School of War - Ep 228: Brad Bowman and Ryan Brobst on “Axis” Military Cooperation

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Brad Bowman and Ryan Brobst, senior and deputy directors of the Center on Military and Political Power at FDD, join the show to discuss the military relationships between America’s major antagonists. ▪️ Times     •      01:47 Introduction     •      02:40 Axis cooperation     •      08:02 Interoperability            •      11:19 Fighting all three     •      14:49 Potential            •      20:57 The arsenal            •      26:56 Progress     •      28:30 Budgeting      •      36:10 Will and capability             •      39:03 Harpoon Coastal Defense System           •      41:31 Per unit cost over speed     •      44:25 Buy-side issue     •      47:49 Production lessons Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Today's episode zooms out to the rather grim geopolitical situation the United States finds itself in today, with several major Eurasian powers drawing closer in an effort to obstruct America's interests and those of our friends. Will the United States have the industrial capacity to deter or, if necessary, fight such an Axis? How does the Axis' defense cooperation actually work? And what can we do to match or exceed it? Let's get into it. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the grave situation in the ground. We'll fight on the beaches, it will fight on the landing ground, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, which will never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter, and feel free to follow

follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Bradley Bowman, who's the Senior Director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Also joining us is Ryan Broaps, the deputy director of that center. They are the authors earlier this year of an interesting report called the Arsenal of Democracy, arming, Taiwan, Ukraine and Israel while strengthening the U.S. industrial base.

I would speak to their many other qualifications and honors. In Brad's case, that involves a long career in the Army, flying Blackhawks, but that would take the whole show to go through everything. So we can talk about things as they come up. But Brad, Ryan, thanks for joining. Thank you. We're really excited. It's a real honor.

Thank you. Thanks for having us. So I want to spend the bulk of our time talking about our defense industrial base crisis and where things stand with all of that. But before we get to that, I know you gentlemen also give a lot of thought. to the other side of the map, as it were, and how access cooperation works. So let's start with that. You know, one frequently hears it said that there is an access.

I know your favorite term over at FD is access of aggressors, but there's an access of some kind between China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. We might identify a few other junior partners. And we all kind of know that this means on one level that they don't really like us. They don't really like the United States of America. What does it mean beyond that? What does it mean that this access exists? How does their cooperation work?

Just to help us understand that. Aaron, thanks for the question. Thanks again for joining. I'm actually really glad you're asking because we're on the tail end of a 12-month deep research project here at FD that spans all three of our centers. The center I lead on military and political power, our center on economic financial power

and our center in cyber technology innovation. We're all three of us from our different. perspectives and different domains are looking at this thing that we're calling the axis of aggressors and saying, how are they cooperating? What are the implications of that cooperation and what the blank should we do about it? That's essentially our research question. And we're actually putting together our report now, which Lord willing will come out later this year. And whenever you see something developing, you've got to give it a name and people of good faith and good study can to have different terms, but we've settled on access of aggressors because that's something that

unifies all of them. Each of them, China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are currently engaged in aggression or severely threatening aggression in the short to medium term. And so they're unified by that and antipathy toward the United States. And this is just them getting together a Shanghai cooperation organization cocktail parties, right? This is much more than that. And so just within my center alone, the center where Ryan and I work and our colleague, Dr. Lydia LaFavor, you know, former U.S. Air Force intelligence is doing great work on this. We define six areas, to be very tangible, it sounds kind of vacuous thus far, six areas of security cooperation, just in our one domain alone within R1 center. And those include weapons development, weapons proliferation, military

exercises, intelligence sharing, and mill-to-mill diplomacy, which we're defining as anything kind of the secretary of defense, defense minister level, or higher, where there's meetings, there's interactions, that sort of thing. And we've looked at from 2019 to present, Aaron, and just in that time period, we have documented over 530, 530, 530 discrete instances of security cooperation across those five categories. Among these four access members with six bilateral relationships, we disaggregated them on the Gant charts to look for trends, continuity, things that might give us some sort of predictive capability and to really kind of understand what the heck this axis is. And, you know, I'll spare you the 100-page monograph. The initial findings are some

version of the following. And that is some of this is performative, right? Some of this is performative. We have to delineate between performative and substantive. And with each one of these instances, we're not treating them all as equal. We've done a waiting exercise to try to refine, you know, is this done just trying to send a message when there's really not a lot of substance? or meaning here? Is it two ships sailing next to each other, you know, looking at each other, binoculars and waving flags and that's it? Or are they practicing hardcore anti-submarine warfare that's incredibly relevant to deterrence in the Pacific? We've tried to bring that level of nuance. And here's my bottom line is we see growing capability, the ability to operate together

among these four, and we'd have to distinguish between each of the six bilateral relationships. We see growing and use some very specific military terms as a two-year-old. veteran of Army G357, when I use words like requirements, I use them very deliberately. We see growing capability, what can you do, capacity, how much can you do of it, readiness and resilience among all four members because of this cooperation. So anyone who spend any time in the Pentagon or in the military like you have, Aaron, understands that if you increase the capacity, capability, readiness, or resilience of your adversaries, that's a problem. And then if you do that with all four of your adversaries,

they're operating more effectively together, you start to create real dilemmas for us. Dilemas for us, what are you talking about? Well, we've had this fiction for years, Aaron, as you know, where we can fight two major combat operations at the time. You know and I know that's often been a fiction because we haven't resourced it. We haven't had a sufficiently large military to do that. So if you're buying what I'm saying, that they're unified and their intipathy toward us, they're increasing capability capacity readiness and resilience, and they're having strategic coordination where we might confront war in the Baltics and the Taiwan Strait at the same time, that has real implications for decisions in Washington like defense budgets, service budgets,

war plans, contingencies, and so forth. I'm struck by your assertion that there's increasing substantive, you know, work on interoperability. I kind of want to ask you to give us some case studies or identify some examples that you feel are particularly alarming. I guess I'm mostly struck by it because, but obviously you use the term access and it summons a particular historical reference point. And when I think about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the 1940s, I don't think about military interoperability or joint exercises or even joint planning, even at the strategic level, like when are we going to surprise attack America? Like there is, to my knowledge, zero strategic coordination prior to Pearl Harbor. So that term axis, you know,

implies a certain looseness, your 30,000 foot explication of your thesis there actually suggests that there's more stuff that's happening at the granular or operational level. Tell me what you're seeing. I love that. I love that question. I'm actually grateful for it because we spent an inordinate amount of time on what the heck do we call this thing. And there were pros and cons with going with the axis moniker. On both ends, frankly, of the dialogue, and you highlight one of them, students of history, and I'm sure you could recite more details than I can, but if you look at the axis in the 20th century context, you know, it sounds really scary, but you're right, the level of strategic coordination or coordination was relatively minimal, shall we say. And what I just described

is more extensive strategic coordination, strategic, I mean, grand strategic, a geek out, strategic, operational, and tactical, we're seeing it really at all levels. And so on one level, if you buy what I'm saying that in the use of the access written term for students of history risks underselling the concerning nature of what we're seeing on the other side of that the danger was you know access of evil oh here you go you call it acts of evil people want to dismiss that you're you're overselling and this gets back erring very quickly what i said a moment ago is that we're really trying to undersell or overselling thing we're trying to distinguish between the performative and substantive because good policy right from our time on the hill Aaron

comes with an accurate diagnosis. You want to give someone the right medicine, you better understand the truth, get the diagnosis right. So I'm doing everything within my modest power and my colleagues are as well is to accurately diagnose this. And what I see is concerning.

Now, let's be clear, on the cyber and technology innovation domain, my colleagues over in CCTV, what they're seeing is there's a lot of smoke, and when they dig in, there's a little less fire. And CFP, they're seeing concerning things we could talk about China's manufacturing, their energy needs and how the flow of energy is enabling the Chinese economy, which they're

using to build their military, and how the revenue that comes back to Russia and Iran, they're using to do X and Y bad things. And so they're kind of in the middle concerning. So among our three domains, we're seeing different levels of concern, but I'm in the one where we're seeing the most. There's the most that we can measure and see, and it's the most concerning because in the end, it's my assessment that our adversaries want certain things. They want at the lowest cost possible, We'll just like you and me walk into Walmart. We've got to buy that widget. We'd like to pay the least cost, but we'll pay as much as necessary to get that widget.

That's how China views Taiwan. They want Taiwan. They'd rather get it with cyber-enabled economic warfare and political warfare. But if they can't get it that way, then they're preparing to do it the hard power way. And there's the most likely and there's the most dangerous and we have to be looking at both. No, it's really striking what you say. I mean, if you'd ask me as somebody who keeps an eye in this, but of not, not made the kind of detailed study you've now made, I would have said the energy and economic

front, in particular with Russia and China, there's an obvious level of cooperation there that supports both countries' needs. There's obviously some sort of grand strategic sympathies, mostly, again, regarding us as an adversary. But you're, again, you're citing, you're suggesting that things exist at a much more concrete military level. What's an example of something that you've seen that, you know, people would find surprising or alarming? So, you know, I've got a graphic in front of me that will be in our final report, which people can't see it because I have a face for a radio hearing. They can't see it. But, you know, the, it is, it is not an exaggeration. It is not Beltway hyperbole to say that Ukraine is

fighting all three members of the Axis right now in some form directly or indirectly. I don't believe that's hyperbole. Whether you look at the artillery shells, surface to surface ballistic missiles, ammunition, unmanned aerial systems, the shed 136s, that Russia has received from Iran, whether you look at the munitions, surface-to-service missiles, anti-take guided missiles, 170-millimeter self-propelled howitzers, the list goes on and on that they receive from North Korea, the troops that have fought there, the dual-use technologies that has allowed Russia to increase its defense industrial brace production capacity that has allowed them to have more munitions and drones and missiles to fire into Russia. So when I say more capacity,

that isn't like a hallmark card. I mean, when you look at Ukraine, Putin has been able to to reset his forces and make his force more resilient and increase their capacity. And in some cases, their capability directly, specifically measure by quantifiably because of the support of the other three. And then when you look at things like potentially the Russians who have decades of experience in undersea warfare, you know, see Hunt for Red October, see Crimson Tide, if you don't believe me, if they actually transfer some of their submarine quieting technology to China, that would materially erode one of our remaining advantages of deterrence and victory in combat in the Pacific in terms of our Virginia class submarines.

So, you know, this is not Shanghai Cooperation Organization cocktail party stuff. This is deterrence, war and peace, life and death, return home to your families are not stuff. And that's why I get a little excited about it because I think we get this kind of condescending, arrogant attitude at times in Washington. We're like, oh, come on. You know, China and Russia didn't come to Iran's help during the 12-day war. So you're overplaying it. Well, okay, That's a pretty darn high bar. But what is China doing? They're sending a monium per-cloire to help Iran rebuild a ballistic missile arsenal.

So just because the worst thing is happening doesn't mean it's not concerning and not relevant to our security interests are requiring urgent steps by Washington. Here's a question that it may be beyond the scope of the work that you've done, but I'm curious just how we measure these things at the biggest, most aggregate level. So I've heard it said that when one looks at the security situation in the Western Pacific, if you're looking to make yourself feel better, which I don't think we're really in the business of doing, but if you were, one of the ways you can make yourself feel better is if you look at, it's not just a U.S.-China question, right? It's a China versus American allies question.

And if you add up the economies, the raw war-making potential of the United States, Japan, you know, the Philippines, Australia, all the countries that, you know, there's a theory of the case that, you know, the combatants that could potentially come into play in such a conflict, In terms of raw potential, things come off pretty well for us. Of course, again, I've just framed that in a way to be maximally comforting. There's also the question of what can you do on the day versus what they can do on the day. But then, obviously, the question I'm driving towards is when you add up, and again, I don't even know the metrics I would look at here, the war-making potential of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, how does it stack up to, I don't even know what to put on the other side of the ledger? America and its Asian allies, America and its Asian allies plus NATO.

Like, what are we actually talking about here in terms of the potential of these countries for military mischief? Aaron, it's such an important question. And the premise, your premise, I think, is absolutely accurate that when you combine the economic power, the industrial power, and the military capability of the United States and its allies in the region, it would tend one to feel pretty comfortable. you might feel pretty comforted by that. But before I get too comfortable, I consider things like the following. I was proud to be a member of this McCain Institute, Russia Task Force report that was

just published led by the amazing Dan Twining, and we did a rollout event up in the Senate. And there's a statistic in there. I forget the exact number. I want to say that, you know, they measured the economic power of the United States or European allies, and there's roughly 50% of the world economy compared to Russia's like 2%. And yet, look how it's going in Ukraine. So, you know, one can have a lot of economic and military power on one side, but that doesn't necessarily, of course, as a student of history, you know this airing, translate into battlefield success. So that's point number one. And point number two is that we don't know if push comes to shove into Taiwan straight on or about 2028. And obviously, I'm making that year up.

No one knows for sure. And it could come sooner. And that's why I have a sense of urgency to what I'm saying. We don't know who's going to join and fight with us, right? Does Japan come in or not? Does Australia come in? What does South Korea do? There's all kinds of unknowns.

And the former military offers in us, right, pushes us toward the paranoid to be prepared for the worst. But it's absolutely true that his serious hat tip to my colleague, Admiral Mark Montgomery, that when you do the war games and Japan's involved, it goes much better for us. Japan's involved and it creates all sorts of dilemmas for the PLA that may want them to make them think twice about launching the aggression. And if they do, it's not going to go as well. But I have no guarantees about what they'll do and not do. And so we need to be prepared. And by the way, I'll end with this.

Anyone inclined to overconfidence in the Pacific should look at the security cooperation that has happened back to the access discussion between Russia and China. You say, oh, China hasn't fought a war in decades. They don't have any combat experience in training and combat, as you know, well, Aaron, are very, very different things. Well, you know, Russia is passing some of its hard lessons learned in Ukraine and from Syria to China. Now, it's not the same thing as doing it yourself, but that's not nothing.

And so I would caution against overconfidence and the final comment, if we shot, you know, one quarter of our Thad interceptor inventory, you know, roughly 150 missile interceptors or so, according to the Wall Street Journal, to deal with Iran, how do you think we're going to do on the first island chain? So if we're struggling on April 13th of defeat Iran and cruise missiles, drones, and ballistic missiles, how the blank do we think we're going to do in the first island chain against China? So if that's not a wake-up call, I don't know what it is. Yeah, well, let's start to shift to this question of, well, if we're going to call it,

called one side of the axis, let's call the other side the allies just for simplicity's sake. I prefer good guys, bad guys, but okay, go ahead. I'm good with that too. So, you know, you've done this interesting analysis of especially on the munitions and sort of defense articles, supply side of things, what our liabilities are, what, you know, what problems might be overstated, what problems actually are really serious and we need to address immediately. And I want to get into all that. But it does strike me just at the highest conceptual level, you know, if we're going to be talking about the axis, we're sort of talking about the United States as the arsenal of democracy again, or we wanted to be the arsenal, democracy again, or the arsenal,

the good guys at least. We have some pretty big changes between the world today and the world of the 1940s that your language is evoking. One, which everyone knows, is America is not the relative industrial power that it was in the 1940s. That's well known, and that's a major factor that we've got to take into account, even though we already kind of know it. But there's another one, too, that I think gets less attention and discussion. And that is that, you know, the American way of war in the 1940s was to combine our manufacturing might with other people's manpower, right? So we limited the number of infantry divisions that we put into the field in World War II to less than 100. It was still a lot, but it was far, far fewer than, for example, the Soviet Union or the Chinese, for that matter,

the two key partners of the other side of things now, right? So in that war, we fought Japan and Germany, both major players, but smaller countries in terms of manpower than our Russian and Chinese allies. We supplied the Russians and the Chinese and the Brits, of course, and others with lots of our stuff and our trucks and our planes. And then we obviously operated a lot of that stuff ourselves with a relatively limited ground combat infantry component. And this was the cocktail. This was the sort of policy approach that limited American casualties, but was extraordinarily expensive. And it won. It won in the end. And it won in no small part due to Russian and Chinese manpower. Obviously, this is a very different situation. Those countries are now on the other side,

and our partners are all the smaller countries. So I just want to put both things on the table. One, as everyone knows, the American defense industrial base is not the defense industrial base of the 40s or even of the Cold War. Two, you know, Stephen Cockham once put it here on School of War, there are no armies to rent like there were in the 1940s. It was just his somewhat cold-blooded way I'm describing it. The United States effectively rented the Russian and Chinese militaries for purposes of winning World War II. Well, they're not available right now. So how do we conceive of this collection of countries functioning as a cohesive military whole in the face of this new axis? Let me start. And then I want to clam up and let Ryan, my colleague, talk because I've talked

too much, and he was the lead author and investigator on this Arsson Democracy report. I'm a big Steve Kotkin fan. I watch him on the weekend for fun because I'm such a dork and he's so awesome. So I hesitate to disagree with him. But I respectfully push back. I mean, I wouldn't choose the term armies to rent, but I know what he means. I'd say we do have an army to rent. It's called the Ukrainian military, the most capable European military on the continent right now.

And, you know, they are dealing body blows, Aaron, to the second leading military conventional threat Americans confront. They're not asking Americans to go fight and die. they're not asking for 170,000 American troops fighting at the high watermark in Iraq or 100,000 Afghanistan. They're asking, as I've said too many times, for a Louisville slugger over the back fence so that they can brutalize the home invader of Vladimir Putin, so he reconsider his line of work. And we can do that, as we've argued repeatedly, for the equivalent of less than 2.8% of what we spent on the Pentagon of the same time period. So we do have people willing to fight to defend common interests and degrade and defeat of possible common adversaries. is called the Ukrainian military.

So good news on that front, and we have one of the most effective alliances in human history in NATO that's ready to fight as well. So for rent, I don't like that terminology, but people other than us willing to fight, yes, we do. It's called the Ukrainian military.

And good news also, we also have that in the Middle East, right? I don't need Israel fighting in the Baltics. I don't need Israeli vessels sailing to the Taiwan Strait. I need them doing what they want to do, and that's dealing, doing blows to the face, of Iran degrading a member of the Axis. By the way, the only member of the Axis, it's the weakest member of the Axis and the only one that doesn't have nuclear weapons yet. So, Israel,

you know, we are helping Israel with ads. We did help them in October. We did help them in April. We helped them during the 12-day war. But by and large, they want to be able to do things on their own. And again, they too are asking for the means to do it. So we do have partners with common interests who are willing to fight. And Taiwan is making a good show of it, trying to get prepared. They just completed a major exercise last month. And so, you know, this, I take your point. This is not China and Russia with a massive manpower. I take that point.

And Ukraine's got a serious manpower problem right now. But what I'm saying is that we do have partners that are willing to fight, but they need our weapons. And so that makes the anemic defense industrial base, the anemic arson democracy problem, such a problem. And let me end with this. So two and a half years ago, we said, hey, we're seeing delays and deliveries of weapons to Taiwan. to what degree can that be blamed on Ukraine? It's a empirical question. Let's check it out.

So we started that. And then October 7th happened and said, oh, shoot, we were concerned that people would blame delays and deliveries on Taiwan and Ukraine as a backdoor way of trying to cut off Ukraine. And then October 7th happened and we added Israel to the analysis. What did we find, Aaron? And then I'll be claim up and Ryan will add. And we found we looked at 25 weapons systems and munitions that were overlapping and potential overlapping. And we did not find in a single instance a material delay. How do you define the material more than one year?

We did not find more than a one-year delay for any of those weapons that could be attributed to U.S. security systems to Ukraine. We can talk about why that is, and then I end with this. But is all well, is all peachy keen in the defense industry? No. For those 25 weapons systems, we found that 72% of them were either in the yellow or red categories. And we came up with 18 recommendations to do about that. Ryan, with Eric's permission, what would you add to that? Yeah.

So I would start with examining. why there weren't delays in the weapon systems between the partners. And this is due to a couple of reasons. The first one is that they have very different needs based on their geography and who they're fighting. So, for example, Israel does not need anti-ship missiles when combating Hamas. Ukraine needed some to keep the Black Sea Fleet bottled up. And Taiwan needs a lot of them.

Second, a lot of these production lines are actually healthy. One kind of common misconception is seeing the defense industrial base as kind of one giant factory that can produce whatever we want. But actually the production lines are largely separate. There are some key input differences like solid field rocket motors that overlap between systems, but one line can be quite healthy and another cannot be healthy. And so examining each line was an important part of our research. And then the other key difference is that we have mostly given Ukraine existing

weapons from our stocks, whereas Taiwan and Israel are ordering new production builds and in some cases weapons that haven't even finished development yet. So therefore, delays in, you know, development can be blamed on giving existing weapons to Ukraine. So we are something like three years into the broad realization amongst, let's just say, the policy layperson that we have a crisis on our hands. It was the invasion of Ukraine or the reinvasion. of Ukraine in 2022 that sort of put everyone on notice pretty quickly that when it came to munitions in particular, but then you can reason out from that pretty quickly that it's not just munitions. We simply are not where we would really like to be in terms of defense industrial-based capacity.

Then obviously post-October 7th, everything got even more acute. You're saying that there are ways in which the news is not quite as bad as reported. There are other ways in which it's pretty bad. Let me ask the question this way, Ryan. And then Brad, you chime in as well. What, you know, where have we made strides? We've had this crisis for three years. Everyone talks about it.

Democrats, Republicans, Congress, the military, the White House, both, you know, Biden, the White House, Trump White House. Everyone acknowledges this is an issue. Where have we made progress and where are the problems still maddeningly acute despite despite three years of our awareness of them? Yeah. So I'll focus my answer on air defense because that's one of the most talked about categories of having a shortage. So the good news on air defense is that we've made significant

increases in production. For example, the Patriot missile has moved from a production of about a production of about 300 Pack 3 MSEs per year and is heading towards 650. On Amram, which is an air-to-air missile, it can also be fired by the Naysam surface-to-air missile, has gone from about 5 to 800 to 1,200. And the sidewinder, he's seeking missile, which fulfills largely the same role, has gone from about 1,200 to 2,500. So we're seeing in some cases over a doubling of these munitions. The issue is that this still isn't sufficient to meet the needs of our own military and our allies and partners.

But there's still more to be done on this because all three of those systems are on the services unfunded priority lists for FY 2026. What the unfunded priority list is basically the services saying, you know, if we had more money, where would we spend our next dollars? And all three of these systems are areas that we could be doing more if we just spent the money. So while there are issues in the defense industrial base, in some cases, we aren't actually even utilizing it to its full capacity while still complaining about that lack of capacity. I want to interject. You should keep going here in a second, but I mean, I'm no air defense expert, but it seems to me the items you

just cited sound pretty useful to have. What are the source? services buying instead of these things? So it's largely just an issue of the top line budget. You know, the Navy has to buy ships. The Army has to buy a variety of other systems. And this kind of stems from the fact that the Trump administration requested a budget, a base defense budget that's actually smaller than the previous Biden defense budget once you factor in inflation.

Reconciliation did add a one-time infusion of funds as a plus up for that. but increasing defense spending by 3 to 5% above inflation each year is something that Brad and I called for on the monograph, and that would fix a lot of these issues. What we're seeing largely stems from the United States stopped spending a lot of money on defense in the 1990s, and the defense industrial base never recovered. If the government is largely the only purchaser of these systems

and they're not purchasing them, companies aren't going to invest in keeping the lines open and expanding production capacity. So, Brad, I'll ask you to keep going on this general theme of it's been three years, what's improved, but where are we still most right to be worried? Thanks, Aaron, and great insights by Ryan, as always. I would say almost everywhere I look, with a few exceptions, I see positive progress. I think the Trump administration is now awake, fully awake on the problem and is making significant or has made significant progress in most of the key weapons systems and munitions that we're looking at. But we're overturning decades of training, if you will, for the National Security Enterprise, where we incentivized risk avoidance over scale and speed. And if you buy what the National Defense Strategy Commission said in his report last summer,

my paraphrase, that we're in the most dangerous geo-strategic moments since 1945, then we got to spend more time focusing on scale and speed. By speed, I mean getting things to feel the combat capabilities quicker. than risk taking. And that's a cultural leadership secretary of defense thing, but it's fundamental. And a quick comment on defense spending. I'm a broken record on this, but so much this comes back to defense spending. And Aaron, you and I saw this on the hill. What we've been spending in the last few years with the, you know, we've had some positive news lately, has been roughly 3% of GDP. Other than three years before the 9-11 terror attacks, the last time we spent this little on defense

was 1940, the year before Prool Harbor. So if this is the most dangerous strategic moment, our country's confrontance since 1945, in part because of the axis we talked about earlier, then what the heck could possibly explain spending so relatively little on defense? I call that strategic dissonance if we're being polite. You meant air missile defense.

So that's at the top level. Let me zoom into some military technical details. If you think, hey, what might we need to protect our interests in Europe, the Middle East, or the first island chain, and the next few years? I don't know, FAD, terminal high altitude area defense system. There's one, and I just cited earlier that we may have shot one quarter of our inventory in the 12, in recent conflicts. Well, how's that possible?

How do we get to a point that we have such a small inventory of interceptors? Well, it's because we've brought a minimum sustainment rate just in time model that works quite nicely for Walmart, but it's not so brilliant when you're talking about national defense because of insufficient defense spending. which over the years have forced the services to make tough decisions. So listen to these numbers. For THAAD interceptors, the Pentagon requested the Trump administration Pentagon, the Trump administration Peace Through Strength Pentagon, requested only 25 THAAD interceptors

in its base defense budget request for fiscal year 26. 25. We fired about 150 in the recent conflict. 25. And then they added, I want to be fully generous here and accurate, and they added 12 through reconciliation, 25 plus 12, a total of 37. Okay?

I'm sorry, 37 of the individual. Of the THAD interceptors. The interceptors at Fad fires. The rockets with the warheads on them, not the system. The hit-to-kill system interceptors at THad-fires a shoot-down incoming ballistic missiles. 37. 37. Okay.

Now, what did the U.S. Missile Defense Agency just do a few days ago? They awarded a $2 billion contract modification to produce, to procure more fad interceptors. Great job. Great job. That's good. But why did we need, you know, why did we need the 12-day war to tell us that we were short? And why were we procuring so little before that? What explains that?

And here's the most frustrating thing. And I'm checking these numbers. But let me remind you, 37 was what the request was. Okay, now the administration is doing the right thing. They're moving out. They got the contract modification I just said. But listen to this. According to my research, our research, industry can produce as many as 96 or even 144.

So, you know, why the heck, and this is one of our 18 recommendations in Arsville Democracy era, and we said the burden of proof should be on the Department of Defense and the Services to justify any instance in their annual budget requests where they're not requiring. the maximum the industry can produce for key munitions. And we can define key munitions. Literally, in every budget request program project activity that comes over, they should say, Raytheon, Lockhe, pick your company, I don't care. They can produce 100 this year. We're going to procure 80. Please tell me why you're only procuring 80 when we could have war on the Taiwan

straight in two years. And this is fundamentally relevant to American Service members of accomplishing a mission. For too long, we've not, and where it should be asking them how they're going to increase or production capacity. So yeah, common sense would dictate that actually you should be doing rather than 80 out of 100. You should be acknowledging that they can only do 100, say, yeah, but I actually need 200. So keep going into the next year and build me a new line.

And that is the second recommendation in our sub-diction from April, that in addition to procuring the maximum, putting the burden of proof on anyone that says that we shouldn't procure the maximum, tell me Pentagon and tell me relevant defense company, what we need to do together to increase your max production capacity. We're acting like it's 1991 and it's 2025. And, you know, George Marshall's quote that I overused for 20 years, I had the time. I didn't have the money. And then I had the money and I didn't have the time. So what we do now is going to affect life and death stuff in the Taiwan's straight in 2028. You know, there's another answer to all of this that I know you guys are familiar with. I'll kind of rehearse it now, which is we're never going to

fix all this stuff. We're never going to get either the money or the resources or the coordination that we need, at least absent a war, and the most likely place for that war is the Western Pacific, or rather the most likely place for a war that most directly implicates our interests is the Western Pacific. And so what we have to do is treat this like an emergency and basically stop helping the Ukrainians, at least to the extent that we are now. I mean, let's just say radically scale it back. Probably scale it back with the Israelis too. It's a little bit more politically sensitive, but, you know, we got to do what we got to do. And they understand that. They're a model ally, they confend for themselves. And everything we got, we put it into the Western Pacific,

and that's how we maintain deterrence. And that's how we're going to solve this problem, because best case scenario, Brad, Ryan, the kinds of things you're calling for, these are like decades out solution, and let's be real, there's no political will for this kind of thing anyway. I'm obviously reciting the argument. But I've heard it any number of times. What's your response to it? My quick response, and Ryan will give you the better version is I use the word deterrence there. Aaron, one of my favorite words. My colleagues rolled their eyes when I started talking about deterrence, but it's just too important. A lot of people, you certainly know what it is. A lot of people in Washington use them, they don't know what it actually means.

Deterrence is the perception of our adversaries regarding two things, our political will and our military capability and our political will to use it, relevant to their ability to accomplish objective or at what cost. That is the essence of deterrence. Notice it's not what I think you think Washington thinks is what our adversaries think on those two things. Here's how this begins to answer your fundamental question because the biggest grand strategic debate in Washington right now, or at least on the top three list, is how do we balance our interests in the Pacific versus Europe and the Middle East? That is the core question. That's the heart of our Arsenal democracy monograph. If China believes that the United States is not willing to support Ukraine,

with that only meaning that we spend less than 3% of what we spent on the Pentagon or the same time period, that we made a good show of it for two or three years and then lost the interests or the ability to keep giving weapons to Ukraine as they fight the worst invasion in Europe since World War II. Why would Beijing believe that we're going to send thousands of Americans to fight and many of them die in the Taiwan Strait, thereby increasing the chances for aggression and what could be the worst war of the 21st century in the Pacific? So that's a long-winded way of saying what happens in Kiev won't stay in Kiev,

deterrence and perceptions of deterrence, which is fundamental to deterrence, is not hermetically sealed by region. What we do in one region affects the others. We can prepare Taiwan and make it a porcupine. We can increase our posture in the Pacific. But if we don't increase defense spending and take some of these steps in our arms boxy monograph, it'll certainly be more difficult. Ryan, what do you think? Clean up my mess there. What do you think? Yeah. So Brad gave a good view of kind of the top line stuff, but our report was really digging into the details. And the reason we did that is to demonstrate that there's actually not a significant overlap in weapon systems. Our key finding was that no deliveries to Taiwan or Israel were delayed by Ukraine by more than a

year. And in most cases, they weren't delayed at all. And in addition to what we've been talking about, defense spending, the reform of the Pentagon contracting process, is something that doesn't actually cost a lot of money to fix. You know, it's the choices that we make, and it's potentially the largest source of delay, in some cases, potentially outstripping the defense industrial base capacity issues. So if you'll allow me to just nerd a little bit over the saga of the harpoon missile, it'll provide a good window into this. So tell us what the harpoon missile does before you tell us the tale.

So the harpoon coastal defense system is a system ordered by Taiwan. I think harpoon missiles, which are anti-ship missiles, useful for sinking Chinese ships. They're fired from mobile trucks that have radars mounted on them. This poses huge dilemmas for PLA planners because if they don't know where they are and you send your ships out through the Taiwan straight, they can easily get some. So what kind of ranges are we talking about? Just like act like a salesman for a second. What am I buying here? Well, you know, we probably don't take any money from defense companies.

So I can't do too much of the salesman, but easily enough to cover the range of the Taiwan's, any ship getting close to Taiwan could be targeted by these missiles. So Taiwan first ordered this in 2020, and the way they did this is that the Pentagon would negotiate with the contractor for them. The Pentagon then took almost two years to award a contract to produce the missiles and 2.5 years to award the contract to produce the launchers. And this is despite the fact that it had awarded a similarly sized contract for the Harpoon missile just months before this sale was announced.

apparently copy pasting contracts was a little too difficult there. Right now, full delivery of the system, probably the most important one for Taiwan's defense, is not expected until around 2028 or 29. So it's going to take eight to nine years to go from announcement to delivery. However, there was an option to advance the full delivery date of two years, and the DOD didn't exercise that option. The DOD could have also conducted a policy change to permit older harpooning. variance to be contracted and sent to Taiwan faster, but they didn't do it. We also didn't learn

the lesson from Ukraine, where we kind of magevered ship-based launchers onto trucks, used missiles that other countries supplied to sink Russian ships. We didn't do that for Taiwan either. And yet, the annual production capacity for Harpoon and the associated SLAM-E-R missile is about 600 per year, and Taiwan only ordered 400. So we're just dragging out these processes through choices that we make even beyond the defense industrial base capacity issues. And so you say it and it sounds so insane as you lay it out. But if you were at the Pentagon, you know, you're a career Pentagon official working in the heart of this system, what would your defense of yourself be?

Like, why are we where we are from that perspective? So the reason that this has happened is that as defense spending declined in the 90s, the Pentagon and Congress instituted lots of regulations and reforms that prioritized per unit cost over speed. So I use the analogy of Amazon delivery. You know, before we had prime, you could pay a little bit extra to have it delivered faster. We have excised that option from our procurement kind of planning. So it makes sense.

It is technically less efficient to pay more to get something faster. But in some cases, like if you're expecting an imminent invasion, you might want to do that. Aaron, one add on to Ryan's incredible analysis there is the idea of bundling. What we've seen, and this sounds really, oh, here we go, bureaucratic boring, but it's incredibly relevant to war on peace in the Taiwan Strait. What we have contract officers, what we're expecting of them in the past at least, and I hear there's some progress lately on this, is we have a request from one partner for a system, and we wait for a request from a U.S. service or another partner so we can bundle them to reduce

unit cost. Hey, that's not evil. That's patriotic. That makes sense. We like to save money. But if one of those partners asking for it is Taiwan, maybe we spend 3% more on that system, see Amazon example, to get it there more quickly. So changing the default from, you know, I'm sorry for X, Y, and Z partners who are facing current or potential aggression. Maybe we forget the bundling, set that aside, and move ahead, even though it's going to be 3% more costly. And that's another reason why the excessive focus on unit costs is that we don't have enough multi-year procurements. The appropriators, God bless them, I bring an authorizer bias, a guilty of charge, often have

been reluctant to appropriate money associated with multi-year procurements, which incentivizes the industry to make investments of their own dime to increase production capacity because the Pentagon in the past couldn't show X percentage of savings. Well, I'm sorry, respectful patriotic appropriator. Maybe there's something more important than 3% savings. I don't know, deterring war in the Pacific. So we got it all wrong. We've trained patriotic hardworking people to focus on risk avoidance and 3% cost savings.

If this is 1940 or 1939, we need to be having other priorities, and those are scale and speed. Yeah, I kind of feel like World War III is going to be pretty expensive. So, you know, it would be a little cheaper to deter it. Yeah. So one, my major takeaway from your analysis, just as you speak about it here on the show, is for all that there are capacity issues in the defense industrial base, the way you talk about it, Ryan and Brad, is that they are largely downstream of, let's say, buy side issues, not supply side issues. And if we fixed the by side issues, the supply side would fix itself relatively quickly. Is that a fair takeaway? Yeah. I think that is a fair takeaway, especially for,

thing for kind of items that don't have a use in the civilian economy, for example, explosives don't have a lot. The other issue of this is that- For yourself, Ryan, I don't know what you do on your weekends, but- That's true. Maybe we do some blast mining. But what kind of the key issues here is the time required. It takes a significant amount of time to set up a new factory.

And each successive administration has kind of thrown their hands up at this and said, oh, you know, it's going to take too long. We have to do something else other than invest. we're going to spend our money elsewhere. But we kind of have an opportunity with the Trump administration because it's the very beginning of the term. If they make the investments now, they will be able to see the rewards by the end of this four-year term. So there's a real opportunity here if the Trump administration is willing to take action and request a sufficient defense budget. And Aaron, I agree with, I agree with your premise that you can spend a lifetime

studying the defense industrial base and acquisition. Much of it is very complicated. Some of it is simple. If we want industry to produce things and have increased production capacity, buy more. And you can't buy more unless you have higher defensemen. So at some level, this is kind of simple. And it's not all dire gloom and doom. I would say the Trump administration's executive order that they published in April adopted, not necessarily because we suggested adopted several of our recommendations, including prioritizing partners. I mean, what a crazy idea, right? Why is arms sales first primarily overseen by the Department of State? Because it's a leading tool of foreign policy. Shouldn't we align our arms deliveries to international partners with, oh, I don't know, our national security strategy, our national defense strategy.

Wouldn't it make sense every now and then to do a rigorous review of our arms deliveries cues and say, hey, Morocco, God bless you, we like you. But it's more important that we get X weapon system to Ukraine, Taiwan, or Israel first. We know that you're not going to like being dropped down the queue. So tell you what, we'll send you an interim capability. We'll do some rotational forces and we'll do some fancy exercises to address your concerns. But we're going to delay you by one year. And I was told Aaron for years, impossible lawyers can't do it. Silly little thing tank person.

What are you talking about? Well, Biden did it and now Trump did it. So it's possible. So why instead of doing the ad hoc, why don't we more systematically examine our weapons delivery cues and align them with our national security strategy? because first come, first serve makes sense in the McDonald's drive-through, but it doesn't necessarily make sense when it comes to arms deliveries, things like that. FMS-only list.

Why are we forcing so much to go through foreign military sales when in doing it via direct commercial sales? In many cases, you can deliver it in six months instead of six years. Looking at congressional threshold reporting requirements that haven't been an updated since the 1980s. The list goes on and on. There's a lot of things we can do very, very quickly. Yeah, and there's a whole other dimension here that this discussion of partners points to that we don't really have time to go into and sort of take a whole other episode. But this question of partner cooperation, co-production, what are our allies actually building

that we might want to buy? And what kind of technologies are they innovating with, in particular Israel and Ukraine, who are both fighting hot wars? You know, what are they coming up with on the front lines and, you know, what are their industry defense sectors and industrial bases looking like in ways that might be of interest to us? I don't know if you have sort of quick thoughts on that front, but that's another piece of the puzzle that we haven't even addressed here.

Yeah, so certainly Ukraine can teach the United States a lot about drones, as well as scaling up the production of them. You know, we're struggling to produce in the tens of thousands of small quadcopers. Ukraine is producing millions and, you know, innovating rapidly on them. Some of the leading U.S. companies, when they send their drones to Ukraine, they're quickly defeated by electronic warfare to the point where the Ukrainians don't even want them anymore. So it's not going to be, you know, just us helping and supporting them. we're going to get back a lot from that relationship. I agree. You know, and there's there's part of me, again, this is like a 30,000 foot good idea

fairy version of this sort of thought. But, you know, we seem to me to have an interest in putting our Ukrainian friends in contact directly with our Taiwanese friends. I feel like our Taiwanese friends have lots of stuff they should be learning from the Ukrainians and buying from them and the Israelis as well. Totally agree. And that's been a priority at FD as well that, you know, we are kind of the hub of the spoke, if you will, but the more we can get our various partners learning from each other,

including like learning from the Israelis. I mean, let's consider what just happened in the 12-day war. We had American-made F-15s and F-35s launching, in many cases, air-launched munitions against Russian air defense. Wow. And who did better? Well, the American planes and munitions did better. You know, full nod to the Israeli pilots, the training, how they did all these fancy

modifications to the F-15s and F-35s. But do we think maybe we can learn a little bit from the Israelis that would be beneficial to what we're going to need to do in the Pacific? Absolutely. So, you know, I really think it's in a good time for Americans to question assumptions, question long-standing beliefs about, you know, like that our adversary is going to be kind enough to present us with one major war at a time and realize that Washington is not home to all good ideas and that the Ukrainians, the Israelis. And yes, The Taiwan's have some lessons to teach us and learn from, and it should be a two-way thing, not us dictating to people who, frankly, I have a whole lot, know a whole lot more about drone

combat than we do right now. I'm thinking of the Ukrainians. Brad Bowman, Ryan Brooks of FDD, I hope folks in a position to do something about these subjects, take a look at your arsenal of democracy, a report out of FDD, and thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks, Sarah. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.