School of War - Ep 268: Seth Jones on America’s Defense Industrial Crisis

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Seth Jones, president of the Defense and Security Department and Harold Brown Chair at CSIS, joins the show to talk about how America has resurrected its defense industrial base in the past and why it should be doing so now. ▪️ Times 02:55 The British in the 1930s 05:58 Roosevelt’s decision 09:48 Re-orientation  13:59 The B-29 16:00 Victory in Iraq  27:54 Skunkworks 31:30 Xi comes into power 35:07 Disadvantages 39:07 What needs to be done?  44:28 Fighting for 5% 47:43 Culture shift Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

I'm going to read you a passage from Seth Jones' book, The American Edge, that we're going to be discussing on School of War today. This is a poem quoted by Winston Churchill in the middle of the 1930s when he was making the case for expanding Britain's defense industrial base. Who is in charge of the clattering train, the axles creek and the coupling strain, and the pace is hot and the points are near, and sleep has deadened the driver's ear, and signals flash through the night in vain, for death is in charge of the clattering train. This fragment of a poem was, of course, about a rail accident caused by an engine driver and a stoker who had fallen asleep. It's a pretty good metaphor for what's going on with the American Defense Industrial Base as we approach a potential conflict with China,

Let's talk about it here on School of War. Let's get into it. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Seth Jones, he is the president of the Defense and Security Department and also the Harold Brown Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS is the author of numerous books. Most recently, The American Edge, the Military Tech Nexus and the sources of great power dominance. Seth, thank you so much for joining School of War. Aaron, thanks for having me on. It's a great podcast. You just told me that you did some other podcast that just blew up. up. So I'm hoping you're bringing that energy here today. Let's make some news. That's right. No pun intended there, though. So. Yeah. Well, so the subject of the book, which really is

interesting and like a very useful overview, not just thematically, but also sort of full of interesting stories and profiles of the American defense industrial base from about the time of the Second World War, starting just a little bit before, up through the present. And I wanted to start at the start of your story. We'll obviously spend some time in the present, spend some time talking about the challenge from China. You both began and end the book reflecting on Winston Churchill, so the Brits, actually, and the problems that Churchill had in the mid-30s in arguments about the British imperial or British defense industrial base. Why the focus on Churchill in a book that's ostensibly about the United States? Well, let me just start with a quote that I love

from Paul Kennedy in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. And what Paul says is in a long drawn, drawn out great power, usually a coalition war. Victory is repeatedly gone to the side with a more flourishing, productive base. The challenge that the British found themselves in in the 1930s and that Churchill saw, although most of his colleagues in all the political parties in the UK, did not, was that Germany was rearming. And you could see that in virtually all the major domains of warfare. There was hope that the British, the French, and others on the continent had gone beyond World War I and that peace was going to be the sort of reality for the future. But as Churchill saw it, the British needed to rearm and if they were going to deter the Germans

or if deterrence failed to have to fight a war that they needed a productive base and you cannot wait. It takes time to build a lot of weapon systems from tanks to ships to submarines. It takes time to get the workforce in place. And that is really what Churchill continued to push for. And the fact that he didn't get it put the UK in a dangerous position once the Germans invaded Poland and then obviously then the Belgians and the French and others fell. I mean, it near the, you know, the British were nearly overrun. Thankfully, that didn't happen. So that's why I start with that

is because Churchill really reminds us that a flourishing and productive industrial base is the key for peace. It's the peace through strength mantra that people like Ronald Reagan emphasized on the U.S. decades later. So that's really why I start and end with Churchill. And then on the American side,

of the Atlantic Ocean, your discussion of time, you can't do it immediately, it takes time. In a way, I found your account of the American story, in a weird way, kind of heartening in the sense that I don't think I had realized that it's really 1940 before Roosevelt seems to get really serious about preparation for war. And the weird reason why that makes me feel a little better is like, well, it's only two years, really, he has to work with. So I guess that wasn't, you know, it wasn't like he was preparing for five years or 10 years. Because on the theory that we have major crises on the horizon here in 2026, the notion that you can actually do a lot in two years is a source for some limited optimism at least. But tell us a bit about the decisions that

Roosevelt takes while after war is broken out in Europe, but obviously before it has come to the United States that prove decisive for American victory. Yeah, I think what becomes critical is that Roosevelt makes a decision that it's going to require the full weight of the people. president to get the industrial base moving. I mean, there have been some steps that he had taken in the late 1930s. This didn't all happen in 1940. There had been some pieces that were put in place by the late 1930s because he sees what's happening in Europe at the time.

But I think there are a couple of things that become important. One is he creates an organizational body that is directly, that directly reports to him. It's first called the National Defense. advisory committee and then becomes the War Production Board. So what's critical there is it's a national priority of the United States to revitalize as rapidly as possible its industrial base. What I find particularly useful about some of the key speeches that Roosevelt gives, including his arsenal of democracy speech, is that he is focused on the American workforce. It's not just the military per se, but it is directly focused on those people that are building capacity in the

United States. And at the time, it's not just defense companies. It's also commercial companies. It's Ford. It's Chrysler. It's General Motors. So that's actually who he starts to populate his what becomes his war production board with. It's people like William Nudson, who was the president of General Motors, a manufacturer. And so those are the things that he starts to do. In addition, it's pretty clear that what he wants to start to do is to streamline the regulations and contracting, really cut through the bureaucracy to get stuff done as fast as possible. It's going to require taking some risks. So you start to see this effort over the next couple of years. 86,000 tanks, 2.5 million trucks.

286,000 warplanes, 8,800 Navy ships. That's what he's focused on, Roosevelt's focused on, and that's what he wants Knudson to focus on. It's get that production capacity at a maximum level. Some of it we're going to ship to our allies as part of Lend-Leese, but once we get involved, if we get involved, we're going to need that ourselves. So those are the few things that I think Roosevelt really focuses on,

really from a national reindustrialization perspective. You're not the first to look to this period for some inspiration and parallels that ought to apply to us today. Let's play that out a little bit. Maybe tell us a little bit more about Knitsyn, who is this fascinating figure who does a tremendous amount for the war effort. Maybe you could speculate a bit for us about who could play a role like that today or others like him at the time.

Who today, if anyone, reminds you of them? And then kind of a closely related question, if I pointed to optimist, earlier, this is a bit more in the pessimistic direction. Of course, as is implied in the account you just gave, the president suddenly thinks it's important that we're going to have all these airplanes and trucks and helmets and bullets and can'tines and everything else. Well, we have this enormous manufacturing base that can be reoriented to war production. What is the, you know, help me see the parallels, if any, there? What would we be reorienting if President Trump, for example, suddenly decided that this was a priority he was going to personally drive the kind of pace and intensity

that President Roosevelt adopted in 1940. Yeah, so, I mean, if I start with Knudsen, Knudsen, who before he comes on board is the president of General Motors, he says pretty categorically, we won, so he's looking back on the time, we won because we smothered the enemy in an avalancheer production, and that word production becomes important here, the likes of which we had never seen nor dreamed possible. So what Knudsen is, is he's a manufacturer.

He has come up through a couple of companies, not just General Motors, but also Ford, in building things. And then trying to streamline the acquisition process so that you can get in his previous world. Cars out faster. I mean, in that case, it's to make money. But, I mean, there's a huge incentive to get as many cars out of reasonable quality to the American. population and then to export them overseas. So he's a manufacturer, and that is what Roosevelt is looking for. I think that the reality today is the United States has enormous innovation potential. And if we look at the technology side today of defense, artificial intelligence, quantum computing,

a range of different types of biotechnology, the United States has some of the most innovative technology companies in the world. If you look at the top 100 companies by market capitalization, technology companies by market capitalization, the United States has 60 of those. The names are going to be familiar to most Americans. They're Navidia, Google, Amazon, and a wide range of others. Part of the challenge is most of them are not that involved in the industrial base right now. The acquisition system is partly broken. They don't want to. to get involved in defense production because it just takes too long. The government is a terrible customer, including the military. And that's all the services. They've got all these requirements.

The timeline for doing it are terrible. And the market is unpredictable in the future. The U.S. will often talk about wanting to build up at industrial base, but it's not willing to spend the money. If you look at the defense budget right now as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2026. We're now in the second year of President Trump. It's lower than at any time during the Cold War, including during the Jimmy Carter years, where President Reagan was rightfully critical of the U.S. for not taking it seriously right now. So I think the challenge is there are companies that one could bring on, which could play a role in some ways, Is it similar to what we've seen in the past?

You're just going to have to change the way you do business. I don't want to spend this whole conversation on the Second World War, but there's one more element of your account. You spend a lot of time lingering on the B-29 in its story. And I wanted to spend a couple minutes on that just because I've been fascinated by B-29 since I was a little kid. And the story behind it is really quite interesting. And it speaks to, again, the pace of not just the orienting in the direction of war production

of our manufacturing base, but of innovation, of this, of this story of the American technological edge that you're telling, you know, you have something, you'll correct me on the exact dates here, but something that goes from a need, a theoretical need in the early 40s because of the distances in the Pacific and everything else, to an aircraft that arguably wins the war in the Pacific, that is the decisive, you know, delivery mechanism not only for nuclear weapons, but for the even if we had not invented nuclear weapons, for the air campaign that would one way or the other probably have brought Japan to submission in time. So just say, say more about the story of the B-29 and why you chose to linger on it. Yeah, it's a great example of innovation in the defense sector

during World War II. And actually, what's great about the story is that the speed with which Boeing and its collaborators build the B-29 in the middle of the war is a fascinating story. And actually a good example of how with the proper urgency and money, the U.S. can actually do tremendous things and build very innovative products. So the challenge for the U.S. Army Air Corps is to build a bomber with higher speed, with longer range, and with greater overall performance than what the U.S. military had at the time. So you get General Hap Arnold, for example, many people who have looked at World War II will know the military side of this. But what is less well known, and I went to actually the Boeing archives in Washington State to get a much better appreciation for what Boeing did in this case. What the U.S. military asked for in the U.S. Army Air Corps specifically asked for is that something very innovative. And it's a staggering feat.

The aircraft had to be constructed around aeronautical principles that had never before been applied. So it had to be twice the size of the B-17, close to 60,000 pounds when empty compared to 30,000 pounds for the B-17. That was just a tremendous feat to build something that large. It would have to have four engines and a wingspan of 1,700 square feet to get a six. 70-ton plane with a full payload into the air above 30,000 feet. And for that matter, at that height, had to have a pressurized cabin. These were all huge challenges for the engineers involved in building it. But they did it. So it's the largest project up to that point in the history of aeronautics. And for, you know, and it came at some risk. Boeing lost its best test pilot who crashed in Seattle during one of

test runs, Boeing had some challenges with the engines that persisted into the war as well, including during some of the deployments in the Pacific. But the end result with Boeing, they had four other companies involved in a major way in helping produce it. What they got out of it was an aircraft that could carry much higher payloads at higher elevation was absolutely essential for the strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific and which also carried the two nuclear weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So again, people are aware to some degree of the strategic bombing campaign. They're also aware of the U.S. military role. What I wanted to point out is the incredible innovation that came from the U.S. defense sector,

in this case Boeing and its partner companies in doing it at speed, at scale, and at volume in the middle of a war and to match that up with with strategy strategic bombing that won the war and so that that that's sort of the incredible tale of the b29 and it costs more than the manhattan project right all all in that was a detail that i did not know that was that was quite striking enormously expensive yes yeah the other thing i mean this is sort of purely literary it doesn't have much strategic significance but years ago when i first found out that the b29 was a pressurized aircraft it kind of shocked me because my image of aviation in the Second World War is, you know, Memphis Bell and things like that. And so nothing is pressurized. And it speaks to the way in which the war sort of accelerates

technological progress and modernity writ large. It's like that. You may have seen, there's this photo that floats around every few years of a German U-boat surrendering in 1945 and it's being brought. I'm pretty sure I saw this before the development of AI. So I'm pretty sure it's a real picture. But a German U-boat is being brought into some East Coast Harbor somewhere. And there's a helo, the kind of helo you'll remember from MASH, you know, the very original version one, Sikorskis, or whatever, did the helo flying over it in 1945? And it's just, it's just striking to me that, you know, the war production and progress brings this world into nascent existence even before Germany and Japan are defeated. Yeah, that's fascinating.

And I, again, I think it's the, it's the innovation and the defense or the commercial side that people often tend to forget. And as we talk about the defense production today, Aaron, it's a reminder that there is enormous innovative capacity in industry. Yeah. Okay, so let's move forward. We'll keep going forward in time. I want to, you spend a fair amount of time on the main part of the Cold War, but I want to skip us to the end and to the Gulf War. For a couple reasons. One, it's sort of the introduction of this style of warfare, the so-called precision strike, reconnaissance strike, whatever you'd like to call it, complex that remains. the going technology here in 2026. And of course, the employment of that technology, of guided laser

bombs, of stealth in the early 90s in Iraq is the fruit of a couple of huge decisions made during the Cold War with the Soviet Union firmly in mind. Talk about the second offset and the decisions that were made that lead to just such stunning victory in Iraq. We actually did an episode, by the way, just a few weeks ago on, I think it was called Task Force Normandy, that very first special operation into Iraq to destroy those radar sites. So this is, this is timely, this more expanded conversation. Yeah. Well, I mean, what I find fascinating about this is, is by the 1970s, U.S. intelligence was deeply concerned about Soviet conventional advantages in Europe. Depending on how you counted, the Soviets had at least a three to one advantage, maybe more in some

areas of conventional forces in Europe. You know, there's a buildup in such areas as the fold of gap. There's a lot of concern that Soviets could punch through and get into the rear echelons of U.S. and other NATO forces, and it would be very difficult to stop them. In one of the more interesting emails or notes that I read, there was a note from Harold Brown to Jimmy Carter saying that over the previous decade and a half or so, the U.S. defense had largely atrophied and that, that the U.S. was dramatically losing deterrence in Europe, particularly in that central European theater. And if something didn't change quickly, the U.S. was going to lose deterrence altogether. So what's fascinating about this is, again, we see this public-private sector partnership. I mean, there's been a lot of focus historically on what the U.S. military does, what some of the great conceptual thinkers like Andy Marshall put together.

on Revolution of Military Affairs. But I think what I find also interesting is I'll just highlight two companies that are become really critical in this. The first is Skunk Works at Lockheed, which led by first Kelly Johnson and then Ben Rich, which stumble upon, actually one of the younger engineers, stumbles upon some Soviet publications

of what was really about stealth technology. And they, what they do is they recognize that actually they could build an aircraft, which becomes the F-1-17, that would be virtually impossible for enemy radar to pick up. It has the signature of like the eye of an eagle as they ultimately identify. So Lockheed goes ahead and builds the F-1-17. And then you see in parallel a number of companies, Texas Instrumentary. being one of the more interesting ones, the one I focus on, develops laser guided technology. It starts off with Paveway 1 and Paveway 2. And if people remember those sort of long bomb craters during the Vietnam War, there's this sense from engineers at Texas Instruments that they can actually get precision in technology.

If they could have one aircraft, that's the way it starts, with a laser guider, and then another that could drop the bomb and they could sink those two together and they could get a precise hit. So what you get by the end of the Cold War is some operational concepts like Air Land Battle for how to fight the Soviets, but you also have the industry now giving the government capabilities for stealth so bad guys can't see them and then precision to strike. And so what that ends up leading to when in the Gulf War is an ability of fly aircraft directly into Baghdad without being seen and to precisely hit targets, which obviously ends up being essential in that war for winning quickly and with, frankly, limited casualties on the U.S. side. So again, that's that's that government industry

partnership that I found so fascinating in the innovation that happens in the commercial sector. And the nature of the progress that these technologies bring to bring into reality is just stunning. I want to read these are numbers from your book, and I just want to read them so listeners can reflect on just how dramatically things change, basically, in the 1980s. So on the stealth technology, the F-117, developed by skunk works, as you just described, basically introduces an 1,000-X improvement in radar signature. So your radar signature is essentially 1,000 times less than that size of aircraft typically should put up on the screen. And then for the guided bombs, to your point about Vietnam, the radius in which a bomb in Vietnam was meant to fall at least

50% of the time, according to your research, is 450 feet, which is not great. So the other 50% of the time you're nowhere near, and even when you're near 50% of the time, you're still not that near, to 25 feet, 25 feet by the Gulf War, essentially. I mean, these are, I mean, these are, these are, there are improvements, they are differences in scale, not kind, but they're so dramatic that they're virtually differences in guide. It's amazing. And just one other sort of really funny part of this whole series is the individual primarily responsible for stumbling on stealth is a 36-year-old mathematician at Skunkworks

and also a radar specialist. His name is Dennis Overholzer. And so he's reading this article by Pior Ufimsev, the chief scientist at Moscow's Institute of Radio Engineering. After the Cold War, this Soviet scientist, comes. to teach at an American University in California and they go to him and say,

hey, did the Soviets ever do anything with your method of edge waves and the physical theory of diffraction, which is what we used for building our stealth technology, which essentially won us the Gulf War. And he said, actually totally ignored by the Soviets.

So sort of an irony here that it was the Soviets who actually had developed the math, the U.S. had applied it, and it was ignored in the end by the Soviets themselves. And, you know, it would not be hard to imagine an alternative story in the United States where it gets ignored by us as well. I mean, you recount in the book these scenes of the young engineer with the boss at SkunkWorks trying to explain this, you know, extremely technical situation that he sort of has this theory of how he's going to exploit it.

And I'm not going to attempt to recount it here because it was complicated. And, you know, the environment at Skunk Works is one where you can walk into the boss's office and kind of push him on something like this. stand your ground and, you know, from the, from the bottom up, as it were, introduced this, what becomes extraordinarily significant innovation, you know, ultimately nested in this, this broader situation to, I mean, to oversimplify, where we've kind of helped the Soviets really lean into investments in air defense, investments that are suddenly essentially defunct the moment the F-117 is rolled out or largely defunct. So, you know, this gets to a question I was going to ask later, but I'll just ask it now. You cite this Andrew Gordon dichotomy between

rat catchers and regulators. You know, clearly the SkunkWorks environment or culture at the time was one of rat catching, problem solving, et cetera. You suggest that one of our problems today is the culture we have as one of regulators of bureaucracy and stultification. How did the culture, it's just to, I mean, we could pick other examples, but just to stick with Skunkwarks, how did that culture get fostered and what can we do today to reintroduce it to the extent possible or grow it where it already exists. Well, I think it included actually two components, one on the private sector side and one on the government side.

So in a regulator environment, both on the defense and commercial side and on the government side, there's a focus on bureaucracy, on process, on saving money, which is important, but probably not of the expense, just of urgency. And then there's the rat catcher side, which is, which really it's a, it should be a wartime mentality. So it's minimizing bureaucracy, minimizing unnecessary regulations, and maximizing production with the idea of your deterring war, or if deterrence fails, you're winning it. And so I think when I look at some of these examples of Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich at Skunk Works and the environment they created, or even as you fast forward into the early period of 9-11,

so companies like General Atomics, which were building Predator and Reaper drones, what you really have is innovative thinkers who are trying to think about, what are the gaps right now in technology and platforms and systems that we need to win against the major threats? And how do we, engineering-wise, how do we figure out ways to solve those challenges? And on the government side, you need supporters as well. Because if you don't have people willing to take risk to add urgency to provide funding for it, then, you know, you're not going to get it. I mean, as much as there was innovation with skunk works, there also were supporters in the Pentagon.

There was Bill Perry, very supportive on the acquisition side from the Pentagon. And then you had people like Harold Brown leaning in, you know, Caltech president, leaning in on innovation. And then by the Reagan administration, you also had the real money to build up the capacity. So those are the couple of things that I really pull out both from the commercial side and the government side. And there really needs to be a synergy between the two to take some risk. So there are these ebbs and flows throughout your history of American seriousness and financial. support for the defense industrial base. So obviously this huge buildup for World War II, then the Truman draw down. Then there's NSC 68 and we're back at it. And then there's this

period in the 70s. And then we're back at it in a Reagan. And this goes back and forth and back forth. There's the famously the last supper in the early 90s. We enter the bad, the bad period again in the 90s. At about the time that that's happening, the Chinese and everyone else for that matter, but let's focus on the Chinese, have just watched what played out in the Gulf. They saw what we did. They saw the new tech. They saw how we had. integrated the new tech into this, what was conceptually originally the Soviet idea of precision strike and the sort of new American way of war. Old in the sense that the American way of war, you know, this is not the first time that technology played an important role, but this particular way of using technology and information technology was new. They go to school, as you put it.

How do the next 20, 30 years look from the Chinese perspective and then we'll get to how we're doing on catching up ourselves? Well, I think what the Chinese said, frankly, every other country, the Russians as well, recognize that the Americans have huge advantages in technology platforms, and they're willing to spend the money on key weapon systems. So everybody else is behind. What you really start to see happening, I think, is in 2012 and the 2012 to 13 period, when, Xi Jinping comes into power in China. And, you know, one of the more interesting periods is this November 15th, 2012 speech, only two weeks after his appointment as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party that Xi Jinping gives at the Natural History Museum in Beijing.

And he does it in the backdrop of the Road to Rejuvenation exhibit that's happening at the museum. His speeches is titled The China Dream. And he outlines this future in which the Chinese have have to build capacity to become a major power. He goes back in time and looks at how the Chinese have suffered gravely from foreign powers. He looks at the successes that the U.S. has had, including in what we've just talked about, the periods like the Gulf War. And then what we see is this China dream. And so for the next several decades, that brings us through today, we see a major effort, what becomes really categorized as military civil fusion by China to build industrial capacity,

not just in the defense sector, but more broadly to become a world-class superpower. And on the defense side, it's all the major elements, all the major domains of warfare, air, maritime land systems, throwing cyber space and then the nuclear domain as well. It's building mass and volume takes time so they compete not just with anyone, but with the United States. So Xi Jinping really starts out in that 2012, 2013. He's got this vision and then he begins to spend money on these major issues. And I think this really sets us up for what the U.S. is facing today. I guess if there's good news about the nature of the Chinese investment in its own defense industrial base, it's that we do seem to retain in the United States an edge on innovation,

as evidenced perhaps by the fact that the Chinese have to steal a good deal of the technology that they rely on, which obviously, and we're going to have David Shed on the show, to talk about his book The Great Heist soon to sort of focus in on the stealing. But obviously, it's bad that the stealing is occurring, but good insofar as it's, it's evidence that, you know, for example, we don't need to steal from them, it seems, at least most of the time. So when you talk about Chinese advantages scale, you know, in a worrisome way, you know, the way people talk about China now sort of reminds one of the way people talked about

the United States in the middle of the 20th century, which is obviously a non-great parallel to reflect upon. But talk a bit about some of the disadvantages as well and some of the disadvantages we might be able to exploit as we plan. Yeah, and there are a number of them. Let me just on the. advantages side, their ability to produce in mass and scale, I think what most Americans may not fully appreciate, if you go back 10, certainly 15 years and you look at the top 100 largest

defense companies, as measured in both defense and non-defense revenue, there were zero Chinese enterprises in that list. Today, there are five of the top 10 are Chinese companies, aviation industry corporation of China, China State, China State shipbuilding Corporation Limited, and a couple of others. That's combined defense and non-defense revenue. So they have, they are focused on building at mass and scale. I think that presents a particular challenge for the U.S. within the first island chain. So think like Okinawa, think of Taiwan. And then also, I would say in some areas, like Huawei, for example, and, artificial intelligence and quantum, I think they're actually quite innovative.

And they, where they're spending money and they've got some private sector involvement, some of the big companies they've got are standard enterprises, which aren't particularly efficient. But where they also have some, some of the more private companies involved, they are innovative. Where the Chinese, I think, have some challenges is in a couple of areas. One is corruption. There is massive corruption, both within the military, and, and, you know, and within the defense sector. And it's probably not surprising

when you're dealing with a country that focuses so much on loyalty rather than sort of merit, that's merit-based. We've seen that with the firings of a number of senior officials, including the PLA Rocket Force, but across the People's Liberation Army,

including up through the CMC itself, the China's main military body. We've seen it across defense industry with a number of executives getting sacked. I mean, there are a couple of other big challenges I see with the Chinese secondest power projection. They don't have a lot of friends in the region. They don't have a lot of stuff stockpiled. Any potential conflict that expands out of that area around the First Island chain,

these don't have an effective blue water. Navy, their Air Force is going to have big challenges in refueling. Again, they don't have a lot of spare parts that are stockpiles. They've got some logistics challenges. And then one other that I'll highlight, and there's a whole laundry list of other weaknesses and vulnerabilities that the Chinese have. But a third one is undersea. And it's an area that the Russians have gotten certainly better over time. The Soviets were pretty good.

The U.S. has challenges finding Russian subs. The Chinese are behind, notably behind, in both submarine and anti-submarine warfare. And this area, actually, there are some opportunities for the U.S. defense sector to make more progress than it is done. So those are a couple of areas, I think, where I see the Chinese as being still behind. Let's talk about the most urgent thing then, which is what is to be done? You know, we have a situation here where we are facing an adversary who, just to pick one number that you cite in the book to focus the mind, has 230x, 230 times the shipbuilding capacity. of the United States of America. So, you know, if that number doesn't wake you up, I don't know what will.

You have thoughts, you have recommendations that you draw from this historical study that constitutes most of the book. What needs to be done? Well, I think there are a couple of things. One is there is no period, at least in the last century of the U.S. industrial base. There's no period where we have not revitalized our industrial base without. the full weight of the White House. And the reason is because it is critical to break the bureaucracy,

cut through the red tape. And it's not just a Pentagon issue. I mean, when you're dealing with the industrial base, even the defense side, you've got the State Department, which deals a lot with foreign military sales and technology transfers. You've got Commerce Department. You've got Treasury. You've got Congress itself.

So this is why the full weight of the White House becomes important. It was critical to break through and revitalize, again, not just for Roosevelt, but for Eisenhower in the 1950s. It was critical for First Carter and then particularly Reagan in the late 70s and then 80s. And that's been, so one issue is it has to be a top priority for the White House. That's a national industrialization. I think there's a second part, which is a real need to bring in the commercial sector in ways that it has not. We talked a little bit about the commercial capabilities of some of the technology companies that are not heavily involved in the defense base. What I find startling is how much internal research and development they have in technologies that are heavily important for the defense sector.

I mean, if you look at that between 2021 and 2023, the top six defense companies invested $34 billion. That's it in internal research and development. During that same period, the top six commercial, U.S. commercial technology companies, again, there's the Navidias and Google and others, invested 600 billion. That's 20 times that amount in AI, quantum, and a whole range of technologies that are absolutely essential for the defense sector. Yet they're not engaged at all or very limited in the defense sector. So I think there's got to be a major push to bring in some of the most

innovative companies. And I'll just say a couple other quick things. Third is this real focus on mass production. It's the stuff we've already talked about. It's the effectiveness of the timelines we built major complex platforms like the B-29s. We did it with U2, strategic reconnaissance during the Cold War as well. So it's other platforms and systems. The Chinese are now doing it. They're cutting down on the acquisition timeline, contracting timelines for major weapon systems. And that really, there has been some progress in the Pentagon with the current secretary and deputy secretary to do this, but a lot more needs to be done.

And then I would just say two last things, workforce. We got to figure out a way to invest more in our workforce so that we're focused on high schools, vocational schools, colleges and universities to get out welders, engineers, electricians, pipe fitters. This is the core of our industrial base, and yet people are taking jobs in other areas. And then just one final issue, and I'll come back to it,

is you gotta spend the money. As a percentage of GDP, I mean, we were never this low during the Cold War. I'm sort of shocked that with Chinese building at the speed with which they're building, the Russian defensive dust are based literally on a wartime footing. We've got the North Koreans fighting in the war in Ukraine right now. And so we've got these access countries that present a serious challenge. and yet we're nowhere near the defense spending that I would say we have to be at to do it. And it's not just defense spending.

It's particularly procurement spending, which is very low right now. It's actually building stuff. That's where we've got to spend more money. So I think those are the key things that I would urgently focus on doing that I think would get us to a revised arsenal of democracy. Well, you've spoken of presidential leadership a couple of of times. I mean, we'll see how serious President Trump is. He's called for this $1.5 trillion budget for defense. That's going to face resistance, not just in the Democratic Party, but also amongst some Republicans. So definitionally, is the kind of thing that a president, if he wants it, is going to have

to drive it. So that'll be a test. And I guess that brings us to around 5%, which I don't know, Seth, if you would say that's still on the low side. Roger Wicker has been fighting for 5% for several years now. So it's nice to see the president, at least rhetorically aligned with him. But I don't know if you think we need to go even higher. No, no, no, look, I think you got to start somewhere. I am very mindful of the political minefields here. The debt is high. There are going to be some really tough decisions on how you get to the 4% to 5% level.

But I think that on money, what I would say categorically at the end of the day is if you run war games on a U.S.-China war and deterrence fails. So all that money that was spent in the Cold War that deterred World War III, if you fail and you get to World War III, the costs are astronomically higher in GDP that's impacted by it. And then you've got all the blood costs, too, of tens of thousands of American soldiers, plus Chinese, plus Japanese, plus whoever gets involved in a World War III scenario, those costs are dramatically higher. So for me, actually, the grand scheme of things, 4 to 5%, we can afford it. And it's much better scenario than having to fight World War III. Yeah, I think we would be lucky, too, if World War III resulted in tens of thousands of casualties, unlike World War II before it, which was comfortably into the hundreds. That's true. One thought on workforce, because it's important.

I'll put it in even darker terms. I don't know if you would accept all of these, but there has to be a culture shift in the way we think about jobs. in America. I'm personally of the opinion that much of college education out there in the land, much of the stuff that gets you a four-year degree at most of these schools, I don't know, it doesn't seem super valuable to me. And there's interesting data out there here and there to show that a lot of the students in a lot of the places are literally learning nothing during their four years in college. Meanwhile, you have this argument that's gaining steam. Apparently, AI is just going to take a lot of these white-collar jobs, which I don't know, when it comes to

fairly programmatic stuff like accounting or, you know, the kind of lawyering where you're producing wills and things like that without a great deal of complexity. It seems pretty plausible to me based on my prusing chat GPT. But meanwhile, there is, I mean, for generations, we've built up this mindset that if, you know, if your kids don't get a bachelor's degree or if you didn't get a bachelor's degree, you've somehow fallen short. You're somehow not as good as people who have. And I just, I don't think that's actually borne out by what most people get.

in their bachelor's degrees, let alone was required to get it. Meanwhile, we have, I mean, even with the kind of tech that's going to automate some of these manufacturing processes, because, as you know, there's a tech aspect to all this, too. We had Will Summer and Dyke, the CEO of Union on a few months ago to talk about this, you know, they've got robots building 155 shells down in Dallas, basically. But even so, we're talking about, what, hundreds of thousands of jobs, at least here, that are just either need to be created or right now some of the bigger companies. You hear this from the shipbuilders all the time.

the jobs exist, they just can't find anyone. And if you enter one of these trades and you stick with it, I mean, these are six-figure jobs because they are highly skilled and you can't learn it overnight. You really have to devote yourself to it. And I just, I just, the whole conversation about this stuff needs to change. I, I 100% agree, Aaron, that there needs to be a culture shift and how we talk about our workforce and how we talk about what the nation needs right now. And then actually there should be a monetary shift in investing along these lines. If I go back to the Roosevelt's Arsenal of Democracy speech, what strikes me as I, when I reread that, is how much of that speech is actually focused on the workforce. And, you know, the message is that we can't do anything in this country without the people. people that are building the stuff. He talks about the brick layers. He talks about the welders.

Those are the people that are critical, the engineers involved. It's the B-29 discussion we had had. I think there is an over-emphasis on college education right now, certainly at the expense of jobs that we need in this country that are sort of needy-gritty, base issues. And I think if we can better connect the workforce to national security priorities, I think we've got a strong political message to the American population that we actually need you. And we need you in these areas and we're going to make the investments to do it. And I think as I look at the last century of our industrial base, I think the effective presidents from Roosevelt to Eisenhower, Reagan. They actually, they did that effectively.

And as you know, in World War II, we restricted the number of ground maneuver, well, really, of infantry divisions. Precisely so, we could retain the workforce that, in our conception of strategy, the world was going to need to make it stuff. The Soviets were going to need the stuff that this workforce was producing. The Brits were going to need this stuff, the Chinese, all of these, in the Chinese and Russian case, these sort of land armies that Stephen Cockkin once said here on School of War, we rented for the purpose of fighting World War. to you, they would need our stuff. And so this sort of American cocktail, this kind of American way of war, comes into focus where it's production and innovation. We make lots of stuff. And the stuff itself,

but also the way we choose to use it, is genuinely, you know, a step ahead of what the bad guys can bring to bear fairly consistently in enough places to matter. And that's what wins the war. And your book, I think, does an excellent job of outlining both just the need for the innovation and the need for the production and how both are just essential. Well, that's, that, that was the, that, that, that was the aim. And, you know, again, I will come back to the Churchill. It, it, he warned in the 30s and, and I think was largely ignored. I think we're having an important discussion, more of a discussion along these lines, but I don't think we're doing enough as fast. And my biggest worry, if we don't move faster, Aaron, is that we

continue to lose deterrence in the Western Pacific, particularly in the first and second island chains, and it is almost an invitation for the Chinese to take action in those areas if we're not careful. I don't know if it's a, it's sort of grim to be a pleasure, but at the very least, I guess I'm glad in a way to be sounding the warning here with you. It does seem extremely urgent. And thank you for coming on School of War to discuss it. Thank you so much, Aaron. Always a pleasure to be on the book's called the american edge the military tech nexus and the sources of great power dominance set jones appreciate it thank you