School of War - Ep 259: Christian Brose on Rethinking How We Fight

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Christian Brose, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril Industries and author of The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare, joins the show to talk about American industry and the future of war. ▪️ Times 02:26 Erosion of Military Advantage 11:11 The Nature of the Problem 16:42 Consensus and Urgency 21:01 Learning the Right Lessons in Ukraine 25:32 Scaling Up for the Offense 31:23 Leveraging AI for Defense 38:07 Will Liberal Arts and Humanities Win? 41:56 Arsenal-1 47:31 Silicon Valley and Defense 52:24 Collaborative Combat Aircraft Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

It's hard to find serious voices who don't think America risks getting into a major war in the coming years. Today, a fascinating conversation with Chris Brose, the president of Andrel Industries, about his career in Washington and now in business, the role of American industry and catching up to our geopolitical adversaries, and what it will take to survive and prevail in a 21st century direct clash between great powers. Let's get into it. 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 rain situation in grand.

We shall fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Christian Brose, who is the president and chief strategy officer of Andril Industries.

He has a long career in public service before that. He was the staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee under Senator John McCain. He served in the State Department with secretaries Rice and Powell. Chris Brose, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. Big fan. Happy to be here. So there's a lot we could talk about.

I want to talk about the state of warfare in 2025 going in 2026. I want to talk about Andriel and what you guys are up to. but maybe to make it a little bit more biographical and merge that into the themes of the conversation. You know, you've been doing this for a while now. You've been in public service and or the defense industry for about a quarter of a century. You've been focused on defense issues for probably a majority of that time. If you could go back to, I don't know, when we would date it, you know, 2009, 2010, Chris Bros. And talk to that guy.

What do you think would most surprise him about what you know now? What diverges from what your assumptions were over a decade ago about how America's place in the world from a point of view of defense technology, defense strategy might play out? That's a great question. And yeah, there's probably a personal and a professional answer to that, right? I think the personal answer is if I had told the 2009, 2010, Chris Brose, what 2025 Chris Brose would be doing for a living, like I never would have believed it. So there's just sort of a wonderful degree to which, you know, careers in Washington have their twist. and turns, and you know, you can't really predict where they go. I think sort of more broadly, the thing that would have been surprising to me back in 2009, 2010 is just the extent to which,

you know, and this is a conversation we've been having for a very long time, right, the degree to which we have seen our military advantage erode. I think back in those days, it was sort of taken as given that, you know, America still had something like military dominance or primacy. You know, obviously a lot of us were paying attention to China, but, you know, that's not where the focus was. That's not where, you know, the national security strategy and the defense strategy were pointed. And I think that the direction at the time sort of assumed what had been true for a very long time before that, which is we pretty much had the ability to go where we wanted to do what we wanted. We had sort of military supremacy over adversaries. And I think that

what would be surprising is the very rapid erosion of that, how fast that's occurred to the point where we now start to see parity in areas. And, you know, I think that's, you know, I think that's going to be an enduring feature of, you know, kind of our world moving forward, especially between the United States and China. Let's drill down on that a little bit. You did an interview earlier this year with the Wall Street Journal, one of their big weekend interview pieces, with one of my favorite journalists, by the way, Kate O'Dell. And in there, you say, I'll quote you, at every level, our conception of military power and the industrial base that we've been optimizing to build it is just systematically wrong. Let's take that piece by piece. So military power,

itself. How are we conceptualizing it wrongly? Where are we losing the technological edge? And that's sort of aside from questions of mass production and, you know, magazine depth and all those other important things, which we can also get to. Yeah, but I think they're related, right? So, I mean, at least how I see it is, you know, really since the end of the Cold War, you know, America has been laps ahead of our competition. And militarily, we've believed that because we have the supremacy, we're going to have the technological advantage to basically. The basic rely on a kind of model of military power that looks like a small number of exquisite things. And sort of underlying that is an assumption about warfare, which is in the event that we do find

ourselves in conflict, it's not going to last very long. It's going to be over in a matter of days or weeks. We're not going to expend a lot of weapons. We're not going to lose a lot of combat systems or people that we're not going to have to deal with protracted conflict. And where I think that we now are is the recognition, you know, which has probably been evident for a while, that it's now in sort of high relief, as you know, you look at the war in Ukraine, you look at the war in the Middle East and other areas, that a lot of those assumptions just don't hold anymore. At least I don't believe that they do.

And I think that when you then start to think about how are we going to prepare ourselves for war that will not be over in days but could drag on for months and years, how are we going to think about dealing with competitors that have, you know, sort of near peer or actual peer levels of capability militarily? And then how are we going to face the challenge of sustaining combat operations and industrial production and force regeneration over that long protracted conflict. I don't think we're ready for any of that. I don't think we're tooled for any of that.

And I actually think this whole period of time, you know, call it past, you know, 30, 40 years or so, it's actually a historical anomaly when you think about how America has thought about conflict and thought about war and thought about industrial base and production, how we've succeeded in the past. It's largely looked more like what I've been saying rather than, this kind of anomalous period of time where we had such overmatch and such advantage. And our assumptions about warfare, you know, we're just actually very different than I think what we have typically done over the course of American history. So even the New York Times now is sort of sounding the alarm on these issues.

I know. I found myself kind of surprised by it. I was hoping for a couple of footnotes, but, you know, maybe that's too much to ask. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, fair point. Fair point. It's high praise, Chris. But, no, I've found myself equally surprised that I didn't disagree with, with all or even much of it. I thought it was fantastic. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, was there a moment in your own career where you first sort of felt alarmed by the trend lines? I mean, you wrote a whole book, The Kill Chain, that kind of, you know, unfolded some of these themes, somewhat ahead of the curve, not only for the New York Times, but for a lot of people. But did you, the alarm that you're expressing now and that you expressed in that book some years ago, is there a moment that you can remember that galvanized you? or did you sort of come on the scene and you were part of, you know, another way this works is you're a part of small group people who kind of had it figured out from the start, but no one was paying attention until, uh, I, I actually, I mean, for me, it was sort of a growing realization during my time in government and specifically, you know, over the period of time where I worked for Senator McCain and really in the final four years of his life when I was his staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee. So call it like 2014 to 2018. You know, there's that old adage, which I think is attributed to Henry Kissinger that, you know, you, you, You spend intellectual capital down in government, but you don't build it up. My experience was quite the opposite. What I found in my time in the SASC was that I basically spent every day, every week, with people coming to me with information. I mean, it was a great thing about the job, a great thing about oversight.

It was just, you know, meeting after briefing after briefing. And it was just a sort of parade of information. And the benefit of the position that I had was that I saw kind of the entire waterfront. I had a whole team of people who would work, you know, elements of the problem, shipbuilding or air power or land or what have you. I got presented with all of it. And you sort of look across all of these different areas. And oh, by the way, the Department of War is the same way, right? Everyone would come up with their specific silo to brief.

And I'm in the position of consuming all of it and sort of seeing the patterns across the entirety of the joint force or the entirety of the defense program. And, you know, it was a growing realization that we just were not where we needed to be. Our advantage was eroding. Our programs were archaic. We were not moving as quickly as we needed to to deal with the urgency of the threat we were facing, nor were we taking advantage of the opportunities that technology was presenting us.

And it was sort of that pattern matching, I guess you could call it, across the defense program. But I would say the specific moment that really kind of tied that altogether because, you know, obviously the same kinds of realizations are occurring at the Pentagon. You know, and I kind of opened the book this way,

which was a classified briefing that was provided, that really sort of attempted to look at all of this in its entirety and really kind of assess how red and blue matched up. And let's just say it was not a positive story. And to me, it resonated with my kind of lived experience in the years of the job of sort of seeing this bit by bit, brief by brief, and finally kind of seeing it all pulled together in one way was quite compelling. And that's what really galvanized Senator McCain and me

to try to expose more members of the committee and more members of the Senate to the realization that we were seeing because the reality was just most of these folks were not paying attention to it. We're not able to get as deep into it as we were. But when you did, you know, what you saw kind of across the totality of the force and the program was pretty alarming. Can you diagnose the big picture problems for us in terms of how we got here? I found your account in the kill chain interesting because you go back before the point that a lot of others, to include in conversations we've had here on the show, start their analysis,

which you typically see the analysis start at the end of the Cold War. and the last supper and consolidation of the defense industry. You kind of traced your analysis back into the Cold War itself and the growth of bureaucracy. You know, we've, so the account you just outlined is we have at pretty high levels of our government, an awareness for more than a decade now, at least, that the trend lines are not great. And here we are in 2025.

And I don't think either of us can assert that the trend lines have been decisively bent back in our favor, even if there are some positive signs here and there. What is the nature of the problem itself? It's a great question. I think the nature of the problem itself is in the aftermath of World War II, you know, which was a massive effort, you know, galvanizing the industrial base, unlocking the capabilities of commercial industry. I mean, that's what won the war, right? I mean, it's freedoms forge. It's all the things that have been written about historically. That got us off to a good start in the early Cold War. But then there was the inevitable backlash to that, right? Of, you know, wasted money, you know, kind of folks running reckless. And there was an attempt to sort of bureaucratic. You know, the long cold, you know, long twilight struggle of the Cold War, and it really kind of happened with gusto under McNamara. It was very much of a time of, you know, how do we generate centralized planning? You know, there was a lot of, if you could just go back and kind of look at the origins of this, a shocking degree to which you can kind of trace it back to very kind of socialistic, communistic sort of theories about the primacy of the state, the need to regulate industry, you know, to almost kind of eliminate the vagaries of capitalism and replace it with. at centralized state planning.

And that's what we got, right? I mean, that is the, you know, PPE process, you know, policy programming, budgeting, evaluation that we all know and love and are familiar with. And to the extent that we were able to work around that and be successful kind of in the 1970s or so lead up to 1980s, it was largely because we were working around that very process, right, doing it very effectively, working, you know, in black programs to develop the kinds of things that became airland battle, you know, deep strike, the kinds of things. that were very much on display in the first Gulf War, at least in parts.

But that process didn't really change after the Cold War, right? I mean, we didn't have any reason to change it. So that is still very much the system we have today. And a lot of the underlying assumptions of it, if you go back and look at it, which was actually very clearly articulated in the 1950s, 1960s, 1960s, 1970s, is like, innovation is passe, right? We've actually generated the types of military capabilities we're going to need. now we just need to sort of like manage the, you know, the industrial base efficiently.

And it almost kind of ruled out the prospect of innovation and disruption and technological change and transformation as something that we didn't really need anymore. And I think that if you kind of look at the problem today, the problem is the very thing that the kind of origins of this bureaucratic system assumed was gone and overtaken by events and unimportant, which is disruptive technological change, disruptive movements, you know, kind of in the threat environment. And I think that to me is that is the core problem, right? We are still trying to deal in a very centralized planning way with forces that are beyond the control of the government.

And a lot's been written on this. You know, the preponderance of capital that's being spent on research and development is not being done by the government anymore, not even close. It's all in private industry. The technologies that are driving us forward are predominantly being driven out of the private sector and commercial technology, not in government laboratories. And you still have this government that is used to and thinking about kind of how you control and harness these things.

And I think the challenge increasingly becomes, how are we actually going to create incentives in a monopsonic environment called defense to generate change and disruption and innovation, which is the exact opposite of what the system is set up to do. The system is designed to come up with requirements and then linearly pass them into programs and budget for them and move.

move into execution and, you know, acquisition and execution over like a 10 to 15 year timeline. And that's just absolutely irrelevant for the world that we're living in, both technologically and with respect to the threat. So how do you create kind of alternative processes and pathways that function on the exact opposite logic, right, where our requirements are going to be unknown to us and they're going to evolve and change at a very rapid rate. And we have to build that kind of flexibility and adaptation into our programs. How do you have flexibility in the, in the the budgeting and acquisition process where you can very rapidly learn lessons, incorporate them on board and off board new capabilities. You know, all the things that we're seeing the Ukrainians do,

for example, the Israelis do, which, you know, in our best examples in American history, we do. We do when we are serious, when we are confronted with these types of challenges, which, which, you know, kind of elude us in peacetime. And I think that is very much the hard part of this, which is how do you kind of get a wartime mindset and a wartime footing for a country that is still operating with a peacetime bureaucracy and largely a peacetime mentality about how they're thinking about military capability and transformation. I'll come back to the Israelis and the Ukrainians in a minute because I really want to get your take on what you're seeing in those two conflicts. But before that, what here in the United States on this subject gives you a sense of hope? Like what glimmers of hope

are generated do you think by, say, actions this administration has taken? And, you know, other side of that coin, what's still happening in terms of either bureaucratic practice or the Congress that just absolutely needs to stop today because we need to recognize the kind of emergency that we're in. Yeah, so I'd focus on the positive, and I think you're right to point it out. We're having a wildly different conversation about these issues than we were, you know, five, six years ago when I wrote my book, let alone 10 years ago when I was still in government. And I think that's an incredibly good news story. If you look at the degree of, you know, almost call it consensus, I mean, back to your point about the New York Times.

Who in the world thought the New York Times would be writing a one-week expose about all the issues that we're talking about and largely coming down on the right side of the problem? I think we have achieved something that looks like consensus at a time where Republicans and Democrats, liberals, and conservatives can't agree that the grass is green and the sky is blue. So I'd say that's actually incredibly encouraging. I think when you look at the actions this current administration is taking, there's also an enormous amount to be encouraged by the emphasis that they're putting on. acquisition reform, the emphasis that they're putting on new capability development and disruptive change, really starting at the top and filtering all the way down, and just the sense of urgency they have, right, in the sense that this does not have to, nor should it be, nor can it be, you know, governed by business as usual, that if we keep doing that, we're going to lose, we have to do new things,

you have to take risk. All of that is incredibly, incredibly exciting. So then the question becomes, with all this excitement and all of this urgency and all of this consensus, what are we going to do it. And I would focus less on the things that stand in our way because I actually believe that not much does. And, you know, this is a bit of a hot take and people can call me out and disagree on it. I actually believe that, you know, we can always reform and improve our processes, whether that's the, you know, requirements process or the problem generation process, the acquisition process or budgeting process. All of that can always be better and optimized. That said, I would argue that we actually have all of the authorities we need to do pretty much whatever we want to do,

whether that's in terms of generating new ideas for military capabilities, creating novel acquisition strategies to procure them. We're spending the better part of a trillion dollars on defense, like we have plenty of money to put into these kinds of disruptive capabilities. I think the real question comes down to what do we want to build. What on the government side is the direction we need to take? What are the new programs we need to create in order to field the kinds of systems we're talking about, right, and field them in large numbers and put the industrial base on a war footing. You know, I think all of this is possible with the authorities we have and the money that we have. And to some extent, I actually think that is the, that's the scary thought for a lot of people, right?

It's almost easier to say, hey, there's some process that's standing in my way. And if I don't fix it, I can't do anything. To some extent, the scarier realization is actually there's nothing standing in my way. I have everything that I need to create the kind of disruptive change on a, timeline that matters. So what are you going to do about it? And I think, you know, my hope for the next three years of this administration, you know, with the kind of support that they're seeing in Congress, is that we can really get after those creation of new ideas, creation of new programs, and really getting the kinds of capabilities that America is going to need, which is not copy and pasting

things from Ukraine into the United States military. It's learning the lessons of Ukraine and then designing programs that are right for us and for our strategy and how we're going to fight and threats that we're facing and getting to scaled production of those systems as fast as humanly possible. To me, that is imminently doable on a rapid timeline with the money that we have available, with the authorities that we have. It's about creating those ideas and moving with a sense of urgency to effectuate them. Well, let's talk about the battlefield itself and the way you just spoke of Ukraine sort of tease up a question that I'm very curious your answer to. You know, Ukraine looks a lot different than the Western Pacific, but at the same time,

It is, along with what's going on in and around Israel in the last couple of years, the war we have to study. What should we be learning, but even more importantly, and I'm actually kind of curious really for your answer to the second part, what should we not be learning from the war in Ukraine in terms of what we think is going to be most applicable to us in some kind of Western Pacific scenario. Yeah. Look, I'd welcome your thoughts on this because you spend a lot of time looking at it. I think that there is a tendency to focus on the specific capabilities that are, you know, that are proving effective in the war in Ukraine, you know, fiber optic FPV drones, you know, other types of kind of battlefield advancements because of the highly sort of short range tactical nature and sort of landed nature of that fight. Those are exactly the kinds of systems that that are proving effective because of the nature of that battlefield. I'm not exactly sure that that

translates into a Western Pacific kind of competition where it is predominantly maritime. The distances are far more advanced, far more vast. And China is a far more formidable, you know, adversary. So I don't think that it's a matter of, you know, saying, all right, well, we just need to really kind of spin up the industrial base for FPB drones and sort of Shaheed knockoffs. And we'll be in a great position. That said, I think the underlying lessons of that, that it is about low-cost deterritable systems. It is about the ability to have mass production, an industrial base that is flexible and adaptable to incorporate the learnings and lessons of the battlefield into a very rapid iteration of product development and fielding. That, I think, is the lesson that we need to take,

right? It's not that the specific systems that are working for Ukraine will work for the United States in all instances. It is the pace of learning. It is the scale of production, the ability to adapt with a changing battlefield that's changing, you know, daily and weekly, those are the kinds of lessons that I think we need to incorporate. And that's where I think that we still have a long way to go, right? I mean, we could produce FPB drones. If we have to, we can produce Shaheeds. I'm not exactly convinced that those are the right answers. But do we actually have an organization and government that can learn and move as fast as the Ukrainians are? Do we have an industrial base that is as flexible in terms of how quickly they can field and roll out and iterate on

new capabilities? That I think we have a lot of. long way to go on because, you know, again, when this war started, no one could have predicted the types of systems that we're now seeing as highly effective on that battlefield. And, you know, God forbid, if the war continues to drag on for, you know, months and years to come, I would take a wild guess and say that the systems that we're going to be talking about in a year or two years are not necessarily the ones that we're talking about today. So it's more to me about, you know, institutional learning and industrial adaptation and just the scale of it all that are, that are, most important and applicable for the United States.

That's really interesting. I feel like I've woken up any number of times in the last two or three years to news of some military operation happening either in and around Israel or in Ukraine that really is just striking. I mean, sometimes these are bad surprises, but oftentimes there's surprises that cheer me. I mean, the supply chain attacks that Israel mounted with the beepers against Hezbollah was really quite remarkable. And kind of a, I mean, maybe you would correct this, but like more a testament to kind of

planning and human guile and kind of old fashioned strategy that's anything particularly high-tech but then there's other stuff like just the the ability to target with the kind of precision and scale and tracking of multiple targets that the Israelis have done over and over again that first i think it's the first night of the 12-day war when they got all the nuclear scientists and and sort of other people in positions of command and iran and you're seeing like you know the the the weapon hit not here on the wall of the apartment building, but here, you know, to get the bed, you know, in the northwest corner of the room. And I just think about what must have gone into the back end of that. And it really is mind-boggling. And it leads to my next question for you, which is you've spent

a lot of time sort of thinking about the, as it were, the technical back end of this kind of stuff, of how, you know, what the internet means in a military context of the role of artificial intelligence and sifting through large datasets and things like that. What do you think people need to understand about the nature of warfare right now that maybe they haven't quite caught up to yet in terms of the role of AI and the sort of tech back end of things. And what do we need to really hit the gas on here in the United States? Yeah, it's a great question. To me, it has everything to do with the scale and speed with which we're going to have to operate. You know, so even in the Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear complex, facility scientists, et cetera, even that to me felt a little bit like a just

well-orchestrated kind of fusion of intelligence and military operations for a very sort of specific application against very precise targets. It feels very much like something that's more familiar as opposed to sort of where we're going. Whereas if I think about, you know, what the Israelis have had to do in terms of defending themselves from, you know, inbound weapons, what the Ukrainians have to do every single night. That is, I think, where you really start, and then obviously, you know, when it comes to the offensive operations, how do you then scale this not against a handful of facilities or a handful of scientists, but just, you know, large formations, you know, large amounts of targets that you have to service every single day,

day in and day out, you know, at real volume simultaneously, both offensively and defensively, that to me is where you really start to see where these types of technologies in artificial intelligence, machine learning autonomy are going to become so applicable. And to me, I think in the United States, I really kind of would focus on the air defense application, right? I mean, we've been looking at this challenge of the Chinese buildup of ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and now hypersonic weapons for a very long time, just the massive inventory of weapons that they have to shoot at a place like Guam or our bases in, you know, the first island chain or even in the homeland, just the volume of things that we're going to have to contend with, not, you know, for one day, the way that we

did when we supported Israel and the defense against these, you know, kind of Iranian retaliation and, you know, two or three hundred weapons. But doing that, again, again and again and again, which is not just about sort of point defense, but wide area defense, the way the Ukrainians are having to deal with, I don't think that you can solve that problem in the absence of technologies like this. You're going to have to automate your way out of it to a certain extent. And I think, you know, we've learned this lesson to a degree with, you know, kind of legacy systems like Aegis or other things where you are going to automate that

defensive kill chain to a degree because it is protecting human life. But when the volume of threat that you're having to contend with, in terms of low-cost fires or just the kind of magazine depth that the Chinese have built up is going to necessitate doing this in the hundreds and thousands over and over again. We just don't have the people. We don't have the cognitive bandwidth. We don't have the ability to do this in the absence of kind of technological support, which I think these technologies really are distinguishing themselves and their ability to provide human beings. I think that it will be integrated first into those types of defensive use cases because it is fundamentally an application of advanced

technology in the service and in the protection of human life. I think it becomes very different when you're talking about a similar kind of automation of the kill chain for offensive operations, for hunting and striking. I think the United States military or other Democratic militaries will rightly be more cautious about how they integrate artificial intelligence and autonomy into offensive operations in that way. With respect to these defensive use cases, large-scale area defense, air defense, missile defense, I think that is the only way we're going to get ourselves out of these problems, which our legacy missile defense and air defense architectures are not built to deal with because they were put in place in the late 1990s and early 2000s at a time where we

thought we were going to be defending ourselves against more or less rogue state launches, you know, from Iran or North Korea that had very small numbers of ballistic missiles. or similar types of capabilities. And that's just long ago been overtaken by events in terms of what we're seeing in the modernization and military buildups in Russia and China. So the distinction between defense and offense there is really interesting.

And we can get in more to the ethical questions about AI and autonomy and so forth. But I actually have a different concern about AI in the military context. I'm curious if you agree or reject this or just want to no comment it. But I keep seeing, seeing in reports senior officers say things like, oh, I'm very, I think this was the commander

of an 8th Army. I'm very familiar with the chat. I use the chat a lot in terms of my day-to-day job or, you know, you see the Pentagon, like frankly every big institution in America, trying to integrate large language models into its daily workflows across a whole wide range of things, including, of course, planning. My concern is kind of the same concern I have with every institution integrating this stuff into its work, which I do worry to the, extent, to what extent these tools are actually completely reliable. I do worry about the long-term effects they have on us as humans and our ability to learn and our ability to kind of own our own work. I think in the educational context, which is not what the military is, the military is there to win.

And so obviously you're going to use any tool that helps you to win. But I don't know, you know, the use case you just walked us through in terms of air defense and the role of AI in air defense, it's kind of inarguable. And by the way, there's lots of data now if you want to to go actually make the case. It's not necessary. Everyone agrees that you can't really do air defense in the way we need to do air defense in 2025 without these kinds of tools. I'm not aware, maybe you are, of how frequent resort to large language models amongst planners and decision makers makes them do their jobs better. Maybe it's faster in the short run, but better in the medium and long run. I don't know what data there is on that. And I've got some generalized

concerns about it. I don't, I don't, maybe I'm just the Luddite here, but I'm curious. to know if this has occurred to you? No, it absolutely has. I think, you know, as, you know, sort of blinding statement of the obvious, right, technology is always a tool. It's never going to be intrinsically good or bad. It will be put too good and bad uses. It will make us better in some instances.

It will make us, you know, more complacent or lazier or stupider in others. I think a lot of how I sort of see this moving forward is we actually have to get these technologies fielded, right? So much of the conversation that we're having, not. not here, but sort of like large in Washington, still has too much of a theoretical gloss around it, right? I've got to solve all these problems in principle before I can really start to kind of deploy and utilize these technologies. And I think the only way you're going to really kind of figure your way out through it is by getting them adapted or getting them adopted and then actually seeing how humans use them,

building trust in them. Because I think we will see, like we have many technologies in the past, that trust will break down in areas where they're less reliable. We'll start to see where the technologies do things that humans do better, and we can rely upon them more. And then I think we'll see a lot of instances where, you know, human agency remains paramount, and we need to have the human being firmly in the driver's seat in terms of decisions that are being taken, et cetera.

I think that the interesting thing with respect to, well, I had separated into two issues, like in terms of how military operators would use large language models more from sort of inquiring and sort of interrogating information and planning. I actually think it looks very, I have two teenagers at home, and it's fascinating to me the extent to which they basically, well, certainly my high schooler, basically uses chat GPT as a private tutor to augment what he's getting from school.

But I actually think that's a good thing, right? I mean, I think that's the one kind of educational intervention that consistently moves the needle in terms of performance and outcomes. and it's this ability to kind of query and interrogate information. Now, assuming the information that you're being provided from an underlying perspective is not biased, is not skewed ideologically, is complete, et cetera. So a lot of this has to do with how you kind of get the data right and not sort of wash it one way or the other.

But I actually think the ability for planners and military operators to interrogate that information in a more thoughtful and consistent way, I would argue would make them better than just the way this has always been done in the sense of, you know, here's what you have to do, don't ask questions, just move out. There will always be that element to it. But actually the ability to kind of empower people with these tools that make them more thoughtful and better at their specific tasks, more able to push better ideas up the chain because they have more access to information, better access and ability to process it, I think is actually

very encouraging. And then I'd say the other application of this that is encouraging is more of the agentic kind of AI, right, of how can you begin building automated tools and capabilities that actually do replace human beings, but replace them in the sort of performance of menial, repetitive tasks, that computers or automated systems are actually going to do better so that the human beings we do have can be better optimized to do the kinds of things that only humans can do, and that, frankly, we only want humans doing, which is more what we were just saying in terms of, leading and strategizing and commanding and thinking. I actually think that sort of division of labor

between human and machine can actually be both operationally beneficial and frankly it becomes morally beneficial because now you have the people in the military who joined to do this, right, to solve problems and lead and command, more able to spend more of their time on the things that they actually want to do and that we actually need them to do and less on the time, less of their time doing just very mundane, repetitive, menial tasks that all too many people in the military still spend way too much of their time doing. I certainly hope you're right and that your optimism is well-founded. And to be clear, I probably am not. I mean, I will absolutely be wrong about elements of this. And I think that's the other thing we just need to sort of say very unapologetically,

which is we will get these things wrong. The lessons that we will learn and the outcomes that we end up with are going to be very different than what we had. I think the question is just, I know this is not your point, but do we start this journey and adopt these technologies or not? And I think we have to. And I think that in the course of doing that, we will learn a lot. We will go in different directions than we ever would have foreseen. And we have to do it always thoughtfully, critically, you know, in a very self-aware way, rather than just assuming that this technology will be, you know, a panacea or, you know, a silver bullet, which it never has been historically. Well, I'll try to articulate a little bit more clearly what my admittedly somewhat contrarian concern is, which is. whether it's a general officer or a senior planner or whatever today, or actually, we could speak of your teenagers at home who, you know,

spent whatever it's been, 15 years or so, learning without AI and now they're using AI to kind of augment and tutor or a senior officer back to the military who has had a whole career and now they have this powerful tool to act as a kind of way to try new ideas and test things and test assumptions. It's hard to say that all sounds awful. I don't think it sounds particularly awful. But what about a word?

that's not too many years from now where the teenagers of today have grown up to be the planners or commanders of tomorrow. And actually, they've never really written anything in their life. The whole world they've known has been a world of AI, not only as useful tutor, but as actually all-powerful agent that you can get to do any tasks that you want. But the problem you and I, Chris, are both old enough to know, is that if you can't write something clearly, it means you really haven't thought it. And so you spend your whole life sort of being assisted by the machines to include in very core human cognitive tasks. I just kind of, I worry about the quality of talent that we have 20 or 30 years out. This is perhaps perverse given that everything you've just

described suggests that, you know, there's, there's a possible future where actually these tools only enhance our human capacity. There's a, there's a possibility that that's not the case that really worries me. Yeah, and you're right to worry. And I, like to be very clear, I was not saying that I think in all instances, this will be positive. I think in some instances, it will be detrimental. It will be, you know, crippling in terms of how people think and their ability to think creatively and critically. But I think this kind of goes back to the question of education, you know, whether it's, you know, across society or specifically, you know, kind of professional military education. I believe that what we will value in the future, I would argue is what we've always valued historically.

And I'm a proud product of the liberal arts, as I know you are too. I think that in the end, liberal arts and humanities win, because that is the set of skills that will be valuable moving forward, right? It is the ability to think creatively when circumstances change. It is to think creatively and imaginatively about new possibilities. It's the ability to make connections across specific disciplines or domains. I believe that AI will actually end up being better at many specific tasks than human beings. I think we've already seen this. you know, five to ten years ago, it was all the rage, you know, go get a software degree,

learn how to code, the future is yours. Turns out that's not true. I think that that's probably just going to continue to unfold in terms of the areas of specific, you know, kind of work or sort of like domain expertise that these types of technologies will master and do just as effectively, if not more so, than human beings. What I would argue is that that actually prioritizes the need to give people the kind of education that they will enable them to think creatively and critically in a cross-functional and interdisciplinary way,

to draw connections, to do the kinds of underlying things that put them in a position of mastery over these tools where they can use these tools and treat these tools for what they are rather than allow these tools to master them and turn them into just reflections of whatever the AI is telling them. If the latter comes to pass and your concerns become valid, I would argue that we have failed in terms of how we educate people and where we put our emphasis on education, both militarily and societally. If we do actually evolve and think differently and more broadly about education, there's still risk there. I would absolutely concede. But I think that there's a better likelihood that we will be able to harness these technologies to make human beings better at their jobs, whether that's military planning and operations and, force development, you know, or something else entirely, and fundamentally do what education is

supposed to do, which is prepare them to approach a very rapidly changing world creatively and critically and be able to evolve and adapt with circumstances that none of us can foresee rather than learn a specific task under the assumption that it will forever be relevant, which I think now more than ever is just not the case. Well, I certainly hope there's a planning cell out there somewhere trying to figure out how to mess with the PLA via their large language models. Because I have a feeling that that's probably happened on the other side. Yes. So let's talk about Anderl.

There's been a lot of sort of like I was saying every day I wake up to something interesting happening in the war overseas. There have been a lot of Anderl headlines this year. Let's take Arsenal One. This is a facility you guys are building, which is sort of practicing what you've been preaching on this episode so far in terms of mass and potentially attritable items coming out at scale. what is Arsenal One, maybe paint a word picture, if you will, for our listeners, for what they could expect to see if they went to this part of Ohio?

Yeah, so Arsenal One will ultimately be about four to five million square feet of production capacity outside of Columbus, Ohio. It will not all be sort of literally under one roof. It will be under a series of roofs of very large facilities, but all kind of co-located on one campus. And the reason we chose to do that, I mean, as we have studied the process of scaling up and delivering on large-scale production, which has been the journey we've now been on for the past few years, our belief is that the very politically easy thing to do is what has often happened in the past, which is you divide all of your programs up and your supply chains up and you sort of put them into as many states and districts as humanly possible because it just sort of builds political stickiness in the work that you're doing. There's a logic to that, but I think the logic that led us to Arsenal One, creation of it, and now the building of it, is that there's massive benefit that comes from co-locating programs of a similar type, right? The ability to produce weapons and autonomous systems of different domains, you know, all in one location, because it kind of gets back to the conversation we were talking about.

If we believe that the future is going to see massive changes to the products we're building, the need to roll new products into development and production when technology or the threat environment changes. Having that production sort of platform under one roof very, sort of allows you very rapidly to reallocate, you know, people, material, machines, capital, to deal with unforeseen kind of developments, as well as just to hit a scale of production that I think we have always targeted for the types of products that we're building, which is like a 10X. increase in volume from where I think traditional defense production has focused. Our belief, and I think we've said very clearly, is that Arsenal is going to need to be producing tens of thousands of

military systems per year, and that probably goes north of that very quickly. This is an investment of our money and a good amount of support from the state of Ohio. So there's not, you know, federal dollars coming in. The Department of War is not financing the facilitation of Arsenal One. They do, the way they have done so many kind of legacy programs on behalf of traditional industrial companies. This is something that we are standing up, probably end up being an investment of around a billion dollars over time, you know, augmented by support that we're getting from the state of Ohio. It'll end up creating probably 4,000 jobs or so. And the growth of it will sort of, you know, go based on how quickly the demand is there to deliver on this. So what we have seen, and I think what we have shown,

that it is very possible to create new industrial base to build the kinds of things that we're going to be building an Arsenal One, low-cost weapons, autonomous fighter jets, other types of advanced aircraft. You can create this industrial base very fast. The workforce that is required is not the kind of highly exquisite,

highly technical, and very limited workforce that so often is required for our very exquisite military programs that things like Virginia-class submarines or B-21 bombers. Again, it's more of a back-to-the-future-type scenario of a workforce that you can pull very broadly out of commercial automotive or commercial aerospace and defense. It looks very much the way we built up, you know, the arsenal of democracy at World War II,

where it was built on, you know, the Rosie the Riveters and people who are coming in with, you know, minimal amounts of retraining to build military systems that the industrial base could produce rather than saying, you know, we're going to define a bunch of requirements. for things that we'd like to have, but our industrial base can't necessarily produce in large volumes. So, you know, very simply put, Arsenal 1 will be a manufacturing platform defined by software and capable of building, you know, everything across, you know, kind of a continuum of capability from, you know, smaller, you know, autonomous aircraft all the way up to robotic fighter jets. It costs a range of different weapon systems, you know, cruise missiles, rocket powered missiles. and it will do everything but the energetics.

You know, we'll do rocket motors somewhere else. We'll do energetics and, you know, kind of all-up-round assembly somewhere else. But the actual production of the underlying systems and final integration will all be done at Arsenal. So this next question involves some not super well-examined stereotypes on my end. So you'll feel free to challenge it. But I am curious from a point of view of business strategy and culture. You know, what are the challenges and also the advantages of a Silicon Valley, you know, a company with its roots in tech becoming a major manufacturing concern.

Like, what do you find are the main things you need to surmount in making that kind of move? And what are the things that maybe Andrew brings to the table that typically wouldn't come to the table? Yeah, so I think, I guess a couple of answers. You know, if you look at the, you know, kind of Silicon Valley company moving into mass manufacturing, and many already do, right, in terms of the sort of hyperscale production of commercial electronics and commercial automotives, consumer electronics, commercial automotive that you see often being driven by, you know, kind of Silicon Valley-based companies. A lot of what we're trying to do is bring the very lessons that I think they have learned and, frankly, created into defense

in terms of the ability to automate the things that you need to automate, kind of insert humans where you need to insert humans, but really kind of increase the volume of production in a way that I think, you know, Silicon Valley companies, software-defined companies have proved very effective in doing to disrupt other sectors of our economy. I think the challenge in defense is that it will always be in many kind of specific areas fundamentally different than the commercial economy. There's an enormous amount of lessons that we can pull over from commercial technology and commercial manufacturing, which mainly have to do with, you know, the kind of the cliche term design for manufacturing. But what that really means is designing military systems that are simple to build,

that are cheap to build, that are easy to assemble by the widest possible workforce, because the sort of illities that we're valuing in that is not just lethality and capability, but producibility and scalability. And the kinds of things that I think in our history, we've had to rely upon much more, but over the past generation or so, we've kind of forgotten that these are also important. So where commercial technology can help us design systems simpler and then scale the production of them in ways that mimic or sort of rely upon lessons pulled from the commercial economy, that's goodness. The challenge becomes in those areas that are essential for defense and military applications that have no kind of analogy to the commercial world where you just can't

get rid of certain things like, you know, energetics and precursor chemicals and germanium. You can limit them. And I think that is very much a strategy. that we've undertaken, which is let's be less reliant on, you know, critical minerals and these kinds of areas where our supply chains are not as robust and where China has an advantage, you're never going to eliminate them entirely. You're never going to eliminate energetics from defense systems, you know, whether it's rocket motors or, you know, actual warheads and the things that go into them. Where I think Anderil has been different in that regard from commercial or sort of traditional defense industry is we're making significant investments in

capacity generation in those areas. So we acquired a solid rocket motor company a few years ago. We have been pouring investment into that, you know, that part of the industrial base to build up the ability to produce more solid rocket motors, not just for ourselves and our own weapons programs, but for, you know, other, other defense industry as well. We're going to do the same thing in other sort of strategic areas that are limiting factors for the supply chain, things like seekers for weapons, you know, and other sort of critical limiting technologies. that have prevented our ability to scale as a country in terms of weapons fielding. That is an area that we're not going to wait for the government to give us a check.

We are going to move with our own resources to build that capacity up for ourselves and for others. So I think it's a blend of these two things that have sort of set us apart, but I think put us in a very good position to deliver on the significant amount of contracts that we have won and are winning, but then also set ourselves up to really do some much more ambitious and exciting things in the future. So I only have a couple of minutes left, but I didn't want to let you go without asking you about the combat collaborative aircraft. Yes. And another area where Andrew has been very active, has a big contract.

I want to understand and keep in mind, I'm not only a liberal arts guy, but an infantryman by background. So in language that I would understand, how is this going to work? That is to say, I mean, I think I and anyone, you know, sort of has a superficial, understand that you have a manned aircraft still out there, accompanied by a bunch of unmanned aircraft doing other things. But what is the division of labor in terms of the missions that the manned aircraft will perform versus the missions that the unmanned aircraft will perform? Is the manned aircraft now just kind of a C2 node sending out these other birds to do its bidding? So that's question one. Question two, and we'll close with that, is do you see this as an intermediate stage of combat in the skies? And if so, how long do you think it

lasts before the sort of manned system fades from necessity? Yeah, both great questions. I think the honest answer to your first question is we don't know yet. Like we writ large the United States of America, I think this is something that we will figure out as these systems are further developed, built and fielded and then incorporated into the joint force. The other thing I would say is, you know, the specific collaborative combat aircraft that we're,

Anderil is building for the United States Air Force. You know, it is a fast flyer. It's a tactical aircraft. I mean, it is more akin to like an F-15, F-16. You know, it's going to fly as fast as a fighter jet. It's going to have a similar profile. It's going to carry weapons and sensors. But I would say is that there will be lots of different manifestations of collaborative

combat aircraft that have different attributes. And, you know, we'll perform different missions on behalf of the Joint Force. but I think in every instance, the way to think about them, maybe from the standpoint of an infantryman's perspective, is ideally these will be like teammates. And they will not be equals. They will be subordinates, but they will be augmentation to the human pilot

or the human operator in the sense of fielding additional sensors that you couldn't have gotten into the battle space otherwise to increase the understanding, awareness, and agency of that human being. it will provide additional weapons. So you kind of augment and sort of increase the reach and lethality of that human being, both from the standpoint of defending that human being's life, as well as enabling them to be more effective in their mission,

whether it's offensive strike or what have you. So in an ideal world, this is how you generate the scale that we're talking about that is so important, where you still need human beings evolved, you still need human beings commanding and controlling, as well as doing things or sort of bringing to the fight capabilities that they and only they will have aboard the system that they're that they're operating, vehicle that they're flying or what have you. So it really becomes this high-lomix, which I think is really to me the kind of important principle moving forward in terms of how we need to think about or rethinking the joint force is that it's not all going to be high-end capabilities, nor is it going to be all kind of low-end, expendable robotic systems.

It is going to be this blending of the two where you are going to have a small number of very exquisite manned vehicles, combat systems, weapons, and you're going to pair them and collaborate them with a large volume of lower cost weapons and autonomous platforms to increase the amount of combat capability that we're bringing to the fight and keeping it under kind of human agency, commanded control. So to your second question, yes, I think that if over time we are not removing more human beings from, the dangerous areas where their lives are at risk and replacing them with more capable technological systems that can do that work, then I think we are failing technologically. The challenge will be as more and more robotic systems, more and more intelligent weapons get pushed into the battle space, how do we as a democratic society valuing law and rights and principles and the trees that we

have signed up to exert the appropriate amount of human agency over how those robots, systems are being employed. I believe that that is possible. I think that it doesn't need, nor should it be held up as this impossible problem that should limit technological progress. But I do think that it, you know, kind of like the beginning of my question, is something that we will only figure out through the doing of it. And we need to get started. We need to move through these processes. We need to learn and adapt and evolve. And I think that if we do that correctly and thoughtfully, consistently with our values, I think we will be better off for it as a country, and we'll be far more capable militarily.

And I think it's the only way that we're going to generate the kind of mass and lethality that we're going to need to restore deterrence and ensure that we have a peaceful future for decades to come. Christian Brose, president and chief strategy officer of Anderil, I've learned a lot in the last hour, and I'm grateful to you for being so generous

with your time and joining School of War. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.