender.

For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. MacLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Will Summerendike. He is the founder and chairman of Regulus Global.

He is the CEO as of this year of Union, a company that is going to do some interesting things in the defense space. We're going to talk about the munitions crisis. We're going to talk about what it means to manufacture munitions and arms in the 21st century. Will, thank you so much for joining the show. Pleasured, thank you. You were warning us before we started recording that you're coming to us from Virginia Beach

where at any second you may be buzzed by F-18s, which I think will only add to the flavor of the show, to be honest with you. Yeah, our headquarters is in Virginia Beach, and I grew up here, so you kind of get used to jet noise, but our particular office now is pretty close to the landing strip, so the jet noise compounds and gets a little louder sometimes.

The sound of freedom. That's how I... Literally. I used to go as a kid to Virginia. Beach, certainly every summer, sometimes multiple times a year. So my dad, you know, was retired military. And you could, in those days, you could rent cabins and fort story, these little beach cabins. Oh, yeah. Yeah. What a happy childhood memories that involved getting buzzed. It wouldn't have been F-18s in those days, but getting buzzed by Jats out of, at Oceania. Yeah. Yeah.

And I don't think, I don't think they allow you on the Fort Story base anymore, but there's still camping opportunities right there on the Chesapeake. Yeah. Yeah. So you grew up in Virginia Beach. you're not a Navy guy yourself, but it's a Navy family, right? Correct. Yeah, I was born in Honolulu, but my father was stationed there at the time. And so he quickly got stationed here in Virginia Beach, retired in 1985. So I am a product of the Navy chief. And then my mother was a third grade school teacher. So you're growing up there.

You're kind of surrounded by the Navy, surrounded by the military. And so I guess in a way, it's not too surprising that you end up where you are in a sense. but there's other things along the way, right? Like, just tell us about yourself growing up. Like, did you see yourself as going into business in this sector? What were your focuses? What were your passions when you were young? Yeah, no, this is not where I thought I would have been.

I went to college initially to play baseball. And I went to Christopher Newport University, which is in Newport News. I'm on the other side of the water here in the Highwater, Hampton Roads region. But I initially went there. I started as an art major. I quickly evolved to a couple other things. I ended up as a communications major, but I was heavy into physics, and I was a teacher's assistant in physics for two years there.

And then I left college and then ended up in the investment banking community of Merrill Lynch for four years, which was completely off from where the major went, but was thankful was in that space. I learned a lot in that space. I started in the year 2000. So that was right at the end of the dot-com Enron debacle into 9-11. And it was a very interesting, it was a very interesting time completely, but particularly to be, you know, starting your career and being in the finance space.

So I was there for four years. I had a short period in the business side of sports for two years in media. And then I kind of fell into this space in 2007. I was playing rugby. there were some people from some of the Southern African countries that we were playing with. This is a big area for defense contractors. I knew a number of them. The industry seemed interesting.

Finance was not something I wanted to go back into around 2007 and 2008 for good reason. And so the first three years of my experience in this space was in South Africa-based. And I flew back and forth learning the business and then spent. two years as an advisor for an American company really delving into export, international distribution, ITAR, BIS, you know, those type of things. And then started this company taking my mother and father out of retirement and started this company basically in January of 2012, Regulus. What is the initial business theory of the case for Regulus? And keep in mind, I mean, not only is this a foreign world for me. But I suspect a lot of our listeners, even though, you know, a lot of people

in the military are listening and, you know, people in D.C., probably relatively few people who are familiar with the nuts and bolts of not only how you manufacture and sell or, you know, trade on as a middleman stuff, but also the regulatory regime surrounding it, which seem very intimidating. Like, so, you know, keep that in mind as you explain, but like, you've got some experience in this space. You've been working with some other countries. Where do you see the opportunity that leads to Regulus. Highly regulatory, which was an environment I was used to in the finance space anyways. In the 13 or 14 years of Regulus's existence, we've probably done over 500 I-TAR and BIS licenses working in 70, 80 countries in the history of the company. The company has started more as,

I'd say, a classic rep group. We represented a handful of small or small, medium-sized U.S. manufacturers, and we would do all their export work and built their entire international distribution network. That gave us a very interesting expertise because we really understood how all of our foreign allied countries would procure things. And who were the main distributors? You know, so in France, who would work with the DGPN raid or who would work with the dive teams or whatever it is, I think he gave us a really good understanding of how to work those markets efficiently. But we evolved quickly. You know, there was only so much scale to that model, going to be in a middleman or broker like you say. And we really involved into more of

running, running larger scale programs. Procurement of a larger scale programs involved really heavily understanding the supply chain manufacturing and logistics space. And then, you know, evolved into where regularness is today, which is a lot, an actual manufacturer, owning manufactured assets and working on the supply chain all the way from the raw material and component to the assembly of manufacture all the way to the logistics. We own a lot of logistic assets that gets it to final mile wherever it needs to be. So it's been an interesting evolution for 14 years. Yeah.

And it sounds like even as you've sort of expanded out to have, you know, purchase on very, you know, a greater and greater part of the whole chain that, the original model remains relevant in the sense that it's American manufacturing for foreign clients, or is that oversimplifying? No, I wouldn't. That was primarily, yes. Look, we love to promote U.S. manufactured goods. We're still more than convinced it's the best in the world.

I think that that philosophy changed a bit in the last three years, not in still believing America still manufactures the best stuff, but just understanding that in the supply chain, particularly to munitions, particularly to conventional munitions, we did not have the infrastructure to do that anymore. And although there is a significant effort to try to get us back to any level of mass production, our focus, particularly in the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, was more of a foreinsuring model, which was go out and invest in or control what we considered were strategic foreign allied manufacturing assets while at the same time, which is what our involvement in me now being CEO of union has been, was to re-industrialize or maybe

re-modernize some of the way that we manufacture conventional munitions. And in that joint effort of both kind of a foreign shoring and, you know, maybe reshoring or on-shoring model, it was trying to get us back up, you know, to where we are five, six, seven to one on a shortfall to our adversaries in manufacturing capacity. So I want to get to that. We'll talk about this new initiative to revitalize manufacturing here in the United States. But I want to spend some time understanding the world in which we have all been living and really are living in right now where we have these challenges. And maybe we can start with Ukraine as an example. Maybe there are other examples. You'll tell me it would be worth exploring. But so obviously, Putin

comes back in a big way in 2022. The Ukrainians desperately need stuff. We sort of realize America realizes we have a munitions crisis. We don't actually have enough of this stuff. You're probably aware of this, but this is, of course, an old phenomenon. Like this happens, it's happened to World War I to the Brits. You know, everyone thinks the war is going to be fast. Then the war's not fast.

And then all of a sudden everyone runs out of munitions. And it was a huge crisis and a huge factor in British politics in like 19, what, 15, 16, somewhere in there. Yeah. So we have the same thing happen again. again here because no one's ever prepared for this. Talk me through to the extent you can, you know, how your business fits into that and what some of the complexities were at some of this stuff. Like, I don't think people, I don't think people, it sounds like I'm talking from a

position of great knowledge. I don't know how to build a 155 shell, which is pretty simple technology, I guess, compared to some of the other defense items we might be talking about. Like, what does it take to build one of these things and where do you have to go and how does the sausage, as it were, actually get made? Let me go back through a little bit so the understanding kind of how we got here. Regulus got into the ammunition space more off the Syrian conflict back in 2014, 2015. At that time, I think the world, the world still had old kind of, it still had inventory.

It had inventory in Eastern Europe. There were still things from the Cold War that were still stock. I mean, there was just such an enormous amount of stuff that was made, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, that was still available to some extent, at least through the mid teens, I guess we'd call it, 2000, you know, 2013, 14, and 15. At the start of the Ukraine conflict in February of 22, you know, we were tasked directly by the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, along with, you know, several other companies to go find anything that was left. What we found is that although there was some stuff, it quickly evaporated because of just the sheer usage on a day-to-day that this particular conflict was having. I don't know what exact numbers were. And I've seen anything from, you know, high marks of 6, 8, 10, 12,000 rounds of large caliber shot a day. But just to put that in perspective, prior to the conflict, the U.S. was manufacturing 14,000.

thousand rounds of 155 a month. That was pretty close to what a daily usage on just the Ukraine side. You know, the Russian side was shooting multiple times that amount. And really for 20, 30 years, I don't think anybody in the Pentagon would have guessed that we would be sitting back in a conventional style war again. You know, it was more precision. It was more targeting. It was more things like that. So to try to ramp up to that type of usage is not a it's such a strain on the supply chain. And we were not doing that here in the United States. So even trying to fix that in a non-Russia, China, Iran, North Korea option,

that was still an incredible strain on the supply chain. Western Europe was not making it. Eastern Europe was making it to some level. And then some of your Asian countries were making it. But everybody, you know, particularly for this last three-plus years, has really had to do a lot. to try to build this up. You know, because, yes, I would agree with what you say.

A 155 is relatively simple, you know, but you still have a traditionally forged, manufactured shell. You have to fill that shell, which primarily is T&T at this point, which has been around since 1863, and is very old, but still effective. And then you have a primer. And confirm.

You have a primer, you have a fuse, and you have propeller. And even when you get into the propellant space, you know, you still have an, entire supply chain for that. It's a very specific type of military-grade nitrouselulist that has to be made. And then you're either putting it in a single or a double or a triple-based style propellant, which then means you have to make nitroglycerin and nitrogonidine, and you have to put it all together, and you have to do it at scale. It's not as easy, you know, and so trying to rebuild that supply chain to any level of scale, look, we've tried to throw money out. It's not a money factor. It's a time

factor, you know, because there's just parts and pieces that are specialized and made, and even making those parts and pieces means that you have to make the infrastructure to make those parts and pieces. So it's just, it's just not a quick fix. So the 14,000 or whatever shells that United States were producing a month, circa 2020, I agree, as you just outlined it, it doesn't seem so simple at all anymore, were all of those various pieces, like the chemicals that go into the propellants and those various elements of the supply chain, would those all typically have been occurring in the United States and then coming together at some location for assembly or were there foreign supply chains involved already? So that's not easy either because the way we do large caliber munitions saying the way the United States does large caliber munitions is also not in a systems integration approach, meaning that we award multiple companies to make the shell.

We award multiple companies to fill the shell, which is called a lap process. you have multiple companies to do your primer multiple companies you refuse and the propeller which is different you know because we the way we are we have to do it overseas is we have to we have to deliver a final product at a final location for that custom so when i do say 14 000 rounds pre-circ of february 2020 that is our go-co in scranton making 14,000 shells we don't make T&T in the United States. We haven't been since 1986. We have just awarded a large contract to try to make a T&T facility in Kentucky, but I don't believe that contract will be online until 28 at best. And quite frankly, it's not going to make enough T&T to have any matter of what's needed

in the current demand anyways. When you get to propellant, our triple-based propellant isn't been made in the U.S. It's made in Valleyfield, Canada. So we don't, we have a, we, even three plus years after this, as much as I commend Picotinney in every way that they have been trying to fix this problem, you are literally asking us to go from 14,000 a month to 100,000 a month when we don't even make or have some of the raw material component even done in the United States. It seems ill-considered that we stopped making a TNT or that we don't make the propellant. Why did we allow our... I mean, we've discussed in the show before,

and maybe listeners are generally familiar with, you know, defense consolidation in the 90s and some of the bigger problems facing, you know, manufacturing and defense industrial-based stuff. But like just sticking specifically these questions of explosives and propellants, you date that to 1986. Cold War is still raging.

What, where do we make it or where does someone make it? And why did we make that decision? So the United States procures its T&T through a couple of places. I think publicly you can see that, you know, we procure it through nitricem in Poland. We procure it through some various companies in India. China's a huge T&T maker, Vietnam and Australia to some extent,

but really that's it. T&T is not environmentally friendly to make. And although there had been some efforts to try to modernize that process, I mean, it just is what it is. Toulin and the stuff that goes with it is just, I mean, it's not environmentally friendly. We've looked at alternatives to T&T, Things like RDX, things like HMX, the Brits make something called IMX.

You know, we developed a product called CL20 back in the mid-80s, but we really don't make it to any level of scale. China makes a lot more of it. It just there wasn't a need in the last 20, 30 years to really focus on that because there wasn't a conflict that required, you know, this type of scale on conventional missions. So I'm imagining then when the call comes to help clients, in Ukraine or help the Ukrainian state or military or however it was specifically structured,

like you're out there. It just sounds incredibly complicated. Like you've got to go find all these pieces and then put them together somewhere, which I presume you're not going to want to talk about on the show. But are you, is your firm's role in all that? Are you responsible for the whole manufacturing of the, or the whole putting together of the final thing and procuring its pieces? Are you part of a consortium that's doing different parts?

I'm just trying to understand how the business works. Yeah, yeah. Look, it's been complicated. And we've had to evolve as we realized what parts of that supply chain and assembly manufacturing process and what parts of that logistic required us to get a more ownership level involvement to make sure that we had more control of it. So look, we basically, you know, look, the greatest thing about regulists is we had such a great understanding of the world. We really knew who was manufacturing, what, what countries were kind of. of stable enough for us to work with, the political situations, the economic situations, everything that can go with it. And so we really tried to look at the world and figured out where were the places that did not require a whole lot of import of anything from like a cotton linter that goes into nitrous cellulose all the way from the capability of doing the actual manufacturing integration.

And there are some. And this is still how the Pentagon does it as well. I mean, we have procure We have procurement programs in which we partner with our allies so that we can do this at scale and at decent price points so that we can support a conflict like Ukraine. And so there are contract vehicles that do that kind of thing. And there are, you know, primes, some being the big five and some not being the big five, that have vehicles in order to do that. It's still understanding that supply chain. And there's no one place that you could just order it off the shelf and things that it,

that think that it gets done. You have to work with multiple different locations and in many aspects help these locations get parts and pieces and components and everything that they may not have easy access to get. And then once you've kind of figured out that whole thing as far as raw material component assembly and everything else, then there's logistical challenge. And logistics is not easy either. You can't just, you know, it's impractical to think that you could put a whole bunch of one-five-fives on a 747 or an A&124 and think you can fly them anywhere. It's very heavy by the sea and very heavy by land. And I think anybody who's paid attention to the world and seeing that, you know, things like what's going on with the Red Sea and everything

else makes that incredibly complicated to do on any efficient basis. Yeah. And there's, you know, famous incidents from the World Wars of terrible disasters with munitions ships that were, you know, foolishly docked at Keyside as opposed to being kept out important things like that, which obviously, I presume you spent a fair amount of time trying to think through how to avoid things like that happening in your life, whether intentionally because of adversary intervention or just accidentally, which is often the case. I mean, look, sabotage is a critical piece of this and the supply chains, as you say historically, is where anybody should be looking.

You know, there's been a lot of fires and factories. There's been a lot of interruption of, you know, key, key, blockchain routes and lines. And that's, you know, when you're in conflicts of this size, at this scale, that's just part of what has to be planned for or worked around once it's done. So, you know, we've got Ukraine consuming all this stuff, the bad guys are consuming stuff. You've got, you know, as of fall of 2023, this ongoing conflict in and around Israel, which itself has a, you know, old-fashioned protraction, 155 heavy component at times, depending on the phase of the complex. So everyone's buying this stuff. Everyone needs this stuff. Surely to a businessman

like yourself and to everyone in the space, and this is the point that I've heard made numerous times, one of the things you have to be worried about is we're going to, you know, knock on wood, we will enter another period of relative peace at some point. So the demand is there now. But the kind of investments you would make to meet that demand, you're going to want some sort of sense of the fact that there are going to be things purchased if only for stockpile or training or whatever at a sufficient rate to justify the kinds of solutions or lines that are being built or whatever now. And my understanding is part of the munitions crisis in the United States is on the demand side.

That is to say it's the United States Department of Defense. And it's not just munitions. I mean, you could talk about, you know, other aspects of the defense industrial base in this context, you know, the need for multi-year contracts, the need for commitments from the government to the private sector to just buy enough stuff to create the kind of defense industrial base that we're We know we want, theoretically, as a matter of policy, but which just economically doesn't make a lot of sense for the private sector actors involved. Is that sort of theory of the problem? That's the kind of, I think I just repeated what is sort of conventional wisdom at this point for a lot of people. Does that track with you? Would you add any complexity to that?

Like, how do you understand the supply side, or sorry, the demand side side side of the problem? Yeah, I think that's some of the biggest debates and some of the biggest challenges that I know. I'm involved with and conversations that are happening in Washington and in Europe, from all our allied standpoints. It's how much investment and infrastructure do you make, as you say, for a problem that is at a tremendous scale now, maybe an unexpected scale, but it may not be there again. And when I say may not be there again, I think everybody realizes that this conflict could last, maybe not the Ukraine conflict itself lasts for a long time, but the threat of this lasts for a while,

and nobody wants to be ill-prepared on that. But there's a balance, and I don't know that anybody can pinpoint where that balance is. The union side of what we're doing is just more focusing on where we're definitely out of balance on the United States manufacturing side. But there's different ways we can go about this. The problem that we have, particularly in the conventional space in the U.S., is that all of our manufacturing is still based on an 80-year-old go-co model.

Can you define that? Sorry, a government-owned contractor-operated model, meaning that we have multiple locations scattered throughout the U.S. on government-owned facilities in which the government contracts companies, like General Dynamics or Northropan or B.A.E. or some of these others, to operate these facilities in the way that the government sees demand needed. Scranton is the example. Scranton is where our, you know, is the largest forge operation of which we are making

these 155 shells. The government owns that facility and General Dynamics has a multi-year contract to manage it and makes however many shells, you know, that whatever award is given per year. And so I think what you're seeing, well, what you're definitely seeing now and you're getting a jump in from even Silicon Valley now, which is great to see in the, you know, in the this defense tech category is this re-industrialization or this remodernizing approach to building out factories that are more scalable, are more software sensor robotics driven, really kind of with a Tesla manufacturing process model in place that helps us avoid this

problem in the future so that, you know, you can scale to some expect these. factories can be nimble or universal is kind of the word they're using that it can make multiple different things. But I think there's also this realization that we've outsourced all this manufacturing. And we have to have it for critical things inside the U.S. But the COVID issue highlighted this in many different ways. This isn't just limited to defense. You know, this is pharmaceutical. This is semiconductor. You know, anything that's of vital importance within a supply chain, I think everybody's in agreement now has to be made at some level of scale and some level of modernization in the United States.

So it's just a matter of pinpointing, you know, those certain sectors and then making sure that we're doing them here and making sure that we're doing them here that we can do them at scale, you know, for national security reasons. You know, and this is just we are very much participating on the defense side where, you know, whether you need it or not, or you're just re-inventoring or whatever it is, we have to have that infrastructure set up so that in case something does happen, you know, we can control our own destiny with that aspect. So we're getting into union here, obviously, and I want you to tell us about this new venture and the new facility that's opening up in Texas. But before you get to that, or maybe as part of

getting to that, I want to kind of repeat back to you what I think I just understood from what you said, and you correct me because I'm just genuinely trying to understand this. So I suggested or asserted that there's a big, the big part of the problem with all of this is on the demand side. I took your response to sort of imply sort of, but also that it's just, it's just a time problem and a capacity problem. Like you can tell these traditional contractors,

build me more, and you can even pay them to build you more, but the way in which their production lines are designed with, you know, needing really highly skilled labor, the kind that is not available on the shelf anymore in America. And you can only, you could kind of, you build a line to build one thing.

You build a line for one-five, it will build one-five. If you wanted to build something else, it's a big deal to switch it over. So it's, it's kind of, you have all kinds of obstacles in scaling in this more traditional model. Your assertion is there are things that can be done on the, on the supply side here in terms of, I guess, creating facilities that, I don't know what the word is I want here. Generic is the wrong word, but more flexible facilities that are more flexible. and that supply tech solutions for some of the labor issues.

Like how, I'm going to finish with an ellipsis there, like dot, dot, dot. Am I understanding this basically correctly, like the theory of the case? Yeah, yeah, because look, inventories are gone. So there is definitely a time to re-inventory. The argument will be once you've inventoried to certain levels, how do you maintain these capital investments, you know, whether it is private money or whether it is, you know, public money through the Pentagon that's been put in there. And so you're right. I mean, there's probably a, I guess it depends on when

this conflict comes to a close or at least is not utilizing what it's utilizing anymore. And how do we get to that point of normalcy and then how could we scale up again? So yes, the answer would be having some sort of universal or flexible nimble manufacturing options that are not, as you say, specific to one skew or specific to one lane or one sector of munition or whatever it would be, it is trying to build up something that has a lot more flexibility to build a number of different things. But look, there's still conventional stuff for you. I mean, I know that people would argue that you could make artillery shells in ways

outside of forging. And I know that technology is there. And I know that some have bought into it or some are not. but the classic way to do it that's been proven on the battlefield is a forging process. And building out a forge line is not cheap. You know, and you have many different ways and you have to, you know, get steel to 1,200 degrees plus Celsius. And then you have to pound it with at least, you know, 1,1, 1,250 tonne presses. And there's a whole process to go through it.

And that's very expensive to build that. And so, and historically it had been very labor intensive. Now, we believe there are new ways that you can do this. And you're seeing this throughout other defense manufacturing platforms as well in the UAV space and everything else. There are ways to build this that can be more modernized, that can use more sensors and software and robotics into it. But there's still massively large capital investments. And so, you know, you're really at a point now, and we've been doing it, where you're either making those capital investments to make sure that our defense manufacturing capacity. are there or you're not.

And, you know, I think that's what's been great to see now is we've recognized, you know, that that capability is not there in the United States anymore. We are trying to rebuild it and we're trying to remodernize it at the same time. And so when you talk about sort of different ways to manufacture shells, there's the more traditional forging way and then there's this theory that can be done. Is that like 3D printing or like what's the non-forging way? Well, you're not going to 3D print a... I'm confused.

Anybody curious? Yeah, I mean, you know, the issue with that is it's the, you know, firing it out of a howitzer has pressure points and just a lot of physics that goes with it that you just have to have, you know, you're not going to 3D print it. Some would argue you can cast it, you know, but I'd say at the end of the day, at least most think that forging is really the only way to do that. So I was a liberal arts major. So could I, could I, I guess so were you. So this is impressive. Well, technically, yeah. So it was a liberal communication major, yes.

Forging versus casting. Can you give us the 30 second breakdown? Yeah, so, you know, forging is going to be where you're literally heating steel to a certain point where you can manipulate it through, you know, a press, you know, and then once you've hit it with, you know, let's just say a thousand ton press or something higher, you know, then you're going through a cooling period, a chemical treat period, you know, a whole line of about 13, 14, 15 different parts of a process, and then you've got a shell in which you've manipulated it is the way you want, which goes to the next step as far as, you know, then filling it

with T&T, which is the majority of this. Casting would be a little different. It's like sandcasting, you don't have to go through the whole press process. You know, you could ideally do it in much bigger volume. I'm not a casting expert by any means, but I've seen a lot of people that have told me about it. the worry is that you just wouldn't have the strength that would possibly be needed, you know, firing out of this howitzer.

Most people have all recognized that the, the artillery shell is kind of the thing in demand, but the problem you also have is you have to fire them out of howitzers. An average howitzer life is probably 2,500 to 3,000 rounds. You know, I know the Ukrainians have been firing way in excess of that amount. So it almost, you know, this just goes right back to the supply chain. You can't fire out these artillery rounds that you're making. If you don't have the number of howitzer in whatever form, you know, the herds are barrels to fire them out of. You know, you need all of this.

And this kind of goes back to what we were saying. Everybody's been focusing on the 155, but you also have to focus on everything around that you need to fire that out. So talk about Union and the first hard venture of Union, this facility down in Texas. say a little bit more, if you will, about the kinds of innovations that you want to bring to market here initially for this 1-55 issue, but, you know, it stands to reason for all kinds of other manufacturing processes as well. The union was built off of kind of seeing what was going on, you know, and just everything we've talked about. I partnered with a venture capital fund called BVC, Joe Musselman, who's also involved in Schoolhouse and, you know, was a big part of building

the honor of foundation and a number of things. within this community. And then we brought on kind of a founding group that included some people from Tesla and some of the guys from Anderol. And the idea was to build, you know, we use the term, we used the phrase factories as a stockpile, but the idea was to try to get this Tesla manufacturing process mindset and then bringing it to what historically has been, you know, the antiquated defense industry, just this big moving defense industry that's hard to move in any kind of nimble way. And so, yes, we are starting with an artillery shell factory in Carrollton, Texas. We saw a need there, only because I said the way we do it currently now is through this

this GoCo model. And we just wanted to show that there was a way to build what many would argue is the most antiquated, very hard, you know, forging process is what it is. And try to do it in a way that is very software sensor and robotics driven. You know, we feel we can build this factory for, you know, a significant percentage savings on an old traditional way and that we feel like we can scale it at ways that haven't been done. We can make this line universal so that you can do many different types of rounds through it. And then also because of software that we're building around it,

be able to give the DOD levels of data they haven't traditionally had in kind of the old ways. You know, in the old ways, you build a lot or two lots a day, and then you deliver. In this way, we'd be able to build and then give DOD information on every single shell that gets made on a daily basis. So I just, I want to understand this, well, both the business proposition, but also in a way, the slogan a little bit better. So this is factories as a stockpile is the basic idea.

So just starting with the, the old situation, stockpiles is stockpiles. You know, stockpiles, again, I'm going to do this thing where I'm going to do this thing where Let me try to explain my elementary understanding of what you're saying, and you can correct me. Stockpiles are important because, you know, stuff starts unexpectedly and you need a magazine of stuff to deal with it. But the problem with stockpiles is that can only ever be so big. And as history continues to show us, we never really anticipate how long and difficult these wars are going to be. And so inevitably, the stockpiles run out. And then what you really need are manufacturing lines.

But the problem there, as we've all discovered in the last few years, is to make the manufacturing lines economically, viable, you will there have to be customers to include in the quiet times. And if you can't have customers in the quiet times, nobody's going to maintain the production lines. And indeed, the Pentagon basically brought this about proactively in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War, where they had everyone consolidate and slow them down. And now we're living in that world and we're finding the problems really hard to solve. So your proposition, and this is right what I want to try to understand what you're saying, your proposition is if we make the production lines more flexible and more efficient through leveraging the kind of, you know,

tech innovation that America still leads on. It's not only, you know, it's good for the country to have facilities like that, but it's economically viable in the long run because they are flexible. This is, I'm entering with a question mark here, because they are flexible in a way that, you know, the kind of line that can only build one thing is just inherently like, well, if somebody's buying that thing, great. but if somebody's not buying it, you're screwed and you built this line and now nobody's buying your stuff.

Yeah, look, the cut, yes, to start at step one, we have to have more factories that can make defense supplies. You know, so I don't think anybody's arguing that. We have to build about millions of square feet of factories that are primarily geared towards defense manufacturing use. Great if they also have a hybrid approach that can be used in the commercial sector. But we don't have that anymore. And then in order to do that, step two is building the manufacturing.

in a way that allows them to be more universal, that allows them to be able to build multiple skews or use new technological means in order to have them be, yes, be more nimble or more flexible in a way that you could build multiple things out of them. You know, look, a forge is a forge. You can only do so many things with a forge. I think there's some very interesting ways that companies are building out, you know, more adaptive CNC capabilities. You know, obviously there's a huge push towards the UAV, USV, UBB space, and what could be built there. You know, we're going to focus a lot more on energetics as well so that, you know, we are modernizing energetics.

We're building out propellants and energetics in a way they could be used. So whether there are payloads on artillery rounds or payloads on UAVs, you know, that is the capacity we do not have here in the United States either. And, you know, that has multiple applications over the military. sector and the commercial sector and everything else. And so, sorry, just again, to clarify for listeners, for whom this may not be normal language, energetics are in effect the explosives that we're talking about. So T&T would be an energetic. So on the artillery round, propellant would be, you know, some sort of mix of, as we said,

nitrous, nitroglycerin, nitrogonity, whatever it may be, that fires that round out of the halitzer. The energetic inside it, if T&T is what's being used, is when then it explodes and it has its effect. You know, that's what I would call the propellant side kind of propulsion, the energetic side is the explosion. And then this model that you're talking about, and I take your caveats that on some level things can only be so flexible. But, you know, your bread and butter, munitions, that's where you're starting, you know, there are all other kinds of defense manufacturing crises. I mean, the one that's in the news that most worries me because it seems

so intractable and difficult to fix. It makes, it, it seems to me, it seems to me, you can correct me if you disagree, but it seems to me it makes the 155 issue look easy as the shipbuilding issue, where even the labor issues are intense. The scale of what you need to build something is incredible. You know, is there something about the model that you're talking about that would be relevant in that space as well? Like, you know, feel free to feel free to be with a broad brush here. I mean, I live in, you know, Norfolk is right next to Virginia Beach, which is, you know,

one of the largest ship, or at least largest naval forces in the world. and there's a ton of shipbuilding right around it. I know this is an area that's affected the area that I've grown up and lived in for a long time. There are companies that are specializing in this. There are companies that Silicon Valley is also putting a lot of dollars in to try to fix that effort. I'm not an expert in this by any means. I've seen where the South Koreans and some of the other countries seem to do a much, much better job at this. Now, I know there's labor constraints and everything that goes with that.

But yes, there is ways that, and I've seen companies with, within the defense tech space that are looking at factories modernizing in order to try to fix that problem. But I think it's also unrealistic to think that we're ever going to be able to get to a volume or scale or where the Chinese are right now in that capacity. So there's got to be a different mindset and a different way of trying to solve that problem. Better technologies, not necessarily better scale, but better technologies and better capabilities in order to feed that. Will Summerendike, the CEO of Union, founder and chairman of Regulus Global.

It's been a super fascinating conversation. It's the first time we've really gone deep in this way on this kind of stuff, certainly with munitions. And I'm you're a busy guy. I'm grateful to you for what you do and for making the time for us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.